The Scole Experiment: lights and séances in a Norfolk cellar

From January 1993 to November 1998, a small spiritualist circle met in the cellar of Robin and Sandra Foy's rented farmhouse in Scole, a village on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk. Robin Foy, a former RAF pilot, had founded the Noah's Ark Society for Physical Mediumship in April 1990. The couple moved to Scole in 1991.

The circle first called itself the New Spiritual Science Foundation. Later it became the Scole Experimental Group. Alan and Diana Bennett, local mediums, went into trance. Through them spoke a cast of communicators. Manu, said to be of Peruvian or Inca origin. An Irish priest. A Hindu warrior prince. A WWI officer.

The room was a carpeted cellar, about 17 by 12 feet, with a table in the centre. Every sitting took place in complete darkness. Then the lights came. Melvyn Willin described them: "The lights were mainly white, also occasionally red or green, and would move around the pitch black room at speed or hover in mid air." A single light would dart around the cellar at great speed. It lit crystals from within. It levitated crystals and Perspex bowls. Sitters said the lights seemed to enter their bodies, leaving a light-headed sensation.

Forms grew to about two feet tall and floated around the room, on occasions trailing gossamer-like robes. Sitters felt themselves handled, stroked or patted. Some felt sprinkled with water. They heard bells, thumps, footsteps, clapping, whistling and tambourine music.

Objects arrived from nowhere. A Churchill crown. A silver thimble. A penknife. And an apparently new copy of the Daily Mail of 1 April 1944, reporting the guilty verdict in Helen Duncan's trial. Factory-sealed film, kept padlocked in a wooden box, came back with inscriptions, foreign languages and electrical diagrams. Later lists added St Paul's Cathedral during the Blitz and a pre-war Daily Mirror front page.

Between October 1995 and August 1997, three senior members of the Society for Psychical Research sat with the group 36 times. Montague Keen. Professor Arthur Ellison. The psychologist Professor David Fontana, who replaced Ralph Noyes after his first two sittings. Archie Roy, Bernard Carr and Rupert Sheldrake were among many other visitors.

The Scole Report appeared in November 1999, about 450 pages long. The investigators were "unable to detect any direct indication of fraud or deception." They reported "evidence favoring the existence of intelligent forces, whether discarnate or originating from the human psyche". Survival after death: inconclusive. They admitted they never achieved "watertight conditions under which fraud would have been rendered impossible."

No one was ever caught cheating. The quarrel was over the rules. Requests for infrared photography were rebuffed. The mediums were never searched or held. Their luminous wristbands were made by the mediums themselves. Tony Cornell argued the lights could be replicated by LEDs on rods or threads. Alan Gauld found the film box could be opened quickly in the dark. No images ever appeared on film in boxes the investigators supplied. Richard Wiseman's verdict on his own test: "it was a load of rubbish."

Some doubters were shut out. Maurice Grosse, of the Enfield case, was excluded after suggesting poltergeist activity. Skeptoid's Brian Dunning and other sceptics argued the investigators had acted as "an audience, rather than researchers".

23 November 1998. The group stopped sitting. Its stated reason was "space-time problems relating to an interdimensional doorway", blamed on "experimenters from the future". Keen kept defending the work. He died of a heart attack on 15 January 2004, during a public debate at the Royal Society of Arts. The case lives on in books, in the documentary The Afterlife Investigations, and in an argument that has never been settled.