A University lecturer is to spend a night in a reputedly haunted Worcester building as part of wider research into people’s experiences of the supernatural across the ages.
Professor of Early Modern History, Darren Oldridge, will be staying for four hours overnight in The Commandery museum. Despite not believing in ghosts himself, he is keen to understand people’s interpretations of supposedly ‘spooky’ experiences.
“Whatever happens on the night, I want to put it in the context of people’s perceptions of the supernatural, past and present,” said Professor Oldridge. “I’m interested in how people make sense of spooky experiences, and how this has changed over time.”
He will be giving a public talk about his own time alone at night in The Commandery, and other people’s perceptions of ghostly encounters from the 17th century to the present, in The Commandery on September 15.
Now a museum covering Worcester’s role in the English Civil Wars, Professor Oldridge chose it because of its reputation as a supposedly haunted building.
The Commandery was a monastic hospital that provided basic care for travellers during the Middle Ages. It became a private home in the 16th century, and was later the headquarters for the Royalist forces at the Battle of Worcester in 1651. In the nineteenth century it was a school for the blind. There have been reports of ghostly encounters relating to all of these time periods.
Professor Oldridge is a specialist in 16th and 17th-century religious history, with a particular interest in witchcraft and the Devil, the supernatural, and the religious context of the English Civil Wars. He has written on the subject of ghosts before, in one of his most recent books entitled The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England.
“The belief in ghosts was discouraged in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the Protestant Church of England associated it with Roman Catholicism. So if people had spooky experiences, these were explained as mistakes or tricks of the mind – which was the most common explanation – or the spirits involved were reclassified as demons,” said Professor Oldridge. “I’ll be talking about the various ways people have made sense of spooky encounters – hearing voices, seeing appearances of the dead, all of these things. It’s been going on for a long time and it’s been understood in all sorts of different ways. The talk is also a way of bringing to life a strange and fascinating aspect of history.”
To purchase a ticket for the talk, visit the event page on The Commandery website https://www.museumsworcestershire.org.uk/events/midnight/.