SCOLE EXPERIMENT

Opening

From 1993 to 1998 a group sat in the cellar of a Norfolk farmhouse at Scole and reported lights in complete darkness, film that fogged in unopened tins, and voices they said were not the sitters. Robin and Sandra Foy hosted. The Scole Experimental Group invited observers. Montague Keen, David Fontana and Arthur Ellison of the Society for Psychical Research wrote a long report that treated the lights as worth the paper. Sceptics asked for infrared and were not given the control they wanted. The cellar stayed dark on purpose.

The work ended in 1998. Books and a later film kept the name. No public infrared record closed the lights as pocket lamps. No sitting produced an object a lab kept with a chain from the dark. Darkness was the method and the wound.

The spine of the file is a cellar that insisted on black. Scole is lights in a Norfolk dark. It is not a specimen on a Norwich bench.

Timeline

1993 sittings begin at the Foy house. Lights and film claims thicken through the mid-1990s.

SPR observers attend and write. The 1999 report is later paper on 1993-98 nights.

Requests for infrared and tighter controls sit in the sceptical file and do not become the group's method.

1998 the cellar stops. Later books are later life. The dark sittings are first.

Key figures

Robin and Sandra Foy own the house and the years of sitting.

The working group owns the dark and the claims.

Keen, Fontana and Ellison own the SPR look that took the lights seriously.

Sceptics who asked for infrared own the control that was not run.

Physical and documentary trail

On the paper, 1993-98 give you four hard objects and no public infrared keep.

One: years of cellar sittings reporting lights in claimed complete dark.

Two: film and voice claims from unopened or controlled stock, as the group told it.

Three: the SPR observers' report.

Four: the absence of an infrared record the sceptics would sign. Scole Experimental Group sittings, Norfolk, 1993-1998, are the originating tray.

There is no object from the dark in a lab chain. There is no continuous night-vision tape released as the official record. There is no second cellar with the same protocol and a cleaner camera.

Lights moved in the dark when we could not see our hands.

Competing explanations

Anomalous lights in a controlled dark. This is the SPR-friendly reading. It has years of sittings. It has no infrared keep.

Pocket lamps and poor control. The sceptical door. Has to carry why observers sat for years and still wrote a long report.

A sincere group in a dark they would not give up. Possible. Darkness remains the method they chose.

Hybrid caution. A cellar ran for five years. The tape that would have ended the fight was not the tape they kept.

Later life of the case

Books and a later film. I keep those on the later-life shelf. The cellar years stay first.

Finding

The Scole group sat in a Norfolk cellar from 1993 to 1998 and reported lights in a dark they would not break, and SPR observers wrote it up as worth the paper. Believe the sittings as sittings. People do not give five years of Thursday nights to a joke they could have ended with a torch.

What still will not resolve: an infrared record from those nights, or an object from the dark with a chain. Either one would pin the lights. The proving object is still those lights, held as lamps or as event by a camera the cellar did not run.