If Erica Gregory and the Worsley Paranormal Group are to be believed, they have cracked hidden messages left by Ian Brady which reveal secret details of his crimes and murders. The truth, however, is that this deluded ghost hunting team have simply been manipulated by the rantings of a paranoid schizophrenic with a narcissistic personality disorder who was imprisoned for murdering children.
The Worsley Paranormal Group first came to my attention in 2012 when they made headlines after they claimed that their ghost hunting led them to a spade on Saddleworth Moor which they said was connected to the Moors Murders. At the time, I wrote my thoughts on how this was unlikely and how their behaviour was unethical. I had no idea that this would lead to five years of being harassed by the creator of the Worsley group, Erica Gregory, who has continued to send me barely-legible emails demanding I remove my criticisms of her and her work from my site.
In the scheme of things I’ve been let off quite lightly for my dissent, but more on that later. Gregory insists I don’t know a thing about her work and that I am a nobody. She is partially correct because I am pretty insignificant in the greater scheme of things, but I do know a fair bit about her work because I don’t make claims without being as informed as possible beforehand.
Here, I am going to break down the work of Erica Gregory and everything that is wrong with it for those who may come into contact with her without knowing the full story. I will explain why Gregory is nothing more than a fantasy prone conspiracy theorist and an awful ghost hunter because while the media are happy to report on her latest claims uncritically, what Gregory is doing causes real harm to those who are affected the most by the murders which took place on Saddleworth moor.
Erica Gregory believes that using psychic insight and Electronic Voice Phenomena (a debunked method of spirit communication) has helped her and her team to communicate with the spirits of the deceased who have links to the Moors murders. Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) is alleged to be recordings of the voices of the dead captured on recording devices, but in reality, they are audio illusions caused by internal and external noises the devices have picked up on.
It is claimed by Gregory and co. that these paranormal abilities of theirs have also aided them in “cracking” a secret code created by murderer Ian Brady in his book The Gates of Janus. Cracking this code, they claim, helps them in their search for unknown information in the cold case of the murders which took place on Saddleworth Moor. One example of this unknown information they claim to have cracked is the whereabouts of Keith Bennett whose remains have sadly never been discovered. They also claim that their work has led them to uncover items on the moors which are linked to Ian Brady such as a motorcycle glove, some polyethene, a gun, and part of a rusted spade. This would only make sense if Ian Brady was the only person to have ever ridden a motorcycle on Saddleworth moor, the only criminal in the North of England who could possibly have thought it a good idea to hide a weapon on the moor in some plastic, and the only man to have walked onto Saddleworth Moor with a spade. Hardly cast iron evidence.
If you start to explore the claims that Gregory and her fellow ghost hunters make it becomes clear that they are establishing links between people and things which there are no credible links between in the context of the murders carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. George Orwell and Bertrand Russel are drawn into the mix, for example. As is the Irish famine, Cromwell, and Anubis, the Ancient Egyptian god of the afterlife.
Below I have transcribed just one of the dozens of similar videos uploaded to the Worsley Paranormal Group youtube channel. The rambling text is hidden below with Gregory’s typos included. To read it simply…
Click here...
Frankly, the claims being made are conspiracy theory ramblings which rely on finding meaning and links where none really exist. Gregory claims that Ian Brady laced his book with hidden messages which need to be cracked but it’s important to remember that Ian Brady was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with a narcissistic personality disorder and his book is largely just pseudo-philosophical writings about the definition of crime. In 2013, after attending Ian Brady’s mental health tribunal, Alan Bennett (whose younger brother Keith was killed by Brady and Myra Hindley,) wrote that ‘the only people that matter to Brady are himself and the people he can manipulate, and there are too many people willing to be manipulated by him.’ Brady worked hard while imprisoned to keep in the public eye and Gregory and her friends have either willingly or unwillingly helped him to achieve this which is a chilling legacy.
Gregory has received a lot of criticism from the public for the often-blunt and fantasy prone claims that she makes about her work and her so-called discoveries on the moor. Alan Bennett has no time for people like Gregory. In a review of Gregory’s book, Bennett wrote ‘This group of misled and misinformed individuals still trawl the internet claiming, firstly, that they have the support of the police and then they state that they cannot understand why they are not taken seriously by the police! Nobody with any sort of understanding of this case and the details of this case will ever take them seriously, the sooner they take that FACT in the better for all concerned.’
You’d think that discovering you had annoyed the family of a murder victim would be incentive enough to back off and reassess your behaviour, but that’s simply not Erica Gregory’s style. Instead, she tells anyone who will listen that Alan Bennett is a bitter man. In an email to me in January 2017 she wrote:
‘ just because Alan acts like he does , well I know he has reasons .,, hes a bitter man towards many not just us’. According to Bennett she has sent similar messages to others too, stating ‘Alan is an ungrateful knob to put it politely, people are helping him find his brother ffs, gahhh makes my blood boil, the cheeky ungrateful moron.’
Alan Bennett has to deal with this abuse from Erica Gregory on a regular basis, adding to the ongoing stress caused by the mass media happily publishing every claim Erica Gregory adds to her growing conspiracy and contacting him in the process of publishing. More recently, he shared on Social Media how Gregory had sent somebody messages claiming that her work revealed that his late mother, Winnie, who died never knowing where her son was buried, was a prostitute and that his murdered brother, Keith, was purposefully visiting Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
‘… just so you know,’ Erica is alleged to have written, ‘Winnie was on the game, I’ve all sorts on this and Keith was going out on a school night dressed up..he was not going to his Gran’s..he was meeting them [Brady and Hindley]. His broken glasses Brady or Hindley did. They knew him months before, chose him, it’s not all what they portray.’
We know what actually happened to Keith which can be read on Wikipedia. I won’t write the details here to spare upset to people who are likely to read this.
Following the death of Ian Brady in May 2017, Erica Gregory told the website Consumer Watch Foundation that her work will continue and she had another message for her critics too; ‘to all the people who have a go at us, including some close to victims, I say to them ‘get on your boots and walk with us and help’.
In conclusion, it’s clear to see that Erica Gregory is a time-wasting conspiracy theorist with a hero complex. It appears she has nothing better to do than to invent grandiose theories involving a book written by a child killer with mental health issues. Gregory herself has written an awful book about these fantasies which, according to reviewers, is filled with inaccuracies.
In the process of doing all of this, Gregory has shown little consideration for the families of the murder victims – even turning against them when they dare to disagree with her. She is possibly the worst ghost hunter I’ve ever had the displeasure of coming into contact with and is a stark warning of the role that the media have in amplifying the voices of people who should be ignored.
Note: the featured image of this blog post shows the children whose lives were cruelly ended by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Almost everyone knows what Brady and Hindley looked like but I’m willing to bet a lot of people didn’t know the faces of their victims.
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