Harklee Films Blog
By Lucy Harkness

November 2009

Valentines Mansion

This is just short bit about the Harklee Films team experiences of the valentines mansion investigation. When we first heard about the investigation we were all really excited and couldn't wait to go down and take a look at the mansion get some establishing shots and do a recce for the filming. It can take some organisation to find dates that we can meet as we all live at different ends of the country but we finally managed to get a date when we could head down to London and get our first proper look at Valentines Mansion. When we finally made it to London and after just a couple of wrong turns we found the lovely Valentines Mansion set in acres of gorgeous parkland unfortunately we had parked on the opposite side of the acres of gorgeous parkland and so we got a good long tour of it whilst searching for the mansion. Knowing that when we found it we might not even be allowed into the building or if they would be happy with us filming there without prior permission. Fortunately for us the staff there were very accommodating and they not only allowed us access to all the rooms we would be filming on the night of the investigation but were happy for us to film our cut away shots. Their were certain challenges with filming this location the extensive renovations that had taken place made Valentines Mansion look lovely but not really as spooky as we were hoping. As we wanted to get some good establishing shots and cutaways for the programme that portrayed a certain atmosphere we went about the building looking for ascetically appropriate angles to shoot from. Luckily a lot of the original features had been kept such as the portraits of the owners and some of the original furniture. They had also set up some exhibits where they projected shadows of people onto the walls which gave off a suitably spooky vibe so by the end of the recce we had a lot of suitably creepy shots to hopefully go along with a ghost filled investigation.

On the night of the investigation things didn't run exactly smoothly with all of us gathering from different sides of the country we had some logistical issues which along with a slightly senile sat nav lead to the Harklee team and some of the investigation team running a little late. But we finally got there and after just a little coercing managed to get the somewhat shy investigation team outside for some establishing shots. Then it was time to set up and film the experiments we split into two groups with one camera op with each group. The filming side of the investigation was straightforward for us just film the investigators had hope for something paranormal to happen and of course make sure the night vision mode on the cameras was on. We were all extremely hopeful and couldn't wait to get the investigation under-way unfortunately as the night went on it became more and more apparent that any paranormal activity that had been experienced at valentine mansion it was not going to reveal itself to us. By 3 am we were all feeling the strain and getting a little frustrated leading to more than one ghost directed insult being uttered.

We were all a little disappointed by the lack of activity at valentines but in the world of paranormal investigations that is just the way it goes sometimes. And we were all thinking about and looking forward to the next investigation at Secunda manor.