While staying at Birmingham’s Clayton Hotel, paranormal researchers TRACY AND ANDY LINDON carried out a late-night EVP session that led them into the city’s buried past
During March 2026, we stayed at the Clayton Hotel in Birmingham due to our son being in hospital for leukaemia treatment, funded by the hospital itself.
Being paranormal researchers ourselves, on the second weekend stay we decided, out of boredom while sitting in our fourth floor room watching television, that maybe we should head out into the hallway and carry out an EVP session.
We waited until after 10pm when no one was around. Four floors up, one of us crept out into a corner to switch on the recorder and carry out a few 30-second blasts. No questions were asked, no investigation carried out, and we then returned to our room.
Four recordings were made. Two were discarded upon review, but what we were about to discover felt beyond reality.
One EVP specifically said: “Fk this shit – Andrew Brookes is still here!”
We questioned it and then started searching Birmingham archives, only to discover there was an actual person by that name who had existed.
The story gets even better. Not only did he exist, from our findings we also discovered that his house, number 4 Albert Street, was part of the original Birmingham back-to-backs housing community. Due to the original footprint, his house would have stood within the hotel’s reception area at the front of the building.
The second EVP mentioned the name Jane, spoken in a male voice as a single word.
Jane was also the name of Andrew Brookes’ wife, and they had four children.
What was Andrew Brookes?
Andrew Brookes was born in 1845 and died in 1870, making him just 25 years old when he passed away.
What’s more disturbing is that he was buried in an overflow burial ground, six coffins deep, because due to his status he did not have much money and had no gravestone.
His grave still resides beneath the hotel towards the back of the building, not far from where he lived. He was not buried with his wife, who lived into her mid-50s.
Just across the road from the hotel, only yards away, there is also a new building site for the HS2 train line.
We discovered that before the plans were made, around 6,500 bodies were unearthed and removed. It reportedly took a whole year for them to be relocated. You can read about that in this Mirror article
About Tracy and Andy Lindon
Tracy and Andy Lindon run Whispered Encounters UK. They say:
“Exploring the unexplained through EVP research and historical investigation.
“Every case starts with an unknown voice. No pre-research. No local legends. No prior knowledge of the people connected to the location.
“Using a capture first, research later approach, we investigate names, places, and events reportedly heard during EVP sessions and then trace them through archives, census records, newspapers, maps, and historical documents to uncover the lives behind the voices.
“Some leads end in mystery. Others reveal real individuals whose stories have been forgotten by time.”
