my innermost sanctum

:S

see my reaction above. nicked off this week's the northerner. erm, enjoy.

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You'd think it would take a lot to scare the wits out of the landlord of a Yorkshire pub. Judging by his picture in the Yorkshire Post, Roger Froggatt, of the Low Valley Arms at Darfield, near Barnsley, looks the sort of man who would know what to do with customers with no homes to go to at closing time on a Saturday night.

But according to the YP, Mr Froggatt was so shaken that police who came to the pub after strange nocturnal goings-on offered to call an ambulance to take him to hospital. He declined.

After a routine night, Mr Froggatt switched off the lights and the bar's three televisions and went to bed in his flat at the pub. At 1.30am, he was woken by an alarm and, fearing an intruder was on the loose, went to investigate. He found nothing, so reset the alarm and went back to bed.

The alarm went off again 90 minutes later. This time he picked up a handy length of wood and went downstairs for another look round.

"I will never forget what I saw," he said. " All three plasma television screen were switched on. My wife went to switch them off and I checked the toilets. When I went into the ladies', I couldn't believe what I saw. There was a figure of what I believe was a woman, with no face and silvery great hair, dressed in a white gown.

"I stood there for about four or five seconds, then fled in terror. I ran out of there, I was that shaken. I couldn't speak. I couldn't even speak to the police when they arrived soon afterwards after my wife called them."

Kathryn Froggatt took the officers to the toilets where the figure had appeared and there they saw the loos flushing with no human intervention on the handles of cisterns. "I can't remember much about it after that," added Mr Froggatt. I was shaking. I have never seen anything like it before and don't want to again."

He said the figure was "the ugliest thing I have ever seen. This has just done my head in."

There have been other strange happenings at the Low Valley Arms: gas taps have turned themselves on in the cellar and barrels have mysteriously moved.

Police supported Mr Froggatt's story about the flushing and said they were investigating. But they have not yet issued a photofit of a mysterious grey-haired woman with half a face. Some of the pub's regulars think they know what this manifestation is all about: a barmaid is said to have died in the pub several years ago. But Mr Froggatt is taking no chances: he is calling in a priest to exorcise the demon in the cubicle.