Broad Oak Printing Works in Accrington produced one of the more methodically tested paranormal reports gathered anywhere in this collection, a case that moved beyond simple witness testimony into something closer to a deliberate, if informal, experiment. In the 1970s, a night watchman making his rounds reported a genuinely chilling encounter: an icy, invisible presence that took hold of his arm as he walked through the building, cold enough and physical enough that he was left in no doubt something had actually touched him.
Rather than simply recording the story and moving on, whoever investigated the claim afterward took a concrete step to test it: a tape recorder was left running overnight in the same room, with no equipment in the space switched on and nobody present to interfere with the recording. When the tape was played back the next day, it was found to contain the unmistakable sounds of working print machinery, the clatter and rhythm of presses in full operation, despite the fact that nothing in the room had actually been running at any point during the night.
Nobody involved in the original investigation was able to offer an explanation for how a silent, switched-off room could have produced the sound of active printing equipment on tape, and no source consulted for this entry proposes a mundane solution either. It stands as one of the more genuinely puzzling entries in this whole collection precisely because of that deliberate testing: not a vague impression retold years later, but a specific claim, checked with a specific method, that produced a specific and genuinely unexplained result.
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