The Haunted Hunts Get Up Close & Personal With Grace The Haunted Doll In Their Halloween Special

The Haunted Hunts return for Halloween with one of their darkest investigations to date, with a one-hour special that focuses on what the team believe to be a dark and sinister item that's housed at their base of operations, Tatton Old Hall in Cheshire.

The episode premiered on October 31 exclusively on the The Haunted Hunts XTRA, the team's official Patreon stream. It saw Danny Moss take on the evil within one of the most haunted objects in the country. 

The target of their investigation was Grace the doll, and thanks to this seemingly harmless toy Danny, along with his fellow investigators Charlie Rutter, Roxanne Rutter, Gareth Cole and Tracy Thomas, had a night they'll never forget.

The episode opens with the backstory of this creepy artefact and it all started in 2018 when the team took several members of the public on a an investigation of Nantclwyd Y Dre in North Wales.

While at the historic location, the oldest dated timbered town house in Wales, several guests attending the event reported feeling extreme nausea, headaches and some even passed out. Strangely, multiple people felt their eyes burning, and stigmata-like pains in their feet and wrists.

It was on this night that the team decided to use Grace the doll as a trigger object in the hopes that it might attract child spirits, but this resulted in the innocent doll becoming an unforeseen vessel of spiritual attachment. This episode features those who were there on that very night and have been part of this journey now for over three years.

Halfway through that night at Nantclwyd Y Dre in 2018, Grace unexpectedly fell from the chair she had been placed on. Later that night an EVP was caught in this exact same room. An EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon, is a form of supernatural communication that involves capturing the sound of spirit voices in audio recordings. The unsettling voice in the recording appeared to be saying, "wreath, your eyes." Other strange happenings captured that night included the words "evil", "trap" and "hang" being spoken through various other ghost hunting gadgets. And this was just the start of it.

Over the next few days, Grace became more active with several instances when she physically moved, albeit ever so slightly. On one occasion the doll move outside a chalk circle that had been drawn around her while in isolation in a room overnight. The doll also gave off strange levels of electromagnetism causing devices like a K-II electromagnetic field meter and a similar device called a REM-Pod to light up in her presence.

During their next investigation, the team used a device called a spirit box, which rapidly scans through radio frequencies, it's believed that spirits can manipulate the white noise in these frequency ranges to form words and sentences. As Danny asked the doll where it came from, a gruff voice through the device seems to say "Ruthin," the North Wales town that is home to Nantclwyd Y Dre.

Eventually the doll was moved into Tatton Old Hall where research and investigation into the artefact could continue. It didn't take long for Grace's influence to be felt on the iconic haunted property. She was soon blamed for dark and negative activity, which included people becoming uncharacteristically hostile towards each other. The paranormal activity at the hall increased and began to resemble that which the team had experienced at Nantclwyd Y Dre.

Over the next few years, Grace continued to provide extraordinary happenings, with countless EVPs being captured, including the phrase "release" and "I am trapped" as well as knocking sounds on the box the doll was now kept in for safety.

The team eventually came to the conclusion that there was not one, but multiple entities attached to the doll. Words obtained through ghost hunting gadgets even started to suggest names, two of which feature in famous texts relating to demons which date back to the 16th and 17th centuries.

Before we meet the members of the public who have witnessed paranormal activity at the hands of Grace, a disclaimer tells us that nothing is staged and that no actors are used. A message on the screen reads, "this is not a dramatised story, it is real and it has affected real people in very real ways."

The episode is shot entirely at Tatton Old Hall, a historic building that sits within the grounds of Tatton Hall, in Knutsford. The whole park is now open to the public, but it's the 15th century Old Hall that is home to Grace, a place where visitors have reported a strangling sensation, almost as if a rope was being gradually tightened around their neck.

Witnesses have also reported hearing guttural moans, loud knocking and footsteps throughout the house and poltergeist activity is said to be commonplace, especially in the old Victorian dining room.

The hour-long Halloween special breaks from the show's usual format, most notably because it features members of the public who have a history with Grace the doll. It also features investigators, Gareth and Tracy, two members of The Haunted Hunts' events team.

All this means that the one-off special exposes a different side to the team's investigations, revealing methods that the public might experience on an event with them, and techniques specifically used to entice Grace the doll to communicate.

The Halloween special comes off the back of the team's recent fourth series, entitled 'Project Invocation', a ten-episode experiment that was designed to test if fear itself can invoke paranormal activity.

This involved sending the team to a series of unknown locations without being forearmed with the history of the locations in advance. The tactics and methods used during their investigation were explained to them upon arrival, which meant the team really were in the dark and were pushed outside of their comfort zone and to the limits of fear.