PARANORMAL Database’s estimate of 140 supernatural sightings in Brighton and Hove is an under-estimate (The Argus, October 12).

The index to John Rackham’s invaluable compilation Brighton Ghosts, Hove Hauntings (2001), from which, I suspect, many of this website’s entries have been taken, sometimes inaccurately, lists about 250 locations.

Other books, such as Alan Murdie’s Haunted Brighton (2006), give further sightings.

Plenty of others are not to be found in either book.

Practically any longtime resident, I find, has some ghostly story to tell which is all the more remarkable, since the city’s history is comparatively short compared with, say, York, whose history goes back to the Vikings.

As for spooky goings on at The Argus’s former North Road premises, the chief photographer who had a close encounter with a poltergeist in the darkroom was Dennis Wixey, while another photographer, Dave Bennett, encountered in the same place a woman with a child in her arms at which point “he shot out of the room as fast as his legs would take him”.

It was a third photographer, Jerry Casswell, who was drying pictures in the same darkroom one night when he saw “at the far end of the office, the figure of a man dressed in a long highwayman-style topcoat. The coat reached down to his ankles and had four short capes hanging across the shoulders. On the man’s head was a tricorn hat.

This unexpected visitor from the past appeared to have lost his left arm below the elbow” (Rackham, pages 92-93).

So far as I know, The Argus’s present premises, in Manchester Street, have no supernatural history.

Graham Chainey
Marine Parade, Brighton