Mike White offers a blow by blow account of a night spent monitoring ghosts in Oxford Prison

**The vigil gets under way. Pairs and small teams of investigators take up positions around the main block and at various places in the surrounding grounds.

**My partner and I are manning the control centre when there is a commotion from outside. Sadly, this turns out not to have been a sighting of a mysterious lady in white gliding across the Mound but one of the team stumbling into a bush.

**Midnight comes and goes with a sense of anticipation but absolutely no sign of any paranormal activity.

**At last, something genuinely puzzling. One of the temperature sensors in a cell in the main block records a sudden drop in temperature, although none of the other equipment registers a change and none of the investigators in the area feels anything unusual.

**Everyone is beginning to slow down now. This is the time when the body clock is running at its slowest and everyone is feeling the strain. Most of the group have snatched some brief moments of sleep in the cell set aside as a rest room.

**My turn has come for outside patrol and it is still raining. Sheltering in an archway next to the old prisoners' graveyard, I am starting to wonder why this ever seemed like a good idea.

**Post-vigil meeting to review the night's events. All the notes taken throughout the night are correlated to check for anything that was not reported as unusual at the time.

**All the equipment is packed away and we disperse. I am going home for a few hours' sleep in a real bed.