Ghost busters want to track spooks who swim in Poplar Baths

Haunted? Derelict Poplar swimming pool (Image: TH Council)

Members of the White Light Paranormal Investigation team say the Victorian bath house is awash with lost souls who have failed to float on to next world.

Former Poplar Swimming Pool (Image: Archant)

Now they are to ask Tower Hamlets council for permission to carry out an investigation before the dilapidated building in East India Dock Road—left empty for a-quarter-of-a-century—undergoes a £36 million redevelopment.

“I plan to go in cold,” said the White Light group’s leader, East Ham spiritualist Barbara Lowe.

“We have a team of techies to set up electro-magnetic fields and the latest matrix laser shield from America if we get the council’s go-ahead.

“Sometimes if you have a spirit around, they set off the netters. If anything goes through, you can see it.”

The council was waiting today (Tues) to receive the group’s request to go in.

One of White Light’s ‘techies’ is former security guard Robin Blay, 46, whose late father Allan Blay worked at Poplar Baths before it closed in 1989.

He said: “My dad told me they often heard footsteps at night when the place was empty.

“There were many apparitions of people who had passed away over the years which used to happen when he was on late shift.”

The group wants to set up infra-red cameras and electromagnetic field metres which can detect energy that any self-respecting ghost using the old pool would emit. These are said to include a man who had a heart attack and drowned.

But Robin admits he’s never actually seen a ghost—only heard the stories.

He is also keen to hunt spooks said to be lurking in Whitechapel’s Blind Beggar pub, scene of a Kray gangland murder in the 1960s, and The Gun at Blackwall where the vision of a screaming mad woman sealed up in a back room in the 18th century leapt out and vanished when the room was eventually opened up in 1970.

Robin is certain there are spirits in most East End boozers.