Be afraid. Be very afraid. This Rotherham museum is home to all your fears

Halloween may be over but things are still pretty scary in one part of Rotherham.

Down at the Haunted Objects Museum in Parkgate there are enough items to unnerve even the most determined sceptic.

Demonic dolls, a haunted wheelchair, pictures that can supposedly set your house on fire - they have all been lovingly collected by Lee Steer.

The paranormal investigator, who runs the Ghosts of Britain site on YouTube and Facebook, has added a definite hint of the macabre to a small terraced property - known as the Poltergeist House - since he opened it in 2019.

Lee opens up the museum to visitors and even lets some stay there overnight...if their nerves can stand it.

He and partner Sarah Carter have witnessed plenty of strange goings-on themselves - even catching some on CCTV.

An autopsy tables, djinns, a real human skeleton, relicts of Aleister Crowley... the Haunted Objects Museum has plenty of artefacts to amaze, scare and bemuse.

Lee said: “People have travelled here from Cyprus, from America, India, all over the world.

“The interest in this museum internationally is going crazy.

“I think people want to believe in the paranormal. The question ‘are ghosts real’ has always been around.

“People are always wanting to know if there is life after death.

“Some people who have come here as sceptics have gone away believing.”

And there is certainly an interest. Lee has been researching the paranormal and collecting weird and wonderful objects for many years, even before the museum opened.

He said: “For me it’s crazy to think something that started in my bedroom has grown to this collection.

“People send us items from all over the world, and some don’t even say what is attached to the item.”

Lee’s Ghosts of Britain research group’s online output has received two billion views on Facebook and he has 3.4 million followers.

But he says that despite witnessing odd things, he remains “sceptical”.

Other paranormal investigation teams have spent the night in the museum. And there has been plenty of unusual activity to tease the interest.

In the War Room, for instance, there is a supposedly haunted World War One wheelchair which has had a strange effect on visitors who have sat in it.

Lee said: “People have sat in the chair and felt like their leg has been amputated.

“Someone sat in the chair and felt a stabbing pain in their left leg.

“When the wheelchair arrived and we were wheeling it in, on the CCTV we caught a female voice.”

Sarah added: “It was a very softly spoken voice. We think it might be a nurse attached to the wheelchair.”

In the Church Room, someone was looking into the mirror there and supposedly say a baby’s head rise from the coffin behind him, and Sarah says she has seen objects flying horizontally across the Bridal Room.

Others have said they were left with scratches after visiting.

Lee said that doing work in the museum has sparked off paranormal activity, something which paranormal investigators say often sparks off hauntings.

Lee said: “We have been doing a lot of renovations recently and a lot of the activity has started, and also when we bring in new items.”

Perhaps the creepiest items in the museum - and there are a great many to choose from - are the dolls. There are a lot of them, many donated to the museum by their previous owner who wanted them out of her life.

Lee said that a psychic called Deborah Davies had built up a collection of haunted dolls after people sent them to her.

But Lee received a message from her saying that if he wouldn’t take them for the museum them she would bury the lot as they were having a negative impact on her life.

A doll apparently appeared to her in a dream and told her about Lee’s museum, so she got in touch.

And since her entire collection arrived at the museum in Broad Street, Parkgate, there has been, according to Lee, “an increase in activity”.

“The activity goes in waves and spikes,” he said.

“You can go a couple of months with nothing happening and then you get a lot of events in one week.

“It is concentrated.”

Sarah added: “One wave was last year. Our CCTV cameras - ones on the inside - started moving on their own.

“We have not got an explanation for that because the CCTV was moving backwards and forwards in time.”

Passers-by on busy Broad Street will be blissfully unaware that they are standing literally a few feet from an old mortuary table from Paris, under which people can allegedly see mysterious shadows of children. People who have touched it often feel sick, it is claimed.

And there is the mourning pram which dates from Victorian times when they had what we might describe today as a morbid fascination with death.

Babies who died were not necessarily buried straight away but were dressed and wheeled round in the pram which had an ice box in its base to preserve them.

This is perhaps a fascinating glimpse into our social history as much as the paranormal, alongside a newspaper article telling how the Rotherham Fire Brigade in the past organised a mass bonfire of Crying Boy pictures because so many local people had become so afraid of them.

And yes, there are some arson-causing Crying Boy pictures in the museum. Ofcourse there are!