In 1969, something of a sensation was caused at the Palace Hotel when Mr J. Smith and his
eleven-man team of demolition workers reported alarming and apparently ___1___ happenings
at this thousand-room hotel.
Eerie voices were heard from empty rooms and corridors on the second floor and the four-ton
___2___ was said to have moved up and down many times of its own volition. After conducting
an investigation, the North Wales Electricity Board asserted that not an amp of power was going
into the hotel; ___3___ having been, in fact, cut off weeks earlier.
One of the men stated that he entered the foyer in the company of eight others and they all saw
the doors slam shut and the lift move up to the second ___4___.
One Mrs Templeman called at the hotel on business and was talking to workmen when she saw
the lift suddenly begin to move ___5___ . She said there was no sound whatsoever; the lift moved
about two metres, almost to the second floor and then stopped. Mrs Templeman ran up to the
winding room with one of the workmen. They discovered that the lift brake was still firmly at the
"on" position and there seemed no ___6___ way to explain the movement of the lift. The
emergency winding handle for cranking the lift had been removed by this time.
At length it was decided to cut the cables to ___7___ the lift and although this was done, the
lift did not budge. Now the main shafts were ___8___ and still the lift would not move. It was
continually thumped with twenty-eight-pound hammers for twenty-five minutes before it eventually
plunged to the bottom of the lift shaft and buried itself one meter into the cellar. The workmen all
agreed that it was ___9___ : although the lift had moved, silently and without apparent effort by
itself on so many occasions, it should have been so difficult to knock down.
During the course of a television broadcast a dog was shown
___10___ to pass the second
floor landing although it had no such objection to passing other, apparently identical, landings. |