There was certainly something eerie about Beversbrook Sports and Community facility when The Athletic arrived. Deathly quiet, there was no one in sight, except a few shadowy figures in red, floating in the distance.
Turns out that’s just Ian Holloway and his Swindon Town side, preparing for a big game against Morecambe on Saturday.
The Athletic has come here to Swindon’s temporary training base in Calne, Wiltshire, to investigate reports of strange, unexplainable events.
The person who has been reporting those events most publicly is Holloway, Swindon’s manager, who’s spent 44 years in professional football, 28 of those as a manager at nine different clubs. In that time, he has no doubt seen tea cups thrown, probably doors slammed, chairs tipped, and maybe even a glass window pane being broken. But at his latest club, these things have been happening with no obvious suspect in sight.
“I actually did my first team talk and the door swung open,” Holloway tells The Athletic. “If you see the door, no one could open that. There was everybody in the room. There was nobody out in the other room, and the door swung open, and I went, ‘Come in’. And I looked, and they all started laughing.
“They said. ‘Oh, that’s the ghost saying “Hello, Gaffer.”’ I went, ‘What do you mean?’ And they told me the things that have happened.”
Holloway says staff who work at Beversbrook have CCTV footage of peculiar incidents occurring — including a glass falling, and on Tuesday he entered the building to find one of the inside panes of glass of a double-glazed door overlooking the pitches was smashed.
“The site manager is a lovely bloke and he was on duty the night before,” Holloway says. “He said, ‘Ollie, look at that’. One of the doors was broken on the inside, going into the one on the outside, and it was leaning on it. How could it be broken on the inside?
“He said, ‘I can’t prove it, but look at it, it doesn’t make sense. There was nobody here last night’.”
Holloway certainly believes Swindon have been cursed with some bad luck when it comes to injuries, including a serious ankle tendon injury that captain Ollie Clarke picked up in innocuous fashion during training last week.
“We’ve had some weird injuries, strange injuries around the place,” Holloway says. “I saw a horrendous injury that didn’t look normal. He (Clarke) jumped up, he headed it, and when he landed, he thought he broke his leg. And the pitch is perfect. It was a weird scenario.”
Holloway says he has been told the facility is built close to an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. Local historian Nick Baxter could find no record of a burial site but told The Athletic there was once a lost Medieval village of Beversbrook nearby, while an archaeological dig in 1999 discovered evidence of a Roman settlement.
Nonetheless, Holloway says his wife, Kim, who is a practising pagan and a fan of Caspersight — a YouTuber (whose real name is Ben Hendy) who reacts to videos of paranormal activity — will be cleansing the training ground of the spirit with sage.
When The Athletic asks Hendy about the goings on at Beversbrook, he says: “One of my catchphrases is, ‘It was built on a graveyard’. The reason I say that is because the videos of ghosts I review sometimes have a back story that the building was built on a graveyard. I do know that sage is said to warn off any negative or evil spirits that may be in that location. It’s called cleansing.
“Hearing about the window breaking and no living person being responsible, it could point in the direction of a poltergeist. From what I know, communicating with it is the wrong thing to do, cleansing is a good idea. Never ever do an Ouija board. You never know what will come through.”
Swindon are currently third-bottom in League Two, but Holloway bristles at any link between his team’s struggles on the pitch and the odd activity around the training ground.
“I’ve read some things like, ‘Ian Holloway is saying his team are losing because of a ghost,’” he says. “That’s not my intention — and it is just absolutely stupid and pathetic.
“At the end of the day, I’m trying to help in every way I can, every single per cent of anything and even if I help the people in the building by my wife coming up and actually clearing the area, it might change how they feel about coming to work.
“If they’re scared of the building, and my lads keep talking about it… if I clear that out of their heads, it might help, mightn’t it?
“All I’m saying is it might be total utter coincidence (the injuries), but if I make an offering and I say — and you never know, do you? — if I can help in any one per cent, I will. It might be nonsense, but who cares? But then you’ve done all you can. I’m going to try.
“I don’t know if it’s evil, but I’ve been to a lot of places, Glastonbury and all that, with my lovely wife and, at the end of the day, I don’t mock anything. Who am I? I don’t know everything, do I?”
Holloway is the eighth manager since the departure of Richie Wellens in 2020 to take on the challenge of resurrecting Swindon on the pitch. In the past four years, there have been issues with unpaid wages and unpaid rent on the County Ground, their home stadium. The temporary switch to Beversbrook is while the club searches for a new training ground.
There is also dissatisfaction among some supporters over the ownership under previous chairman Lee Power and then Australian businessman Clem Morfuni, who was the subject of an open letter from the Swindon Town FC Trust calling for him to sell the club at the end of last season following another disappointing League Two campaign.
In Holloway, they have a manager whose personality and energetic approach may lift the spirits of a beleaguered fanbase and the morale of his players, reconnecting the club and the supporters.
“I think there’s been a bit of a fundamental disconnect between club and the community in some areas and the club have probably understandably become a little bit insular and a bit defensive at times, in the way in which they dealt with that,” says Sam Morshead, a Swindon supporter and editor of The Moonraker, a website for news about the club.
“It’s not a particularly happy place, and I think that’s why Holloway’s doing what he’s doing. He’s trying to bring humour, he’s trying to bring energy to create some sort of atmosphere that allows for the fun to come back, because I think the general view for just about anyone associated with this club, with the exception of the academy and the women’s teams who have done well in the last couple of years, is that it has been a dark time.
“From a senior men’s perspective, anyone who works around the squad, anyone who goes on Saturday, sponsors, fans, management, whoever it is, it’s just not been fun, and I think that he’s recognised that and that’s where he’s trying to change things.
“But there’s a long way to go for the whole club to feel a community once again, but it hasn’t felt a community for more than 10 years.”
It isn’t just a poltergeist Holloway is trying to cleanse. He is also trying to rid Swindon Town of the club’s malaise and bring a fresh start.
“There is a lack of confidence but I know what I’m doing, and I know what I’m trying to get through,” Holloway says. “I’m gonna help absolutely everybody in and around the place, and that includes the staff who don’t even work for me.
“If you ask everybody in this football club and anybody who works in the training ground, if I have done that every day and helped them, then I think the answer would be yes.
“You pick up every stone, you clear it out and you start again, and that’s what I’m doing.”
The only spectre that Swindon should be truly afraid of is the prospect of relegation from the Football League, where they have played their football since being elected to the professional ranks 104 years ago.
Holloway is determined to do everything in his power — and his wife’s power — to avoid that fate.
(Top photo: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)
