The Haunted Hunts At Pendle Hill - 'Shadow Of The Hill' - Season 3, Episode 1 Review

Following their successful second series The Haunted Hunts team return for Halloween with a third series, this time they head to the legendary Pendle Hill in Lancashire.

The six-part Amazon Prime Video series kicks of with a double-length episode in which the gang, lead by Danny Moss, get to grips with the scale of the investigation ahead of them. The series was filmed over a week at one of the most paranormally active locations in England.

As always Danny is joined by Rebecca Salisbury-Moss, Emma Dawe, Charlie Rutter, and Roxanne Rutter as they embark on one of their most ambitious investigations to date.

Not only will they be facing the deep and dark history of a location that is famous as the site of one of the UK's best-known witch trials, but they'll also need to adapt to investigating in rural locations where they could be up against whole new challenges, including the unpredictable British weather.

Speaking about how excited she is to get started in the first episode, Emma said, "I mean who isn't excited about a week full of witchcraft? Everyone knows about Pendle Witches, everyone knows about the trials."

But if you're not familiar with the tales of the Lancashire witch trials of 1612, you're about to become an expert. With some help from local historian and tour guide, Simon Entwistle, the first episode mainly serves as an introduction to Pendle Hill, a location where to this day modern witches and occultists still perform witchcraft and rituals.

In the episode Danny tells us, "this place always had a bit of a hold over me. I've always been obsessed with this place." Part of Danny's excitement is due to the unknown nature of the case. He said, "the entire location is shrouded in mystery and supposed hauntings. It really is a place that's been unaffected by time."

Danny added, "one thing that really fascinates me about this whole case is talks of demons, the devil posing as things like dogs and hares." According to the ghost hunter, there are documented accounts of these strange occurrences happening in the 1600s.

With so much history, Becki hopes there's some paranormal activity awaiting them to back up the stories, "I would like to think that we do find paranormal activity, it's a place I've been obsessed with longer then I can remember."

But Rox admitted that they might have their work cut out as Pendle Hill is very different from their usual investigations, "we've not investigated places where there's elementals."

Danny's first stop on the journey was to speak to Hazel Ford, the founder of the paranormal events company Haunted Happenings. Hazel, who's been investigating Pendle Hill for over a decade, told Danny about her strange experience there. She described the bizarre incident as "one of the most extraordinary things that has happened to us on a ghost hunt."

Hazel and her team were on the hill at midnight doing an exercise with table tipping. She said, "as we were calling out and asking things to happen, we heard something drop on the table, it turned out to be a tooth". The big old molar seemed to vanish seconds later.

Hazel told Danny, "there's so much mystery to Pendle Hill, obviously you've got the Pendle witches and everything surrounding that story which is fascinating. But also in every little town around Pendle there are some amazing ghost stories attached to houses, pubs and obviously graveyards."

On the first night of their first full day in Pendle, the team got stuck into their investigation at the very centre of the Pendle witch story. They got underway near the village of Barley where in 2011 a 17th century cottage was found by engineers working on the Lower Black Moss reservoir.

The building that had been buried and forgotten could be Malkin Tower, which despite its name was a small, one-roomed limestone cottage. Malkin Tower was the home of two of witches at the centre of the trials and the location where the infamous 1612  trials took place.

Little is known about Malkin Tower other than the fact that it was destroyed and its location was not recorded. Danny and the team hope to find out if the activity around the ruined cottage could confirm that it was in fact Malkin Tower. The cottage was re-buried after its discovery leaving the team to investigate the nearby woodlands.

With their cameras switch to night vision they conducted an experiment in which Emma was blindfolded and wearing noise cancelling headphones, eliminating all external influences. Then the output from a Spirit Box was pumped in. A Spirit Box rapidly scans through radio frequencies, it's believed that spirits can manipulate the static and white noise in these frequency ranges to form words and sentences. Emma will be the only member of the team who can hear these responses through the Spirit Box, but because of the noise cancelling headphones she won't be able to hear the questions her teammates are asking the spirits. Known as the Estes Method, this technique eliminates any subjectivity.

Emma didn't seem to be getting any responses, so after a while Charlie put on the blindfold and headphones and listened intently to the sounds coming out of the Spirit Box. Charlie was able to hear what could have been the first signs of an entity attempting to communicate, as the team heard whispers through the trees around them, but they captured nothing conclusive on camera and their questions went unanswered.