Chislehurst Caves tour guides on decade of working underground

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Telling ghost stories in caves deep underground is not your usual 9 to 5, but for two tour guides in Chislehurst this has been the norm for more than a decade.

Chislehurst Caves has been carved out over thousands of years and witnessed centuries of history - and a small team has the job of distilling this into an hour-long tour.

The News Shopper caught up with two members of this team, Darren Pledge and Pete House, who between them have 25 years of experience leading tours through the labyrinth of passages below our feet.

Both have more spooky stories than you can count and a clear love for the "magic" and intrigue of the place, whether they believe in the paranormal or not.

READ MORE: I braved a Chislehurst Caves tour with ghost stories on Halloween week

Darren said he "always thought it'd be a fantastic job" when he visited the caves as a kid, but studied graphic design at college before moving into conservation work.

He then had a "bizarre way of falling into the job" after discovering they were hiring during his daughter's 10th birthday party at the caves.

Darren told News Shopper: "I've worked for the National Trust and I worked for Chislehurst and St Paul's Cray Commons Conservators at one point as well.

"I've literally done all the stuff above and now I work below.

"I'm a bit of a night owl anyway, I'm definitely not a morning person. I prefer the winter.

"Working in conservation, that was horrible sometimes working through the summers, working on south-facing hillsides, out in the open.

"Now I'm underground. It's cold, it's dark and I like it like that."

Chislehurst CavesNot your usual office... (Image: NQ)

The job also never gets dull, with new bits of history to discover and unexplained noises in the caves - and in the office above - to keep guides on their toes.

Darren and Pete spoke of checking the passageways at the end of the day after hearing what sounded like a woman talking to a child, only to find no one there, and hearing a screaming toddler in the empty office building one night.

Pete said: "It has sort of reached the point these days where if we can't answer the question immediately in the building here, we say 'the place is haunted'.

"It's kind of accepted."

Even after 12 years of working at Chislehurst Caves, Pete himself is sceptical about ghosts, but has had experiences that have made him doubt these beliefs.

"I'm willing to be proven wrong, and I think I have been proven wrong in many cases, but still not definitively," Pete said.

"It might not be that it's ghosts, it might be an extension of science that we haven't come to explain yet.

"There's things that have happened here or transpire that have me sitting on the fence where I have to go, hang on a second, there's probably some logic in this, isn't there?"

"And that's, I think, part of what should be the magic of it."

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