This investigation takes the GHI team to merry olde England, and a fairly ancient place called Samlesbury Hall. Before they get there, though, we are introduced to Brandy Green, the Ghost Hunters International team's new case manager. This threw me a bit. I know Donna was the case manager for TAPS back on the original Ghost Hunter show in the early seasons — is/was she also the case manager for GHI?  Is Brandy's arrival a sign that Donna isn't coming back?  I hope not.  Especially seeing as the prior investigation saw Robb calling J&G back in the states asking for someone (Kris) to temporarily fill in while Donna was recuperating.

…but wait, what's this? Barry is setting up the equipment. Isn't that Brian's job?  In fact, where is Brian? I don't think we saw him since we met Brandy. That's rather odd. Since when do team members just vanish without being mentioned?  I mean, Donna's absence has been explained thoroughly and even became an issue in the previous investigation (because they were an investigator short).  Then again, Shannon just vanished into thin air while the show was on hiatus.

Wait a minute… could this mean Brian was fired? But he was doing so well this season! He didn't tell us how shadows were looking at him and chasing him once since GHI came back. If he's really gone permanently I can't say I'll be upset but I know a lot of other fans will. The oddest thing here is that Shannon vanished when the show took a few months off. Brian just vanished essentially in the middle of an episode, halfway through. Some people complained when Brian's original firing/rehiring/firing became part of the storyline in Ghost Hunters but I have to say, this "person vanishes and is never mentioned again" stuff is way spookier than any of the evidence this team is collecting. It reminds me of a certain Stargate: Atlantis episode where the main computer is erasing dead citizens from the minds of the remaining ones, as if they never existed. Creepy.

Moving on, when Dustin saw the place they were going to investigate he said it looked like a "Gothic Gingerbread House".  That's a pretty good description of the place. Also, "sprawling" comes to mind. The buildings seemed rather short, I would say the tallest section was two stories, but they seemed to be primarily long, narrow structures that framed out some rather nice courtyards within a larger campus. The buildings themselves were styled in a latticework pattern of brown and cream. Apparently the original construction on the site goes all the way back to 1325, but I suspect there has been a lot of renovating since then because the place doesn't look nearly its age.

As one might expect with a nearly 700 year-old location, there are many legends. One was of a priest that was murdered by soldiers. When they beheaded him the floor was stained with blood and the blood wouldn't wash out no matter what anyone did. Apparently they bricked up the room for 200 years and when they opened it up again the first thing they did was replace the floor — but now the new floor shows what are purported to be blood stains as well.

Another legend was of Lady Dorothea, who was going to marry a protestant (hey, these things were serious issues back then!).   I wasn't clear if it were she or her lover (or both) who were killed but supposedly the skeletal hand of her lover was discovered by a team installing a new drainage system and in the hand he still clutched her engagement ring. In another story, a police car was driving past the building and hit a woman in white (Lady Dorothea, supposedly) who promptly vanished into thin air (like Brian) but left a dent on the front of the vehicle.

Robb & Andy began the night walking through the buildings and entire campus staring at their FLIR screens. This inevitably led to a lot of confused, "what is that?" moments, but in getting used to their new eyes they were eventually able to identify every anomalous blip they saw. As they were walking through one of the outdoor areas they heard a rather interesting "bang", and aimed the camera in that direction — if there had been a person over there it should have been clear as day to them, but they saw no one. Moving towards where the sound had come from they suddenly heard what seemed to be the same sound again, but this time from back in the direction they had just come from.

That was the extent of this experience, and to their credit they did not bring it up (that we saw) during the reveal later on, but it deserves mention because it did seem slightly odd. The fact that they were outdoors with the FLIR also gave them the ability to see any would-be hoaxers in the dark, which is kind of cool. The sounds might still easily have a natural explanation, but this incident was the closest the team came to supernatural all night.

In the room where the Priest was reported to have been beheaded Andy examined the floor and noticed that there was particleboard underneath, which he said dated the floor to post-WWII.  He also noted that there was no spatter effect and I believe he ruled out bloodstains on that point. I don't agree with that logic — if there had been seeped underneath the original floor and then soaked into the new floor it would not leave a spatter — but while I disagree with how he reached it, the conclusion is likely correct: the stain is probably water or something else (it didn't even look like blood) and because of the legend people are just predisposed to think any stain on that floor must be the priest's blood.

Speaking of "because of the legend", Dustin did a great job filling in for Donna in researching the case after the investigation: There was no police report on record that corroborated the story of a police car hitting a ghost (or being involved in any sort of accident) at this location. Of course, one could easily imagine the officer in the car realized he couldn't very well file a report that he hit someone and then claim the person vanished into thin air — they'd probably think he'd killed them and buried the body.

However Dustin also found out that while there didn't seem to be any report of finding human remains during construction on the property there was a report of finding wild boar bones. This offers the beginning of an interesting hypothesis: perhaps the legends led workers to originally believe they had dug up the bones of Lady Dorothea's protestant lover, and when it became clear the bones weren't human the story was just too good to stop telling.

In fact, despite their hosts claims that Samlesbury Hall was "the most haunted house in all of Great Britain" the GHI team found nothing, which seemed a great disappointment to him. I kind of felt bad too, because he seemed to be an amiable chap who really treasured all the stories he'd collected about the place, but if there are any spirits haunting those premises then they must have made alternate plans for the night when they heard GHI was coming.