27/08/2026
GOODBYE 30 EAST DRIVE — 2016–2026 👻🏠
Our second home for 10 years.
We have sadly now stopped running our events at this fantastic location.
After 10 years of investigating 30 East Drive, more than 600 visits, and countless hours spent inside this now-famous house, Haunted Houses Events has made the decision to step away.
So, why have we stopped?
There isn’t one single reason, but rather a combination of factors which, together, meant the events were increasingly becoming unsustainable for us, and our resources are better placed elsewhere.
We want to explain those reasons openly because transparency and trust are incredibly important in our industry.
And, just to make this clear from the outset — our relationship with 30 East Drive and its management ended on good terms. There has been no fallout. ❤️
Trust and honesty are everything when you're responsible for facilitating genuine paranormal investigations — and besides, we all know our followers love the tea too. 🤣
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OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH 30 EAST DRIVE
At its peak, we were hosting an incredible 120+ nights at 30 East Drive in a single year.
We have seen the property in every season, every atmosphere and with hundreds upon hundreds of different guests.
And after all that time, we can confidently say one thing first:
We believe 30 East Drive is haunted.
We also have personal experiences — and footage we have never shared publicly — which continue to support that belief.
But perhaps that is also part of the problem...
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EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT
Over the years, the reputation surrounding the house has grown enormously.
Stories, television appearances, social media and its status within the paranormal world have created an expectation that simply cannot be fulfilled every night.
As most experienced investigators know, real paranormal investigation doesn't work like that.
A ticket pays for access to the property, our hosts and the investigation itself — paranormal activity can never be guaranteed.
Even after spending £65+ on a ticket, witnessing something genuinely unexplained remains a privilege rather than something any venue can promise.
As discussions on the 30 East Drive OWNER'S PAGE often highlight, sometimes activity is dramatic. Sometimes it is incredibly subtle. Sometimes you may spend hours waiting for something that lasts only seconds.
And sometimes, absolutely nothing happens at all.
Every experience — active or quiet — becomes part of the wider discussion surrounding the property.
Over time, however, we increasingly found that the quieter and more subtle experiences that paranormal investigators traditionally accept as part of the process did not always match the expectations some visitors understandably arrived with.
When a property has the reputation of 30 East Drive, that is perhaps inevitable.
But when those expectations aren't met, disappointment can follow — despite unpredictability being the reality of investigating any genuinely unexplained location.
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EVENT TRENDS AND CHANGING CUSTOMER DYNAMICS
We've also seen a wider change within the paranormal events market.
The number of people choosing to attend 30 East Drive specifically because of a passion for, or curiosity about, paranormal investigation itself has reduced over time.
Interest in the property remains high, but with a reduced volume.. Much of our target audience has now already visited this venue for a ghost hunt, or ghost hunt sleepover, including those who have always questioned it's haunted claims, just to give the venue the benefit of their doubt by attending, often as a *one and done" just to "tick it off the list*. So, after many years they are joined by others now choosing alternative venues, which each continues to be very popular. (30 East Drive first opened its doors in 2012 and has seen many visitors since that day)
There are several completely understandable reasons for this.
The cost of attending 30 East Drive has increased at a time when household budgets are under pressure. Many experienced investigators have already visited 30 East Drive — sometimes several times — and naturally want to experience somewhere new, while others now choose to hire the property privately themselves for a maximum of £450 per night, granting access to four people or less.
There are also considerably cheaper paranormal experiences available elsewhere on our own website, offering the same style of investigation, while for others the distance and travelling costs simply make another visit difficult to justify.
At the same time, social media has introduced 30 East Drive to an enormous new audience.
For some people, their first introduction to the property has come through TikTok, YouTube, the Movie based off the haunting - 30 East Drive When the Lights Went Out, and other online content, where the house can sometimes appear very different from the reality of spending an entire night conducting a paranormal investigation.
Fast-paced videos naturally concentrate the most interesting moments into a few minutes of content. The result can unintentionally create an impression of constant activity, intense fear or a continuous “chill factor”.
That inevitably attracts people to the house for different reasons.
Some are fascinated by paranormal investigation itself. Others are interested in its history and reputation. Some want the thrill of simply being inside the famous house, while others hope to film or create content during their visit.
None of those reasons are wrong.
It simply meant that, increasingly, the expectations of everyone attending a shared event did not always align perfectly with the type of investigation our events were designed to provide.
Although interest from this wider audience increased, it did not translate into enough additional bookings to replace the reduction we were seeing from the traditional paranormal-events market — more on the financial side shortly.
Content creation also occasionally presented practical challenges during shared investigations.
Some attendees had substantial online audiences — in a few cases 100,000+ followers — and had understandably planned or advertised content from their visit beforehand on their socials.
However, our events have always placed restrictions on livestreaming because our first responsibility has to be the shared investigation and the experience of everybody who has paid to attend.
There were occasions where bright phone screens affected the dark investigation environment, phones remaining connected to networks could interfere with sensitive equipment, or our hosts received requests to appear on camera and explain things to online audiences while they were simultaneously responsible for hosting everybody else in the room.
There is nothing inherently wrong with creating content.
It simply doesn't always sit comfortably alongside the structure of a shared paranormal investigation, where concentration, silence, darkness and minimising potential interference are often essential.
Over time, we therefore found ourselves balancing two increasingly different expectations of what a night at 30 East Drive should look like.
Ghost hunting involves long periods of waiting in the dark, repetition, patience, focus and often very subtle experiences.
30 East Drive isn't a theme park attraction where something frightening happens every few minutes.
And quite simply, real paranormal investigation isn't for everybody — and that's absolutely fine.
We completely understand why somebody arriving with expectations influenced by external media might experience boredom or disappointment, or even feel that the night wasn't what they believed they had booked.
The difficulty was that managing the difference between those expectations and the reality of paranormal investigation increasingly became another responsibility for our hosts during the event.
30 East Drive has such a formidable reputation that, ironically, its reputation can sometimes work against those trying to facilitate a genuine paranormal investigation within it.
Everyone is welcome to experience this wonderful property.
But on a ghost hunt, the most rewarding approach has always been to arrive with patience, an open mind and an understanding that the house ultimately decides whether anything happens at all.
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THE PRACTICAL DIFFICULTIES
As the costs involved in running events at the property continued to rise across virtually every area, attendance on many dates began to fall.
Eventually, we reached the point where some events were costing us more to operate than they could realistically generate in return.
There was another significant factor too.
In order to secure the popular Friday and Saturday nights, we were also required to operate Wednesday and Thursday nights, meaning blocks of four consecutive events.
Historically, these weekday nights had performed well.
But from around 2025 onwards, filling them became increasingly difficult as household discretionary spending came under greater pressure.
While Friday and Saturday could still perform strongly, Wednesday and Thursday could sometimes run at half capacity — and occasionally with as few as two guests.
The losses generated by those quieter nights could then wipe out much, or sometimes all, of the revenue achieved by the busier weekend dates.
In practical terms, that could mean four consecutive nights of travelling, setting up, hosting and operating events — a huge amount of work — simply to break even, or occasionally to make an overall loss.
That simply wasn't sustainable.
We are then faced with a difficult balance: increase the ticket price to protect the viability of the event, or absorb more of the cost ourselves and accept a much smaller margin. At a property where customers are already very sensitive to ticket price, that became another significant challenge.
When combined with rising venue costs, travel, insurance, administration, lower weekday attendance and the requirement to operate blocks of four consecutive nights, the financial margins at 30 East Drive became increasingly difficult to sustain.
At the same time, marketing 30 East Drive on social media also became increasingly difficult.
Because the property generates such strong opinions, advertisements would regularly become discussion points in their own right.
Comment sections frequently included debates around whether the property was genuinely haunted, whether particular activity was authentic, or whether paranormal events represented value for money.
Comments would often include statements such as:
“The house isn't haunted.”
“Nothing happened when I went.”
or claims that paranormal events were simply a “money-making scam”.
People are, of course, completely entitled to those opinions.
And somebody experiencing nothing during their own visit is an entirely valid experience.
However, one quiet visit on one particular night doesn't necessarily close the case either.
Paranormal activity, by its very nature, is unpredictable. A property can appear incredibly active on one occasion and completely quiet on another.
Sometimes people simply happen to visit on a quiet night — and, particularly given the formidable reputation surrounding 30 East Drive, some understandably arrive with expectations that are extremely high.
When those expectations aren't met, disappointment is understandable, and people naturally share that experience with others.
But experiencing nothing personally doesn't invalidate the experiences of hundreds of other people who have reported unexplained activity there over the years — just as their experiences cannot guarantee that the next visitor will experience anything at all.
That's the reality of genuine paranormal investigation: we investigate what happens; we cannot promise that something will.
Healthy scepticism has always been welcome at Haunted Houses Events. In fact, questioning, testing and attempting to debunk experiences should be part of any responsible investigation.
The commercial difficulty came when advertisements themselves increasingly became dominated by debates around the property.
For somebody quietly considering booking, repeatedly encountering those arguments could understandably influence whether they ultimately decided to attend.
Combined with all the other factors above, marketing the events simply became increasingly difficult.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO OUR TEAM ❤️
We also want to give a very special thank you to all of our hosts, past and present, who have given up an enormous amount of their own time over the years to make these events possible.
And it's important to point out:
Our hosts have done this unpaid — through passion, not payment.
Hosting a single night at 30 East Drive was never simply a case of turning up for a few hours and then going home.
For many of our team, it meant leaving home during the afternoon, spending several hours travelling to Pontefract — often through heavy rush-hour traffic — before unloading equipment and setting up the event.
They would then welcome our guests, look after people arriving with a huge range of different expectations, host investigations throughout the night and remain responsible for both the group and a considerable amount of expensive equipment.
30 East Drive was also, unfortunately, the one venue where we experienced equipment going missing on numerous occasions.
That meant our hosts often had to keep an additional “eagle eye” on equipment throughout the night, while also being very conscious that the actions of a tiny minority should never make the overwhelming majority of our guests feel that they weren't trusted.
Once the investigation finished, there was equipment to pack away, usually only a few hours' sleep at the property, a house to clean, and then another long journey home the following day.
In reality, hosting just one evening at 30 East Drive often meant giving up the best part of two days — leaving home one afternoon and not arriving back until the following afternoon.
Multiply that by hundreds of events across ten years and the amount of time, travelling, effort and dedication our team has given to this property is enormous — and very deeply appreciated.
To every host who packed a car, drove for hours, carried equipment through that famous door, set everything up, cleaned the house, welcomed our guests, stayed awake into the early hours, slept on the floor, packed everything away again and then drove home tired the following day:
Thank you. ❤️
You were every bit as much a part of these ten years as the house itself.
And we also need to raise a glass to Carol, our lovely site representative, who greeted us on countless visits with the key, a story or two, a freshly cleaned tea towel and, importantly, a batch of luxury toilet rolls for our guests' convenience. 😂
“Thanks, luv!”
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CONCLUSION
After ten wonderful, exciting and occasionally exhausting years, we have sadly concluded that the time is right to close this chapter.
That doesn't necessarily mean never again.
If the right level of genuine demand returns in the future, we might look at 30 East Drive again from 2028 onwards.
But for now...
Our final Haunted Houses Events investigation at 30 East Drive has taken place.
Rather than continually trying to recreate the past, Haunted Houses Events is moving forward and concentrating on discovering and investigating new properties — giving our guests fresh locations, fresh experiences and, hopefully, some completely new mysteries to explore.
We leave 30 East Drive with an enormous amount of history behind us, some extraordinary memories, and plenty of experiences that we still cannot explain.
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ONE FINAL THANK YOU
We would also like to sincerely thank the owners of 30 East Drive, Bill & Nelly, for working with us throughout the last decade.
Thank you for allowing us priority access to dates each year, for helping us resolve the inevitable issues that arose along the way, and for allowing Haunted Houses Events to call this extraordinary little house our second home for so long.
We wish the property, its owners and management, and everyone who continues to investigate 30 East Drive nothing but the very best for the future.
And finally, thank you to every guest who walked through that famous door with us between 2016 and 2026.
Whether you joined us once or returned time and time again, you became part of our ten-year story with this extraordinary house.
A particularly heartfelt thank you goes to our regular visitors who returned to investigate with us on multiple occasions.
Your support, loyalty and friendship have meant a great deal to us.
What a decade it has been. 👻
See you all at another venue 😍
Haunted Houses Events
30 East Drive — 2016–2026
