 If you were around in 2005 and you loved Wallace and Grumit like I did, you probably know about the tragedy that struck the company. No, not a death, but a terrible blaze. It ripped through the Victorian warehouse, and nearly everything went up in flames, including all the models from a grand day out, the wrong trousers and more. And animator Nick Park said of the matter, referring to the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn't a big deal. But it was a very big deal indeed to have ever died there. If I understand correctly, the body had been torn into a bunch of separate pieces, none of them really resembling human body parts, and the remains were so thoroughly charred that even the best analysis couldn't reliably confirm it was human. Everyone who should have been in the warehouse, animators, cleaning staff, etc., was still alive, meaning the person who died probably wasn't supposed to be there. In the early days of the case, some people assumed the corpse had started the fire, but once it was traced back to an electrical fault, people forgot because nobody wanted to believe it was actually a human corpse. As weeks and months went by without any reasonably connected missing person reports, people forgot about that whole aspect of the fire, and some people you ask might argue the ghost never affected anything else. But I think that person's ghost continued to haunt the studio for at least a half decade afterwards. The ghost really loved setting fires. Every few months, some other thing would overheat or burst into flames. The light bulb, the trash and the bin, it even tried overheating the computers, but it couldn't heat them while they restarted. That said, Ardman Animations was far too vigilant for there to be any fires after the first. The ghost also hated the stop motion animation process. Suddenly, claymation characters were showing up mangled, squished and ripped into pieces. Sets were getting destroyed left and right in ways that couldn't be natural, but could have done them was up in the air. I still think that ghost is part of the reason Ard for Christmas was CGI as opposed to stop motion, because I heard the problem was especially bad with that one. Security cameras weren't any help either, because the models that were on camera never actually got destroyed. It's one more piece of evidence that something fundamentally unnatural was happening. Other than those two things, it never got too bold. It may have stolen pencils, but they also may have been misplaced. The papers ended up on the ground because of stray gusts of wind. People got sudden chills and felt like they were being watched sometimes. It never really reached the point where anybody made a public statement, because what were they supposed to say? Someone died in the warehouse fire and their ghost is haunting our animation company. Okay, maybe I can say for certain that the ghost was the reason the claymation characters started showing up ripped into pieces. Maybe all the spontaneous electrical faults which occurred in the years after that really were spontaneous. I don't have any proof that they hired an exorcist except for word of mouth, and it took them nearly half a decade to do it. I guess they must have tried other solutions before resorting to the loopy sounding one that ended up working. I believe nothing out of the ordinary happened during the exorcism, but the weird stuff stopped happening. No more fires, no more ripped-out models. I'm pretty sure nothing like that has ever happened again, and I hope it never does. You may have already figured this out, but I definitely think Ardman did nothing wrong here. The corpse obviously wasn't supposed to be there and all it did was make life harder for the people in the animation company. The whole debacle just makes me root for Ardman even more. Still call me a heretic, but I don't have full faith that the exorcism worked, and I'm kind of scared that the ghost is just biting its time. I guess I don't have concrete proof, but I still think it hasn't finished business in the mortal plane, considering the amount we don't know about its origins. That's why I still obsessively look up news about Ardman in case there was another fire, and why I can't stop searching for who could have possibly died in that warehouse. All in all, I hope Ardman never has another fire like the fire of 2005.