From Groundsman to Ghost Hunter: Meet Non-League football's longest-serving manager
Meet Brent Peters, the longest-serving manager in non-league football.
At 69, Peters has spent almost three decades in charge of Bacup Borough FC, having first taken the reins in 1997.
To put that remarkable longevity into perspective, Chelsea have appointed 29 managers since 1997, while Watford have gone through an astonishing 35 managerial spells during the same period.
Bacup Borough, who compete in the North West Counties League Division One North (Step 6 of the non-league pyramid), became Peters' home following spells as a youth coach and chief scout at Bury, director of football at Accrington Stanley and assistant manager at Doncaster Rovers.
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During his time at Bacup, Peters has done far more than simply pick the starting XI. From driving the team bus to carrying out repairs and maintaining the pitch, he has taken on virtually every role imaginable, earning himself the nickname 'Mr Non-League'.
Despite spending almost 29 years at the helm, Peters has overseen just one promotion, guiding Bacup from the North West Counties League Division Two to Division One in the 2002/03 season.
However, his contribution to the club extends far beyond results on the pitch. In fact, without Peters, Bacup Borough might not even exist today.
Brent Peters saved Bacup Borough from the brink of extinction.
At the end of his first season in charge, the club was drowning in debt and struggling to raise the funds needed to compete in the following campaign. With expulsion from the league looming, Peters stepped in and paid off part of the debt himself.
His financial intervention helped secure Bacup's immediate future and strengthened a bond with the club that remains unbroken almost three decades later.
Unsurprisingly, Peters has accumulated his fair share of extraordinary stories during his lengthy spell in charge. But perhaps none is more bizarre than the time he called in paranormal investigators after becoming convinced something supernatural was happening at the club.
Speaking on the non-league podcast I Had Trials Once, Peters recalled a series of unexplained incidents that began after the club changed its name from Bacup Borough to Bacup and Rossendale Borough.
"All of a sudden, it was just weird, there were things happening that I couldn't explain," he said.
Among the strange occurrences were light bulbs inexplicably exploding in the changing rooms, mysterious telephone calls being made from an empty clubhouse in the middle of the night and a former Manchester City youngster seemingly freezing in front of goal.
"We had a lad called Ramy Raymond. He'd been at Man City," Peters explained. "One game, he's going through on goal and all of a sudden, in a split second he's stopped.
"It's like he can't lift his foot back to connect with the ball. It was like when you're pulling a Subbuteo player's leg and the ball just trickled towards the keeper."
Brent Peters hired paranormal investigators after numerous incidents
Things became even stranger when Peters discovered that the club's telephone appeared to be making calls in the early hours of the morning, despite nobody being inside the building.
"The Bacup Borough phone was ringing a random number in Ramsbottom at three o'clock every morning, and nobody was in the building," he recalled.
When pressed on whether someone could have been responsible, Peters was adamant: "It's impossible. There's nobody in the building."
With no obvious explanation for the increasingly bizarre incidents, Peters decided to take matters into his own hands by calling in paranormal investigators.
"I got some paranormal investigators in," he explained.
"They asked me what I'd changed, they said you've changed something. The spirits aren't happy.
"We walked over to the changing room and they put this machine on the physio bed. When you ask it a question, it flicks right for yes and left for no. They asked the spirit do you know Brent? And the machine flicks right.
"Next thing, it was like somebody put a fan on my arm and I could feel a draft up as though something was wandering past."
Peters then decided to ask the supposed spirit whether it approved of the club's decision to change its name from Bacup Borough to Bacup and Rossendale Borough.
According to Peters, the machine swung to the left, indicating that the answer was no.
What happened next was even more extraordinary.
Peters claimed the device "screeched like nothing else and leapt off the bed, before the batteries fell out of it."
He later suggested the strange activity could have been connected to spiritualists who had previously used the club's facilities.
And while Peters maintains that he doesn't believe in ghosts, the experience was apparently enough to convince him to restore the club's original name.
After almost three decades of managing Bacup Borough, Peters has experienced just about everything non-league football can throw at him. Even, it seems, a possible encounter with the supernatural.
Topics: Football
Jack Kenmare
