16

IN WHICH… I TAKE ON A HAUNTED LOOK

On Tuesday 21 November 2017, I heard my first ever ghost story about a record shop. I’ve always been fascinated by the paranormal. I even subscribe to Fortean Times magazine, which concerns itself purely with unusual and incredible events.

I was in Julian and Helen’s Second Scene which I’ve already mentioned. But what I haven’t mentioned is that the building is haunted. I was standing in the upstairs room where the events occurred, having been invited to look at the massive store of albums Julian kept there. From neatly filed multiple copies of ‘middle-of-the-road’ discs by the likes of Perry Como and such crooners, to massed bundles of Beatles’ White Albums, almost certainly filed in descending order of cover number, from classical desirables to jazz rarities. The wall-to-wall shelving was clearly just a few singles away from buckling under the strain of the huge weight.

Record shops, by their very nature, are full of the ghosts of deceased artist(e)s responsible for the music contained in the album grooves. They are reborn every time someone picks up, plays or discusses one of their records. They are all around you as you go through the shelves and racks. Julian was bemoaning the gradual diminution of available incoming stock, equating the downturn with the fact that there were now, he believed, ‘over one million records being offered for sale at any time on eBay alone.’ He was taking comfort that he had already reaped the harvest of recent years and thus had sufficient stocks of ever in-demand ‘classics’ from the likes of Zeppelin, Stones, Queen, Bowie and The Beatles, that he had once thought might be tricky to shift, but which now seemed to be the purchases of choice of youngsters introducing themselves to vinyl delights.

He’d invited me up to look at an item he had acquired – an original 1960s green dartboard bearing the name and image of The Beatles – together, importantly, as they completed the set, with a number of matching green darts which, he told me, had impressed London’s respected Bonhams auction house to the tune of four figures when he’d sought a valuation.

‘They said they’d occasionally seen the boards before – but never with the original darts. I could sell them tomorrow for a small fortune, but I quite enjoy impressing Beatles’ collectors who think they’ve seen everything there is, when I show them this set. One woman who came in looking for Beatles LPs was so excited that she insisted on having her photograph taken with them!’

As we chatted on, I mentioned to Julian that I had put some of my records, books and other memorabilia into a forthcoming auction and delved into my pocket to show him the catalogue, only to bring out by mistake my latest copy of the earlier mentioned Fortean Times. When Julian saw the magazine, he pointed to it and told me: ‘This place was the subject of a letter in that magazine some years ago – and what happened took place right where you’re standing now.’

I shifted slightly and looked around.

‘It happened when we were actually living upstairs above the shop. This was our living room, packed with records of course, and over there (pointing to a room whose door in the corner of the room was ajar) was our bedroom. I was in here, rather like today, showing off records to a friend, when there was a really loud, prolonged noise out of nowhere, which neither of us could account for. It definitely wasn’t traffic noise – we are bang on a busy road here, so we hear that all the time – and it wasn’t an aeroplane flying overhead. You recognise these sounds – it was neither. But it was so loud that it stopped us in our tracks, and I can only explain it by saying it was as though time had stood still – eventually, as things returned to normal, we looked at each other and could only ask, “What was that all about?”’

This hadn’t been the first such incident for Julian, though. ‘Helen and I were in bed one night when we both saw a green glow in one corner of the room where we had no light or lamp. There was nowhere it could be coming from. It spooked the pair of us. We just dived under the covers and didn’t come out until morning.’ There were more incidents, and Julian remembered that the previous occupant of the house had vacated the premises at very short notice, leaving behind personal possessions including a ouija board and other ephemera associated with contacting the dead.

Incredibly enough, I was soon to hear about another haunted record shop, which seems to exhibit virtually every ghostly trope in a horror author’s armoury. Angela Collings started selling records ‘or as we now seem to have to call it “vinyl”’ over 30 years ago:

‘I did a car boot sale to raise funds as a poor student and sold my Clash, Buzzcocks, Pistols collection. Something I instantly regretted. When I was later starting as an antique dealer I remembered how well records had sold and had a box at the front of the stall. Gradually they took over and I became a record/CD dealer. I quickly graduated to owning two shops in Nuneaton called Entertainment Exchange with 80,000 records in stock.

‘We held the, er, record of being the only record store ever to have an armed robbery. They raided the tills and safe, but also stole from the wall an American Beatles Christmas fan club LP. I often wonder if it was done just for that.

‘Record collectors are a strange bunch. I had the man who came in every day to sniff the vinyl. He never bought anything – he was addicted to the smell of new vinyl. The man who had been looking for a certain single for years. When I found it for him, he cried and said: ‘What am I going to do now?’ There was the man who came in once a week to play “The Ripper” by Judas Priest – and then left. And the Japanese record dealer who assumed my male manager owned the shop – I always made him tea and brought him his McDonald’s – and let him think it.’

Angela now had two stores in Nuneaton:

‘For nearly 20 years we were trading there as Entertainment Exchange, which myself and partner Dawn opened in 1994, and became the biggest music/gaming/film collectors’ store in the West Midlands. They were housed in two buildings next door to each other. 60 Queens Road focused on the video games and movies, whilst 62 was the music and vinyl store. I’ve been incredibly lucky, I always seem to turn up good collections. The shop was dripping with rarities.’

But it contained some rarities not even the most dedicated collector wanted to discover. Here’s Angela’s haunting story:

‘Both buildings were historic and atmospheric. 62, the music store, was mainly my responsibility. Some of the things I experienced here may seem to be the stuff of the movies or nightmares. Dawn and I made a success of Number 60, and expanded into 62 to turn it into a two-floor music store. We were due to open on a Monday so the Sunday before I spent upstairs in the shop pricing vinyl and laying out displays. Dawn dropped me off, locking me in, and promising to pick me up in four hours. I set to getting my store ready. The vinyl was mainly based on the second floor. I had boxes of new stuff I wanted to price. Off I went up the stairs with the company of a radio tuned to the chart show.

‘I became engrossed in pricing. Suddenly, totally caught up in putting LPs in racks, I saw something in the corner of my eye near the old office. I caught the image of a small, dumpy woman dressed in black with dark hair up in a bun. I turned my head straight to the store room door and the image vanished. Absolutely shocked, I had seen something I could not explain and I had to stay locked in that building for another three hours in a state of suspended panic. The only thing that kept me sane was the radio. I refused to look up towards the store room again. When I heard Dawn knocking I switched the radio off and ran downstairs.

‘I knew I would have to keep this to myself. We employed a lot of young staff, who I was worried could be quite impressionable. I did not want to tell Dawn because I knew she was more disturbed by anything supernatural than I was. I started to notice other weird things occurring – very mild at first. I would put items down and within minutes of turning back to pick them up they would not be in the same place. I noticed a smell in the mornings when I would open up, like old-fashioned pipe tobacco mixed with furniture polish. It would dissipate quickly but then sometimes appear again.

‘Out of the corner of my eye I would occasionally catch the shape of somebody or something, turn my head quickly and there would be nobody, nothing there. This got to be extremely annoying and frequent. About three months after my first experience on that scary Sunday, I was travelling home in the car with Dawn when she suddenly asked me:

‘“Have you ever experienced anything odd in the music shop?”

‘“What do you mean by odd?”

‘“Creepy, unexplained, ghostly?”

‘There was no point in lying any more: “Tell me what you saw first before I say anything.”

‘Dawn told me that when painting the floorboards of the shop upstairs before it opened, she had seen in the very same place as I had, an image of a woman matching the same description as I had seen. I was both shocked and relieved. This verified what I had seen. I told her of my experience and from that point we swore to share anything that happened with each other, but not with the staff.

‘One Friday night I was the last person out of the shop and made sure I had tidied a CD rack before I exited. I was first to enter the shop on Saturday morning – the rack was now half empty with the CDs thrown around the shop.

‘Bit by bit the staff started to take me into their confidence and tell me about the things they had experienced. Many had encountered the figure in their peripheral vision, also noises were occurring upstairs. We heard footsteps on the upper floor after the shop was closed and lots of noise coming from the store room area.

‘“Robert” came to work for me (I have changed his name) eventually staying for nearly 15 years and becoming the overall manager of both stores. It was now widely discussed by staff that there was something extremely strange going on at 62 Queens Road. Robert would have no truck with this. He laughed when anybody mentioned an odd happening, proclaiming himself an atheist and non-believer in anything that did not have a rational explanation. That did not last long.

‘It started with Robert feeling somebody who was invisible push past him on one side of his body and then the other. Then he started to get the shape in his peripheral vision. It seemed to focus on him until one day Robert came down the stairs himself as white as a ghost. He told me he had seen an apparition of a male at the end of the upstairs floor that seemed to shimmer then disappear.

‘The strange events increased almost at a daily rate. We had a top alarm system installed but it was continually going off at night and we had to drive back to the shop. Each time the panel would indicate that something upstairs had triggered the alarm. The most dramatic of these false alarms was on a New Year’s Eve. I had not had a drop to drink. I started to join in the countdown to the New Year on the TV. At three seconds to midnight the home telephone rang: “Hello, Miss Collings, this is Warwickshire Police the alarm has gone off at your premises.” We drove to the store. There was no reason for the alarm to have been triggered. It was something upstairs that had caused it. We received a warning letter from the police that our alarm was going to be unmonitored if this continued.

‘Once I was working late with three other staff members, when we heard the sound of heavy running footsteps coming from upstairs. It sounded like about five or six people. We all froze. Rapidly running out of courage, I sent my staff up those stairs first. There was nobody there.

‘I was the first up the stairs one morning on to the record floor and there on the record player was a 1970s photograph of a young girl’s first Holy Communion. She had a bouquet of roses clutched to her that looked almost blood-like. 62 Queens Road was at one time a photography shop. We discovered the female figure that Dawn and I had both seen fitted the description of the lady who managed the shop for many years. What of the male figure Robert had seen? One morning I mounted the stairs up to the top floor. There in front of me, five years after Robert’s experience, was the figure of a late-middle-aged man. This shimmering image disappeared before my eyes. I went downstairs, told Robert and we both laughed about it.

‘Staff would continually come to me with stories. Some nearly 20 years after they left. I had a lot of very cool young people work in the shop. Teresa changed her hair on a daily basis. One day a pink Mohican, then a green skinhead. She told me one day that she had been eating her lunch in the staff kitchen when suddenly a man approached and stared right at her, very close up, looking in particular at her hair. Then he vanished. Not long after, Teresa left.

‘A photographer for the local paper, a guy in his late fifties, once asked me, “Have you ever experienced anything strange in 62?” He told me he had learnt his craft at 62 when it was a photography shop and even then it had been haunted. Staff had refused to work after 6pm as they felt something was trying to get them out of the shop. He thought the answer lay in the archives of the Nuneaton Tribune. The shop was bombed in World War Two. Where the upstairs extension now was, there had been a shelter which received a direct hit and been obliterated.

‘I got used to the weird stuff over time. We never once tried to publicise it. Having a ghost was not going to increase our sales. As downloads became king, our business changed. Mail order and eBay became far more important. This eventually meant that upstairs at Queens Road became a mail order floor. I was upstairs on the computers, listing. This could mean being locked in the shop until ten at night, making sure all the addresses were printed and all loose ends tied up. Often the metal shutters would be pulled down at the front and back for safety. Now, as I sat at the computer, the peripheral vision shapes escalated. The activity seemed to increase, the atmosphere seemed as thick as fog. I was looking for a particular address, and felt as if everything around me was shimmering. I had the feeling I could actually slip or disappear into another world or time-zone the air felt so thick. Dawn later told me she had experienced the same feeling upstairs. One night I was sitting working and playing an audio book set in the war. A siren sounded. The minute that siren sounded the atmosphere around me changed. I could hear in my ears, indistinguishable but very clear, whispering and the whispers became louder. I was terrified. I picked up my mobile and called Dawn: “Hurry up… just come and get me.”

‘I am not sure how I managed to tolerate a lot of what happened, other than we had to earn a certain amount of money so I just got my head down and carried on. 62 was on a lease. We finally handed the lease and the property back to the landlord. Things didn’t end there. We were still based next door and could see who occupied 62. The first tenants did not last long after telling us they found the shop incredibly creepy. The next tenants put a manager in the store. Adi was working and staying until late at night.

‘One day I asked him how he was. “Have you ever experienced anything strange in the shop?” I asked him. Suddenly, in what I can only describe as like something out of The Stepford Wives he turned to me and said. “There are six of them, they talk to me. Please don’t tell anyone, please. Do you miss them? You can see them again if you want. You can talk to them again.”

‘“No thank you,” I answered.

‘I was shocked. After half an hour I went to my car. Adi ran out to me looking very disturbed. “Please do not tell anybody about what I have told you. They are really angry, Angela, they do not actually like you.”

‘I had never told Adi my name.’

Having left Number 62 behind, Angela, now thankfully ghost-free, concentrates on local markets, trading as Turntable Records:

‘Since I’ve been back in the markets after selling my shop, and being in a new relationship back down south I’ve had some lovely stuff, including a 2000 LP blues collection. Which the man so wanted out of the house he put it all in the drive and left me with it in 90 degree heat. I was like a demon trying to get it out of the sun! I love being a record dealer. It’s like being on a permanent treasure hunt. Being a woman has its benefits. You gain a lot of trust when people are selling which I always repay by being fair.’

Not quite in the same ballpark as these shop hauntings, but spooky enough, was the occasion when, during the sudden explosion of rock group interest in the occult, I gave a positive review to the first Black Widow album, Sacrifice in 1970. This was the year in which Black Sabbath and The Ghost both issued debut discs with ‘spooky’ covers. I was on good terms with a couple of guys who had started up the Farx Club in the basement of a pub in Southall.

They put on a Black Widow gig. Their LP included such toe-tapping ditties as ‘Come to the Sabbat’, ‘Attack of the Demon’ and title track, ‘Sacrifice’. This was a time when ‘Carry On’ and ‘Hammer Horror’ films were popular, as were Dennis Wheatley’s black-magic themed books. I figured this was a gig not to be missed. I even invited along my girlfriend, Sheila. It was only a small room, and it could get pretty packed, with the obvious result that the temperature would soar.

Come the night, and Black Widow were in full flow. The joint was rocking, the heat was rising. ‘I conjure thee, appear, I raise thee mighty demon,’ roared vocalist Kip Trevor as they performed ‘In Ancient Days’. ‘Read the tales and spells that turned the whole world upside down – the Four of the Apocalypse on horseback ever wait,’ he warned wailingly in ‘The Way to Power’.

We’d taken up a front-of-stage position. The crowd was pushing forward, better to see the action, as the band called out to the dark side, playing ‘Come to the Sabbat’. Trevor threw himself wholeheartedly into character as guitars, keyboards, drums and brass pounded out the beat… ‘Who dares to help me raise the one, whose very name near stills my heart? ASTAROTH!... join me in my search for power, we’ll be as one within the hour… Come, come, come to the Sabbat. Come to the Sabbat… SATAN’S THERE!’

There we were, in a hot, sweaty press of bodies clustering as close to the stage action as possible, preparing to witness a human sacrifice… at which moment Sheila decided to faint clean away, and slump to the floor as dramatically as the victim of Satan, just inches away from her. As Sheila slowly crumpled to the ground – there was barely room to stand on your own two feet, let alone collapse – I realised she’d have to be dragged up, lifted as high as possible, and passed back over the shoulders and heads of the assembled multitude, otherwise there might be a real-life fatality stretched out on the stage.

In those days when micro-mini dresses were Sheila’s favourite mode of attire, this involved a slight loss of dignity, but she was eventually helped to safety, revived in the cold night air, and survived to tell the tale – unlike the band victim, who was duly dispatched to the arms of the anti-Christ.

It may have been the title, When You’re Dead, which caused me to give a record I was sent to review back in 1970 a little more attention than most of the run-of-the-mill releases by unknown bands. It was by The Ghost, on the obscure Gemini label LP, featuring a striking front cover image, showing the five-strong group superimposed, wraith-like, over and around an imposing gravestone in a misty atmosphere. Every track of the record, declares Carl Denker, writer of the sleeve notes ‘is immersed in ghosts’. This is a terrific record, with or without ghosts. It is very good rock, flirting with prog and psych, but with the standout element the soaring voice of Shirley Kent. I gave their debut single ‘When You’re Dead’ such a rave review in my column of 10 June 1970 that the record company used it as a press release to promote the forthcoming album.

When it comes to the ultimate ghostly records, Jason Leach should have the final word. John Hobson met musician and music producer Jason at a pub in Scarborough in 2007, several years after his mother’s death. They discussed taking recordings John had of his mum, Madge’s voice and somehow combining them and her ashes into a unique vinyl record, as a memento of her life. Jason turned this initially macabre idea into actuality, and thus, from death, his company And Vinyly was born (contact address: theundertaker@andvinyly.com). His first male subject was a French man, whose wife commissioned the job. Leach’s service steadily grew as his discs containing ashes and voice recordings of the deceased, began to attract attention.

Dead easy?

I don’t believe any of the record shops involved in Record Store Day are haunted… other than by those enticed to buy specially created ‘collectors’ items’ which rarely turn out to be other than cynical cash-ins.