‘Ghost’ walks when girls make wreaths.
Blyth flower shop is ‘haunted’.
The first job every morning for two Blyth shop girls who work in a main street florist’s is the making-up of wreaths. And as soon as they start, the girls say, ghostly footsteps begin a weird march overhead. “At times, the footsteps are so loud and distinct it nearly frightens us to death,” said Mrs Norma Harris. Her friend, 19-year-old Miss June Cook, is no believer in ghosts, but she, too, has heard footsteps as the first wreaths of the day are made up. “Every time we hear the footsteps we rush upstairs into the storeroom to see what it is, but it’s always the same – empty and not a sign of life anywhere,” she told me. “The footsteps sound as though a man is walking across the floor with heavy shoes on.”
But this is not the only unaccountable happening which has set the girls on edge. One morning Mrs Harris tried to write with a fountain pen lying on the counter. It failed, so she bgan preparing some flowers ready for the display window. She tells her own story: “I had left the pen on the counter, walked round to the display stands, and no sooner had I got started with the flowers than the pen just flew off and clattered into the vases near my feet. The pen moved at least five feet through the air, and there was nobody else in the shop at the time,” she added.
None of the other girls in the shop has ever heard or seen anything unusual. “They say we are imagining it all, but we will wait and see what the result is when it happens to them,” said Mrs Harris.
A few weeks ago Peter, the pub-crawling poltergeist, created a stir among local public-houses with his weird “throwing tantrums” and mysterious piano playing antics. “We laughed at the story then, but we are not so sure now,” said the girls.
Sunday Sun (Newcastle), 23rd September 1962.