Ghostly happenings at Irvine boutique.
If you mention spirits to Frances Moss and Aileen Park it won’t be the kind you find in local lounge bars. For both these ladies have been plagued by a ghost since opening the clothes boutique “Zoo” in Irvine High Street. And it’s not just the boutique owners who have had eerie experiences. The former manager of the Co-op shoe department admited he too heard things going bump in the night.
Frances Moss said: “I first noticed there was something wrong when I was working in the basement. I heard the floor creaking as if someone was walking upstairs but when I went to check there was no-one there. After that I heard the footsteps another couple of times and thought nothing of it. It was shortly after that the man who was the manager of the shoe shop before we moved here said he had heard things and had found stock moved. After the footsteps there were other incidents. We used to leave a big heavy door open so that the heat could circulate round the shop and when we arrive din the morning the door would be firmly closed. There is no way a draught could have moved it. The same happened with the heating. We would set it at low and in the morning it had been moved to high and the shop was roasting.”
The fact that there is something strange about the shop was confirmed by Mr John McIntyre of Tollerton Drive, now retired after 26 years as footwear manager for the Co-op. He said: “I never ever saw anything but things happened which I cannot explain. I first heard the footsteps when the basement was converted into an office. I was working late one night and definitely heard footsteps go from the rear of the shop to the front. When I investigated there was nothing there and there was no-one in the shop. On another occasion when I was searching the shop after hearing the steps I found a shoe which had been on a display lying on the shop floor. There was no way the shoe could have fallen off the display and there was no-one in the shop to remove it. Other times we would go in to work and find odd shoes lying on the floor with no explanation of how they got there.”
The ghostly happenings don’t scare Frances Moss in the slightest. “I’ve had things like happen to me before, ” she explained. “In my own house I’ve seen electric flexes swing back and forward. Lights which were supposed to have been off were turned on and little things have gone missing and turned up in strange places. Strange things have even happened when I’ve stayed at Aileen’s house. There are reasons, I think, to explain some of these things but not what has happened in the shop.”
Irvine Herald, 17th February 1984.