Waiting for a ghost.
By Chris Oxley.
All last night, I sat up waiting to meet the ghost of Penny Lane. But he didn’t keep the appointment. With floorboards for a bed and a plank of wood for a pillow, I stayed awake hoping to solve the mystery of the strange sounds in Penny Lane, which have kept a family awake night after night. The sounds heard by the Bruce family next door to a printing shop inPenny Lane are of heavy footsteps and creaking floorboards – especially on Fridays, Saturday and Mondays. Although the spirit of Penny Lane didn’t oblige me with a personal visit, eight people swear they heard noises last night.
For the first half of the night, I was one of 11 people sitting and talking about the weird ways of spirits, in the Bruce’s front room – which is separated by a thin wall from the printing shop. After midnight, strange things started happening – or so eight people among us claimed. They said they heard eerie noises coming from the room next door. The final count was: Several faint footsteps, two or three creaking boards, one whirring sound, one bump, and two female voices.
Was there any reason for a spirit to haunt this house? Had death come unexpectedly early to a previous occupier? “Not that I know of,” said Mr John Emberton, who lived in the now empty rooms some seven months ago. “I heard nothing then, although I have heard the noises since. My wife reckoned she heard some sounds while we were living there, but that was probably me sneaking in late at night.”
I went alone into the empty shop, armed with a torch, a piece of cotton and a tin of French chalk. I stuck the cotton across the door and scattered the powder on the floor. If it wasn’t a ghost making the phantom sounds then the culprit would break the cotton or leave a footprint in the powder. I waited. What was that? Voices? Keep calm. Just another car-load of people coming to visit the new tourist attraction in Penny Lane.
Minutes ticked by. The slightest sound or creak sent cold shivers down my already cold back. It’s difficult being a cynical journalist in the early hours of the morning when you are alone in a house believed to be haunted.
Then there was the steady tapping sounds just behind my head. I looked round… relief. It was just rainwater dripping from the roof on to the window. There I stayed until the uncertain light of early morning roused me and I left the house cold, tired – and still wondering.
Liverpool Echo, 28th November 1970.
That Penny Lane ghost is quite a character.
The mysterious sounds of ghostly footsteps are still being heard in a printing shop in Penny Lane. The ghost has been less busy recently, but not the owners of the printing business – Mr Ken Shackman and Mr John Hampton. They have been sifting through the records of the house, trying to discover if there was any previous history of ghostly tricks. What they have found is almost as disturbing as the mysterious sounds themselves. It seems that in 1930, a family left a next door house after being scared by the noises of footsteps. And in 1945, another family in the same house heard strange voices and bumping noises, although the shop next door was empty, after being slightly damaged by bombing.
The ghost has brought memories flooding back to old Penny Lane residents. Mr Shackman and Mr Hampton have received many telephone calls and letters telling of strange noises in the area. One woman wrote from Rotherham, Yorkshire, to say she heard the loud tread of feet on stony steps while living in an old manor house which used to be in the Penny Lane area, soon after the first world war. She wrote to say that with her four sisters, she was startled one night when a young maiden, combing her long, golden locks, suddenly appeared in their bedroom.
Meanwhile, Mr Hampton and Mr Shackman have continued their search for the strange sounds. One night, they even sat up next door, and recorded the ghostly sounds on a tape recorder. Said Mr Hampton: “We now have a tape recording of the shuffling and banging noises. It’s enough to send a shiver down anybody’s back.”
Liverpool Echo, 1st January 1971.
Haunted Liverpool.
Halloween is here again. Witches and pumpkins, tricks and treats. And of course – ghosts. According to the Guinness Book of Records, Britain has more ghosts per square mile than any other country in the world, and it seems as if every twon and hamlet in the UK has its fair share of phantoms. And Liverpool is no exception.
One of the best documented cases of ghostly goings-on occurred in a printing shop at number 44 Penny Lane in January 1971. Ken Shackman and John Hampton, the owners of the shop, had just locked up the premises for the night, when there was an outbreak of poltergeist activity in the room above. The next morning, neighbours complained to Messrs Shackman and Hampton about the unreasonable racket and sounds of someone walking heavily in the room above the shop. This baffled the owners of number 44, as nobody had been on the premises that night. Shackman and Hampton later received more complaints about the strange nocturnal cacophony, and suspecting that a poltergeist could be the culprit, they decided to research the history of number 44. What they unearthed sent a shudder down their spines. Since 1930, many of the previous occupants at numbers 42 and 46 Penny Lane had left after hearing “loud walking and shuffling noises” emanating from the room above number 44.
A journalist from the Echo wrote a number of articles about the Penny Lane Poltergeist, and the owners of the haunted printing shop were inundated with letters and phone calls from ex-Penny Lane residents who had also heard the spook. A couple of months after the outbreak, the ghostly noises diminished, then ceased. Recently, number 44 became the office of a construction firm, but after a couple of months the firm moved out…
Liverpool Echo, 31st October 1990.