The spirit in the wardrobe
When I worked in a haunted charity shop, some donations came with a spooky added extra...
As a charity shop warehouse manager, I often answered the phone to people offering to donate furniture.
But today’s call about a bedroom set was about to get eerie…
‘I need to get it out the house now,’ a woman panicked. ‘It’s haunted!’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll collect it today,’ I told her, intrigued.
Normally the lads who worked in the warehouse would go in the van to fetch items. But this time, I was so fascinated, I went along with them.
‘Thank goodness you’re here,’ the woman gasped when we arrived.
She told us there had been strange goings-on ever since she’d bought the 1950s walnut veneer wardrobe, cabinet and dressing table set. ‘I’ve seen the shadowy figure of a woman in the bedroom,’ she said. Then, as we began moving the furniture, I felt a sharp smack on the back of my head. The spirit had hit me!
Quickly, we took the spooky set back to the charity shop in Widnes, Cheshire. Within weeks, someone had bought it. Hopefully the ghost left its new owner alone!
My encounter with the grump didn’t surprise me because I’d been seeing ghosts since I was a kid.
When I was 10, I chatted to the spirit of a little boy in a graveyard and, a few years later, the spirit of a thin man dressed in black followed me home!
When Mum started reading books about famous spiritualist mediums such as Doris Stokes, I was desperate to attend a Spiritualist church to find out more. But it was in the days before the internet so I had no idea how to go about finding one.
I was 25 when I got the job in the charity shop warehouse. Set in a former cinema from the 1800s, it wasn’t just the items that came to us that could be spooky…
The building itself was haunted! Once I saw a man in a black coat and trilby hat disappearing through the doors of the old-fashioned lift.
In the charity shop, books would fly off the shelves. And staff would tell me certain donations felt weird. I knew they were sensing a spirit attachment.
One day I had a reading with a psychic, hoping to contact Dad. He came through, and there was something else…
‘You could do mediumship, too,’ the psychic told me
‘That’s all very well, but where is a Spiritualist church?’ I asked.
‘There’s one across the road,’ the psychic replied.
The church was just a five-minute walk from the shop. It had to be a sign, so I started going there, joining a development class and doing readings.
When I was made redundant later that year, one thing led to another and, by 2002, I was working as a medium full time.
That haunted second-hand shop led me to my destiny!