Many of the shops in the city centre – and quite a few in the suburbs – have their resident ghosts. Marks and Spencers on Church Street is housed in a building that was once the Compton Hotel (pictured in the Tankard painting above on the left hand side of the street), built on the site of Compton House, a popular retail store run by Messrs Jeffrey which boasted of being able to provide everything the shopper needed ‘from the cradle to the grave.’ Colossal in its proportions, Compton House was staffed by hundred of men and women, many of them living on the premises. At 10pm on the Friday night of 1st December 1865, two policemen on their beat in Tarleton Street noticed smoke issuing from the basement of Compton House, which was the outfitting department. Within twenty minutes, a steam-powered fire-engine and a body of firemen were promptly despatched from the Fire and Police Station at Hatton Garden. The live-in staff members were rescued by the firemen, but despite the gallons of water hosed into the flames, the inflammable materials in the store were nigh on impossible to extinguish, and Compton House, which had begun life as a modest drapers in 1832 and grown to unimagined proportions, was gutted. How did the fire start? Well, it was started by one Thomas Henry Sweeting, a 20-year-old respectably-connected apprentice of Compton House who had been present in the store on the night of the blaze. He had gone into the basement shortly before 10pm that evening and lit a wax taper which he threw among inflammable goods. He then went upstairs to have his supper. He saw smoke gathering on the premises within minutes and cried ‘The house is on fire – make haste for your lives!’
Sweeting said he had no animosity against his employers, and could not provide the police with his motive for destroying Liverpool’s greatest store. ‘I must have been mad at the time,’ he later told the magistrate at the police court. He seemed unbalanced, and had also stolen seventy-four pounds’ worth of merchandise from the temporary store his employers had set up at Newington. Sweeting was charged with having unlawfully and maliciously set fire to Compton House, causing damage to goods and property valued in excess of two-hundred thousand pounds. Sweeting was also charged with larceny, and duly committed for trial. He was found guilty, and sentenced to twelve years’ penal servitude. Messrs Jeffrey never recovered from the actions of the madman Sweeting, and Compton House, once a magnificent grand emporium of trade, remained a charred eyesore on Church Street. Phoenix-like, from that charred rectangle of scorched ground on Church Street, there arose, on 4 January 1875, the Compton Hotel. It occupied the block between Basnett Street and Tarleton Street, and expanded in size in the 1880s. By 1926, ‘the Compton’ had closed, and from around 1930, Marks and Spencer moved into a small part of the building, and, of course, this phenomenally successful business went on to expand until they occupied the entire former hotel.
It’s not unusual for a building as old as the one that was once the Compton Hotel to be haunted by a few ghosts, although some of them are still unidentified. The upper floors of Marks and Spencer are allegedly haunted by a ghost nicknamed ‘Lulu’ who, from her attire, dates back to the 1930s. For some peculiar reason she often materialises holding a soda siphon and has even squirted people with it before vanishing. This ghost has never been explained and as far as I know, no medium has attempted to contact her.
Another entity who occasionally haunts the building may be the ghost of Billy McMullen, a 22-year-old junior porter who suffered a tragic violent death at the Compton Hotel in March 1877. McMullen was messing about in the hotel’s kitchen lift, which was little more than a suspended cage used for transporting coal from the cellar to the kitchen ovens on the fourth floor, when tragedy struck. Machinery from the hotel laundry was put in the lift to be taken downstairs, and as this took place, a porter named Daley said he wanted to ride the lift down, even though it was carrying heavy machinery. Billy McMullen asked if he could ride the lift down as well, and the lift-operator, an engineer named Duff, said he couldn’t, but McMullen jumped in the lift and refused to get out. The porters then asked if they could operate the lift brake, and Duff said they couldn’t, but one of them did. The lift plummeted sixty feet and Duff clung on to the ropes. One of the heavy iron cog wheels at the top of the shaft was damaged by the lift’s sudden descent, and it fell, smashing McMullen’s head in. He died instantly. There was a coroner’s inquest and the jury returned a verdict of “accidental death”.
Not long afterwards, the ghost of Billy McMullen was seen by many members of staff at the hotel, as well as several guests. A chef had the eerie feeling of being watched one evening, and when he turned around, he saw the solid-looking ghost of the deceased junior porter, standing in a shadowy corner of the kitchen, gazing at him with a blank expression. The apparition’s hair was slicked with blood. The chef fled from the kitchen, and refused to return until his workplace was blessed by a priest. The Compton Hotel’s owner, Mr Russell, consented to the chef’s wishes, and brought in a Catholic priest to bless the kitchen. The blessing - carried out in strict secrecy so as not to alarm the staff outside the kitchen - seemed to do the trick – at least for a short while. A fortnight later, McMullen’s ghost appeared to Mr Russell, materialising at the foot of his bed. When Russell asked, ‘Is that you Billy?’ the phantom melted away into the darkness. A tall figure that looks almost as if it is made from dark vapour has been seen in the basement of the store, and seems rather harmless. The smell of burning sometimes accompanies the apparition, and it makes me wonder if this entity if the ghost of Thomas Henry Sweeting, the youth I told you about earlier. He set fire to Compton House by leaving a naked flame in the basement, and he was described as being rather tall.
Parker Street, which branches from Church Street to Clayton Square, also has its fair share of ghosts, and has been the scene of some strange goings-on over the years. In February 1830, a tobacconist, confectioners and several other shops on Parker Street were ‘robbed’ by burglars who could enter and leave the premises without breaking entry or being seen by anyone even on evenings when the street was being patrolled by a night-watchman. Who was raiding the cake shop, tobacconist and the fruiter? Why it was a pack of rats with above-average intelligence. They started in the tobacconists, where they nibbled minute holes in the seal-skin pouches of tobacco and carefully transported it to their nests. In the confectioners one large rat lay on its back, with its four claws clinging to a type of fairy cake. Another rat pulled this fellow rodent by the tail through a hole in the skirting board gnawed to a specific diameter to give access to the nest. In the end, a stick of liquorice – called “Spanish juice” in those days, was found protruding from a hole in the floor of one shop, and that provided a clue as to the real identity of the mysterious thieves. Poison was put down but the rats were too clever to fall for that, and seemed to have simply moved on to some other area.
If you walk into Parker Street from Church Street, look at the first building on your right (pictured above). The upper parts of this building, which date from 1880, are beautifully designed, with bow windows and ornate carvings. An ashen female head was often seen peering out the top window on the right, and was seen regularly up until the 1990s. Just whose ghost is peering out that window is a mystery, but I know a person who laid in wait for that ghost many years ago with a telephoto-lens camera, and he said the face was pretty but the eyes were coal-black and lifeless. the patient ghost-hunter tried to take a picture but only captured a blur. On that same side of Parker Street, there was once a colourful store called Sexy Rexy. At this clothing shop around 1981, a 17-year-old girl named Becky bought a denim shirt as a birthday gift for her brother. As she was paying for the item, she became aware of a young man of around 20 to 22 years of age, gazing at her from outside the shop. He wore an off-white jacket with light brown corduroys. He was blond, and Becky thought he bore a resemblance to Martin Fry, lead singer of the band ABC, which was enjoying popularity at that time. Becky left the shop and walked to Lewis’s, and the blonde young man followed her every step of the way. He stalked her in Lewis’s, and Becky became so unnerved by his antics, she soon left Lewis’s and hurried across Renshaw Street to the bus stop. She hoped to catch the next bus to her home on Bagot Street off Smithdown Road. As luck would have it, the bus arrived, and Becky was only too glad to get on it. She went upstairs and looked out the window at the weird stalker, and he was standing outside one of the doorways of Lewis’s, looking up at her. About two months after that Becky went to Sexy Rexy’s store again, this time to buy her dad a pair of jeans for Father’s Day. To her utter surprise, the Martin Fry lookalike appeared again outside of the shop. On this occasion, it was a bright sunny afternoon, and Becky felt confident enough to confront him, but he turned around and seemed to literally disappear into the milling crowds. A week later, on a Saturday morning, Becky was with her mother in the C&A store in Church Street, and who should she see but the same man she’d seen on the previous two occasions outside Sexy Rexy’s. She realised he was wearing the very same attire – the off-white jacket and light brown corduroy trousers. She tried to point him out to her mother, but Beck’s mum was too engrossed in finding a bargain to pay any attention. The blond-haired stalker circled Becky and then once again seemed to vanish into the crowds of weekend shoppers. Weeks went by, and Becky visited town with her father to do some shopping. Becky’s dad went to talk with one of his old friends, who had a stall at the market that once existed on Church Street, and Becky, tiring of the boring conversation her dad was having with his mate, walked towards Owen Owen on Clayton Square. She almost bumped into the blond man, and drew back startled. Seeing him close up, his blue eyes seemed to be encircled with redness, almost like liquid blood. The stranger backed away, in the direction of Church Street, and Becky stood there, thinking about the state of his eyes. She felt ill.
‘Hey lass!’ said a rough voice behind Becky.
She turned, startled. There was a scruffily-dressed man in a parka, wearing a greasy pair of faded jeans and badly scuffed trainers. On the floor next to the beggar was a small cardboard box with pennies and ten pence pieces in it.
‘Can you see him?’ the beggar asked, nodding his bearded face in the direction of Church Street.
‘What?’ Becky asked, and looked back towards Church Street, but the man with the grotesque eyes had gone.
‘That fellah, goldilocks, who you just saw –‘the beggar said, and gave a chesty cough.
‘What about him?’ asked Becky.
‘He’s a ghost!’ exclaimed the vagrant cheerfully and then thanked a passer by for the few shillings she dropped in his box.
The beggar told Becky that the man she had a knack of bumping into was dead. He had suffered some time of brain haemorrhage outside of Sexy Rexy’s about a year back, and not long after, had started hanging around the place of his death. ‘I see a lot of them,’ said the beggar, chillingly. ‘They get confused sometimes and can’t accept that they’re just spirits now you see.’ Then he added something that turned Becky’s blood ice cold on this warm sunny day. ‘He likes you, especially because you can see him, like.’
Becky went straight to her dad and told him she was going home. She wouldn’t say why because she knew he’d think she was crazy, but she implored him to go home. Her father said he had things to get in town and told her to ‘behave’. He asked her repeatedly what the matter was, and in the end, Becky ran off to Renshaw Street and caught the bus home. She happened to glance back as her bus travelled up Renshaw Street, and suddenly noticed the familiar figure standing outside Lewis’s – it was him. He was waving to her. This time she saw him slowly fade away into nothingness, and Becky experienced mixed feelings of fear and sympathy for the troubled ghost. She avoided the city centre for a long time, and when she did eventually return to Church Street, she was very edgy, but to date she hasn’t seen her admirer from beyond.
The old Owen Owen building which now houses Tesco Metro (pictured above) has quite a supernatural reputation. It opened in 1925 and was originally intended to be a hotel, but Owen Owen used it as one of their most famous stores. A woman who wishes to remain anonymous, who worked at Owen Owen in the 1970s, once saw a tall distinguished-looking man in typical Victorian attire as she worked in an upstairs room. He wore a high white collar, waistcoat, frock-coat and long striped trousers. He was examining a fob watch, and when the witness noticed this outdated man, she gasped in surprise, and he raised his heavy-lidded eyes from the pocket watch and squinted at her in a haughty way. The witness ran out of the room and told another woman who worked in the store. They both returned to the haunted room and peeped in. The man was still there, looking out of a window with his back to the startled women. The women tip-toed away to inform another employee of the supernatural visitor, but when the women and a man reached the room, the figure was nowhere to be seen, but a sweet smell was evident. On another occasion in the Owen Owen store, a young man serving in one of the departments saw and felt a hand on his left shoulder, but when he turned, that hand had no arm or body attached, and the man yelped. A customer he was serving also saw the hand, and watched as it slid off the young man’s shoulder and vanished. A woman with mediumistic powers once visited the Owen Owen store after it had closed, and claimed there were at least seven spirits from different eras at large there. They had become something of a ghostly family over the years. According to the psychic, one of the characters was an old barber, and another was a clerk of some sort, but there were also two women, and it seemed one of these females had met a violent death at the store a long time ago. A security guard who later worked at the building when it was being refurbished prior to occupation by another firm, soon discovered the place was haunted when he did his rounds. On one occasion the security officer found a strange pair of scissors lying on the floor and when he examined them they looked blackened and quite old. The guard put them in his rucksack, but the next morning when he reached home, the scissors were nowhere to be found. The guard and a few of his workmates used a the Ouija (in the form of an upturned glass and cut out letters) at the haunted building one night, and an apparently nonsensical word came through. GORSUCH. The guards laughed at the word. They didn’t know that in the 19th century, a well-known and respected barber named John Gorsuch had his premises on Parker Street. Wouldn’t that make some sense of the scissors which appeared in the building?
In 1880s there was a millinery run by a Mademoiselle De Moysey at the location where the health and beauty store Superdrug now stands, and there was a suicide at the millinery around 1883 when a jilted youth overdosed on laudanum. So as not to inconvenience the clientele, the youth’s body was smuggled out of the store in a canvas bag and dumped at the hospital on Pembroke Place. Had he received urgent medical attention, the young man might have been saved, but instead was left to die. Years later, in the 1930s, a dance school moved into rooms over a shop where Superdrug is today. In the 1990s, there were reports of ghostly silhouettes seen in the windows of the building where the dance school used to be. A shopkeeper who viewed the interior of the building one afternoon with a friend saw a man and woman dancing in one of the dusty old rooms. The man had oily slicked back hair and wore a black hammer-tailed tuxedo-styled jacket and black trousers. The woman had a short bob of blonde hair and wore a knee-length pink dress of velvet and chiffon. The shopkeeper called his friend to the doorway and pointed at the young dancing couple. Seconds later the couple were gone.