Footprints At Watsons

Immediately opposite The White Hart Hotel on Bailgate is Watson the Chemist. To the left of the shop entrance is another door leading to the second and third floors of the same building, which are occupied by "Watsons Face Place", a prestigious beauty salon. As well as exhibiting typical haunting phenomena, Watsons Face Place is, so far, unique in our experience in that it has what may well be ghostly footprints on some of its carpets.

The salon consists of several different rooms, all laid out with a variety of beauty therapy equipment. There is one particular room in which clients often mention that they do not like being left alone. This is where most of the strange marks are found. They consist of a series of parallel lines of differing lengths and the impression they immediately give is that of footprints. Imagine a shoe or sandell, perhaps of an ancient era? which has on the soles ridges, or perhaps lines of hobnails, going from side to side. The main sole of the shoe would have three or four ridges, the heel perhaps two. Imagine such a shoe had walked in mud or oil and then trodden on a pale coloured carpet. These are exactly the kind of marks which have appeared in the room.

The "footprints" appear so close to the walls that it would be impossible for anyone to leave them accidentally, as no one normally walks so close to a wall. They occur at several different angles, so that they would not appear to correspond to any regular feature which may be on the floor beneath the carpet - grippers, for example. The marks were first noticed some years ago, a year or so after the carpet was first put down. The marks became gradually more prominent until some while ago the carpet was cleaned in order to remove them. Months later however, they began to reappear and when we saw them were quite pronounced. We were told that they had in recent months begun to appear in the room opposite as well, for the first time.

We psychically probed the room and Jenny picked up an interesting event. She 'saw' the room as it was centuries ago, when it was a bedroom. A man was asleep in bed, his clothes draped over a chair. Another man crept stealthily into the room and began to go through the pockets of the clothing. The sleeper was disturbed and a heated fight broke out between the room's occupant and the thief. It resulted in one of the combatants crashing through the window and falling to his death on the street below, two floors down.

Could this be the owner of the footprints? The incident may at least explain the feeling of being watched, which some clients have reported in this room in modern times. Or could the marks on the carpet come from an even older inhabitant? In 1884 excavations below the building revealed remains of a Roman crematory furnace together with several jars containing funerial ashes.

What ever period the ghost dates from, it still seems to be very active today. The staff frequently hear footsteps along the top floor corridor, which leads from the room with the footprints, when nobody is up there. During recent redecoration work, a painter began by working Sundays, so as not to disturb the normal business of the place. When he heard the footsteps however, knowing he was alone in the building, he packed up and left; the work then had to be done during normal hours - when there were plenty of other people about for company!