When there's something strange...in the old arcade - who you gonna call?
Who - or what - was the mystery figure spotted lurking in the shadows after the ancient building was locked up for the night?
For years there have been unexplained noises and objects apparently moving by themselves in the dark.
But staff really got the jitters when they spotted a phantom customer on CCTV screens.
Arcade co-owner Hazel Browne, was locking up for the night with managers Rita Keeble and Alex Rogers
Mr Rogers said: “Rita came rushing down from the office to tell me that she and Hazel had seen a man on the CCTV screen behind one of the shutters I had already secured.”
Worried he had locked someone in, Mr Rogers re-opened the security shutters and walked cautiously in to the area where the figure had been.
He said: “I looked round every corner and behind every curtain, making myself heard so as not to surprise anybody. But there was nobody there.”
Mr Rogers locked up again and went up to the office to find Mr Browne and Mrs Keeble still staring at the CCTV screen.
He said: “They were adamant that they had both seen somebody on the screen and that he was there just moments before the shutters had been locked. I laughed it off and suggested that if they saw somebody then there would be footage of him on the computer.
“I was sure that they were mistaken so I wasn’t expecting to see anything.”
To put their minds at ease, Mr Rogers sat down at the computer and started searching through the recent footage with the ladies.
Mrs Keeble said: “We all saw Alex lock the shutter on the screen. Then, just as the time when we had seen the figure was approaching, the clock on the screen jumped 15 minutes...a full 15 minutes of footage was missing.”
On investigation, the staff discovered that no other cameras had suffered a similar, unprecedented malfunction.
Mrs Keeble said: “It was strange because that was the only camera that was correctly placed to have recorded the figure. But we know what we saw. We all went home that night feeling a bit uneasy.”
Over the centuries the property has been a coaching inn and a domestic home.
For most of the 20th Century it was a grocer’s shop
Mrs Keeble said: “Hungerford Arcade is a very old building and must hold many secrets among its original beams and dry timbers.”