The Tesco "Charlie" Poltergeist: A Haunted Supermarket in Stone, Staffordshire

Stone is a town in Staffordshire. On its High Street once stood the Black Horse, a black-and-white pub. The Black Country Bugle describes it as a timber-framed inn of the 17th century, with no known history of ghosts. It was demolished in 1951. A supermarket was built on the site in the 1950s. Today a Costa stands there. By the mid-1970s a Tesco was trading in Stone, and local accounts place the town's haunted supermarket on the old Black Horse site. No source quite says the two were the same store. The pieces fit, though.

It started around 18 months before May 1977. Staff were tapped on the shoulder. They turned and found nobody there. Boxes were sent crashing to the floor. Footsteps were heard when no one was about.

Then it came for the manager. Tony Simms, aged 27, was holding a wallet with money in it. It was knocked out of his hands. Nobody was within ten yards of him.

Later accounts add more. The Bugle places the falling boxes in the storeroom. It also tells of coins left in the tills overnight. By morning, they had been sorted into neat piles. Philip Leason, chairman of the Stone Historical Society, put it simply in 2015: "Staff at the supermarket experienced strange happenings. Boxes were moved over night and staff never felt alone."

13 May 1977. The Wolverhampton Express and Star ran the story. Simms spoke for his staff. They remained sceptical, he said. But they had experienced things they could not explain logically. They had even named their visitor. Charlie. Local historians offered a theory. The store stood on the site of an old pub. Yet no earlier hauntings were on record.

There is no police log. No scientist or clergyman is known to have visited. No exorcism was recorded, and no Society for Psychical Research visit is known. No photograph of the phenomena exists. The newspaper report is the only document from the time, and its full text has not resurfaced online.

No one has put a natural explanation on the record. The ordinary candidates are easy to list. Badly stacked stock can settle and fall in a storeroom. Footsteps and building noise can carry from neighbouring premises in an old high street building. Shoulder taps and coin piles could be staff pranks. A dropped wallet could be a slip or a startle.

The record has loose threads too. The 1977 report and the Bugle call the ghost Charlie. Leason calls it George. The coin piles appear only in the Bugle's 2026 article. Leason names neither Tesco nor a date.

The case survives in a handful of local tellings. The Poltergeist Archive summarised the Express and Star report in 2025. A Little Bit of Stone carried Leason's account at Halloween in 2015. In August 2026 the Black Country Bugle returned to it in a series on the hauntings of Stone. The same street has another ghost, at the old Joule's Brewery site, with its footsteps and a cold chill as if someone had brushed past.