Coopers of Stortford has two distinct strands to its haunting, a mischievous, low-level poltergeist active around the shop floor and stockroom, and a more traditional Grey Lady seen upstairs. The poltergeist activity is described as knocking stock off shelves, swapping the price labels on various items, and causing the lights to flicker, minor but persistent enough to be a recognised part of working in the shop.
The Grey Lady is a considerably more striking figure, reported crossing a room upstairs before disappearing directly into a wall, a detail common to a number of the county's hauntings but which, at Coopers, comes with an unusually concrete piece of corroboration. During a later refurbishment of the building, workers discovered a genuine doorway that had been plastered over and hidden, located in exactly the spot where witnesses had long described the Grey Lady vanishing, a coincidence that lends the sighting more credibility than most similar reports elsewhere in this register.
More recently, an employee getting a cup of tea in the building was startled by a loud noise coming from the roof space above, and shortly afterward a fire door swung open on its own with no one nearby to have caused it. No identity has been established for the Grey Lady, and while the discovery of the hidden doorway is a genuinely interesting piece of physical corroboration, it does not amount to proof of a haunting, only that the tradition of a figure vanishing at that spot predated the discovery of an actual concealed opening there.
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