Fancy Dress Phantoms Caught On CCTV, Stony Stratford

I’m delighted to be able to share this, the first true story from my Revenants on the Redway project! Confession time—it was a little scary, and not just for the reasons you’re probably expecting.

To be honest with you, I never expected to find myself a custodian of spooky stories. It’s all sort of just—happened. I’d been helping to collate personal accounts of strange experiences from the comments section of a fast-growing paranormal YouTube channel for a few months, and what started as a side project became something else entirely. I was blown away—not just by the volume of stories people shared, but by how vivid, detailed, and honestly frightening so many of them were. They really were the kind of stories that stay with you.

After a while, I found myself looking twice at the places I passed while out walking the Redways. Ordinary houses. Half-built estates. A new roundabout that doesn’t go anywhere yet. I kept wondering: what stories are hiding behind those doors? Surely someone was already collecting them?

Apparently not.

So I decided to give it a try! I’ve got a diploma in parapsychology and a healthy curiosity, but I’m certainly not an expert—and I’m very aware how much trust it takes to share something personal and unsettling with a stranger.

So… I was a little nervous about this, my first interview. I needn’t have been. Anne contacted me after I posted a call for stories in a local Facebook group, we started chatting on Messenger, and straight away I could tell her experiences weren’t just interesting, they were compelling. We arranged a time to talk, and over the course of nearly an hour, she took me on a tour across several of the Milton Keynes grid squares I’m hoping to fill.

She’s very kindly given me permission to share all of them, and I’ll be doing that over the coming months. Thank you, Anne, so much for being so generous with your time and your tales!

I’m starting today with the one that gave me the biggest shiver.

So, put the kettle on, make yourself something comforting, and settle in for a truly eerie story set in the most unlikely of places.

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I’ll start by sharing a little about Anne herself. She’s lived in Milton Keynes since 1975, she’s warm and funny and a real delight to talk to. She’s a former local councillor, a regular on local ghost hunts and a lifelong believer in the paranormal but she was not expecting to have her own unsettling encounter on an ordinary day out shopping in Stony Stratford.

Anne told me that this would have been about nine or ten years ago when she was out with her young daughter, shopping for an outfit for a school event. (Since Anne first told me this story, she’s found the original note from the school, and confirmed the date – it was January, 2018.) The pair called in at Party Mad, a small fancy dress shop located between the butcher’s and a bakery on Stony High Street. That shop closed several years ago, and there’s now a hair salon on the same site, but back then, the colourful costumes filled the ground floor and spilled up to a second floor that was used to house the overflow. 

Anne and her daughter were the only customers downstairs. The school party had an Egpyptian theme, and I like to think of them flicking through the racks of colourful costumes, looking for the perfect one. However, as they considered various different outfits, Anne could hear noises from up above—footsteps, the sounds of people moving around and even muffled voices. She went to chat to the assistant working at the till, and remarked that it sounded busy today, with a lot of people up looking around upstairs. 

What the assistant said next must have been chilling: “No, there’s nobody up there. You’re the only customers.” 

But there was definitely something moving around up there. The unexplained noises were strange enough, but the experience was about to get even creepier. The shop had a CCTV monitor covering the upper floor, presumably so staff could keep an eye out for anyone trying to make away with the stock. Anne could see the monitor from where she was standing, and as far as she could make out, it was indeed picking up people on the upper floor: she could clearly see several figures. 

She pointed this out to the assistant, who looked completely untroubled when she said: “Yeah, the shop’s haunted.” 

It might have been an everyday occurrence for her, perhaps, but it definitely left Anne shaken and feeling extremely creeped out! 

I asked Anne to describe what she had seen, and she said the figures on the screen were vague and indistinct. She couldn’t make out any details of the clothing, but there were several shadowy figures moving around. We talked a little about the Roman history of the area and the nearby Watling Street, but there was nothing to indicate what era the figures might have come from. They were just shadowy shapes, clearly moving around on the screen. The live feed from the upstairs camera showed things that shouldn’t be there, despite being told no one was upstairs. Oddly enough, Anne didn’t fancy popping up for a closer look! 

I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be in that shop alone at the end of the day, but it sounds as though the Party Mad staff back then had become pretty used to seeing and hearing strange things. As I said earlier, that shop closed long ago and it’s now a hair salon. If, like me, you’re wondering whether the staff who work there now have experienced anything strange—well, we might be able to get some insider information on that.

I’ve contacted the salon owner and am waiting to hear back. Anne is also friends with someone at the bakery next door and has asked if they have any stories to share. I’ve also contacted the local Chamber of Commerce and Business Association to see if I can track down the old owners. If there’s anything to add to these case notes, I’ll be sure to update. 

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There’s a lot to process here. Anne’s an extremely credible witness, and really, has nothing to gain from exaggerating or making this up: as much as I’d like to, I’m not offering anything in return for sharing these stories except the knowledge that they’ll be told in a respectful way for other people to read. I have no problem believing that something strange happened that day in the shop. 

The fancy dress shop setting is unexpectedly unsettling. I haven’t been in one for years, but I remember the one in my hometown with its rows of plastic masks and feather boas, that faint smell of latex and dust. As a kid, it always felt like a place full of possibility. The idea of one being haunted sounds almost absurd at first. But the more I sat with it, the more it made sense. Fancy dress shops are playful on the surface, but they’re also liminal spaces—places where identities are tried on and shed like second skins. You step inside as yourself and leave, however briefly, as someone—or something—else. A superhero. A fairy princess. A vampire. (Me? A witch. Every time.) Behind the laughter and glitter, there’s a quiet strangeness to all that pretending. And maybe, in the right light, that’s exactly the kind of place a ghost might feel at home.

The CCTV element really gets under my skin. I’ve been reading a lot lately about technologically mediated paranormal encounters. The idea of ghosts in the wires and shadows caught on camera isn’t new, of course: Black Mirror has built an entire genre out of it. What is strange, though, is how relatively scarce this kind of evidence seems to be. Most of us carry high-resolution cameras in our pockets. We film everything. If ghosts are real, if the veil is thin, why aren’t our phones catching more of it?

One infamous case that’s living rent-free in my head at the moment is the Bothell Hell House. According to the experiencer, the house was wildly active, and many of the occurrences there were documented using phones, webcams, CCTV. There’s a mountain of footage, yet critics still ask: if it was that haunted, where’s the definitive proof? Why not more?

There’s an unsettling theory that the entities in cases like Bothell choose what we see. That they edit their own appearances, interfering with the very tools we hope will reveal them. That the tantalising glimpses aren’t patchy evidence—they’re designed to torment. What better way to do that than to offer just enough evidence to isolate you, to make others doubt what you know you’ve seen?

If that’s true, then maybe the real horror isn’t what shows up on screen—but what deliberately doesn’t.

Of course, in Anne’s case, any CCTV recordings are long gone, no matter how much I wish that it was possible to go back in time and grab a copy of the footage from that day! Especially as there could have been a wealth of it if these were common enough occurrences for the staff to be that calm when it was happening. Where’s a time-slip when you need one? 🙂 

After talking to Anne, I couldn’t shake the story—so early this morning, I walked over to Stony High Street to see the place for myself. The sun was already brightening the rooftops, though the air still carried a chill. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day. The streets were quiet—bin lorries trundling in the distance, a lone runner passing by, nothing unusual.

The unit where Party Mad once stood is now Meraki, an upmarket salon offering “a range of personalised hair care and styling services,” according to their website. The shopfront’s been redone in a smart shade of deep teal, all clean lines and modern signage. It looks polished. Respectable. Entirely ordinary.

And yet I found myself lingering in the early morning quiet, looking up towards those second floor windows. I kept imagining what it must have felt like to be alone there, years ago, in that cluttered upstairs space. The crowded racks of party costumes for hire. Bright polyester, quirky wigs, glittering sequins. A whole room of things pretending to be something else.

I bet they used to sell a lot of masks.

I wonder if any of them ever smiled.

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Thank-you to Anne for being so very generous with her time, and for trusting me with her stories – and thank YOU for reading!
If you have a story of your own to share, I’d really love to hear it.