A Playful Inversion, Stony Stratford

Tonight’s story might have the most intriguing setting yet: no-one expects a bike shop to be haunted!

However, as we’re discovering, Milton Keynes delights in showing us the strange and unexpected. We’re going back to Stony for the third time so far, and I’m pretty sure this won’t be our last visit.

59 High Street is older than it looks, with wattle and daub walls, strange half-floors, and bricked-up windows that hint at centuries of occupation. Today, it houses an estate agent but in the 1990s, it was home to Trackers, a community-minded cycle shop with a loyal customer base and a peculiar series of incidents that built slowly over time. What began as mild irritation soon escalated into something genuinely eerie, ending in a moment that has stayed with one former staff member ever since.

A Sceptic with a Story

Our witness James isn’t someone who leaps to paranormal conclusions. He describes himself as a sceptic, someone who believes most strange occurrences can be explained away by logic, misperception, or the overactive human brain. That makes what happened during his time at Trackers all the more compelling.

He was in his twenties at the time, working as a bicycle mechanic. The shop’s owner, Graham, was in his sixties, and a younger member of staff named Sam rounded out the small team. Together, they created a friendly, open space. They sold bikes, did repairs, and led community rides. The building itself was a little odd, with sloping floors and protected walls that couldn’t be drilled into, but no one thought much of it at first.

Then the alarm started going off.

The Trouble Begins

The disturbances began in small, frustrating ways. The shop’s alarm system would trigger without cause, repeatedly flagging motion upstairs despite the building being securely locked. Engineers were called out and sensors replaced, but the problem persisted. It got to the point where James and Graham simply stopped attending some of the alerts, assuming it was a fault in the system.

Then they arrived one morning to find all the bikes from the second floor had been removed from their racks and stood carefully upside down, balanced on their handlebars and saddles. James remembered at least six bikes like this, arranged with deliberate precision. There had been no sign of a break-in, and nothing was stolen. The building had been locked all night.

For a while, they assumed one of them must have done it, that someone was playing a trick. But no one ever confessed, and the event remained without explanation.

It was around this time that James and his colleagues started hearing whistling. Not music or a specific tune, just the sound of someone idly whistling to themselves as they moved through the space. Several times, Graham would look up from his desk in the ground floor office, sure someone had just walked past him toward the stairs.

Each time, no one was there.

The sound always seemed to come from the back of the building, or from the stairs leading to the second floor. Sometimes all three staff members heard it, sometimes just one. They began to feel there was a presence in the building, something that moved unseen, but not unnoticed.

Then, one day, the bell above the shop door rang.

James glanced up and saw a girl enter. She was small, with blondish hair and a brown dress. Nothing about her seemed strange at first. Assuming she was a customer, James gave her a moment before stepping out of the workshop to greet her.

But she was gone.

He asked Sam if he had seen her. Sam had. They both searched the ground floor, then went upstairs. They checked the cupboards, the staff areas, even the attic space. There was no sign of her anywhere. And the bell never rang again to indicate she had left.

Later, James reflected that the fabric of her dress reminded him of hessian. At the time, it didn’t strike him as odd, but looking back, it felt more like something from a different time. She hadn’t looked at them, hadn’t interacted in any way. She had simply moved through the doorway and vanished.

Sam did not want to take part in this project directly, which I respect entirely, but James was kind enough to reach out to him after our conversation. Sam remembered the girl. He remembered the search. He remembered his tools going missing now and then, too.

For James, this final event marked the end of the disturbances. After the girl appeared, things simply… stopped.

A few days after our conversation, I made the trip to 59 High Street myself. It is easy to walk past it without noticing. The shopfront is modest, now branded with estate agency signage. But once you pause and really look, the character of the building becomes clear.

It sits at the corner of Church Street, directly next to the parish church of St Mary & St Giles. The church looms beside it, heavy with history, and the building seems to lean into its shadow. There’s a quiet, watching quality to the space, as if the church has seen everything that has passed through the shop below.

Across the road, the remains of medieval rooflines are just visible beneath modern tiles. The odd geometry of the windows and walls hints at earlier construction hidden beneath. I thought of the narrow staircase James described, the attic space with its sealed-off door, and of the small figure walking silently through the shop door, never to be seen again.

When I spoke to James, he said that he had done some investigation into the history of the building, and had heard rumours that it used to be the site of a workhouse: naturally, he made the connection to the child in the robes. It would have made sense given the old fabric of the building, especially if the dress he had seen his spectral visitor wearing really had been hessian.

However, thanks to some brilliant detective work from Sue at the Stony Stratford Business Association, we now know that the parish workhouse stood across the street from 59 High Street, not inside it. In fact, that building is very close to the location of the Fancy Dress Phantoms case I write about recently. Expect an update on that story soon – I’ll be making enquiries, and expect that friend-of-the-project Anne will be sharing some of her expertise on the social history of the area. We do think we’re on to something!

Still, Sue shared one more detail that might hold a clue.

At one time, the space just behind 59 High Street was used as a pin factory.

It is not hard to imagine what that might have looked like. Cramped quarters, fine fingerwork, repetitive noise. The kind of place where child labour was not only common, but expected. A space of precision, pressure, and little joy.

Could the girl have come from there?

James and Sam both saw her enter the shop, but she emerged from somewhere. If not from memory, or imagination, then perhaps from one of those forgotten working spaces behind the walls. Places no longer on maps, but still present in the shape of the buildings that remain.

What I love most about this story is that it didn’t scare James. Not really. He was unsettled, yes, and confused but never frightened. He kept looking for logical explanations, kept coming back to the thought that someone, somewhere, must have been playing tricks.

But that answer never came.

In some ways, this haunting feels more playful than malicious. It reminds me of something a child might do to get attention. Upside-down bicycles. Whistling. Poking at the edges of reality to see who might notice.

And people are noticing.

As this project grows, I’m discovering that I’m not just gathering stories, I’m growing a community. James, Sam, Sue, Anne, and many others have become part of a wider pattern of people willing to share, to listen, to wonder. Each conversation deepens the picture of this city, revealing the layers beneath the concrete and convenience that Milton Keynes is known for.

There are still unanswered questions about 59 High Street. There may be more to uncover. If you worked in the building, lived nearby, or have your own memories of that time, I would love to hear from you. The little girl in the workshop may not be done with us yet.

Thank-you to James for trusting me with his story and thank YOU for reading!
If you have a story of your own to share, I’d really love to hear it.