Eerie secrets, ghosts laid to rest

GENERATIONS of South Australians shopped there but few may know a body is buried in its foundations.

GENERATIONS of South Australians shopped there but few may know a body is buried in its foundations.

The ghost of the dead builder is one of two said to haunt Harris Scarfe's Rundle Mall premises, his body still buried in cement, where he fell and drowned when the foundations were being poured in 1917.

Shoppers today may only see a run-down shop past its glory but behind its faded facade is a rich heritage that the retailer's old guard still treasures.

Among them is receiving manager Rod Pratt who, after 35 years with Harris Scarfe, knows every nook and cranny of the building. In fact, there are a couple of remaining "mysteries" - including a boarded up ceiling he is convinced is the floor to old rooms in what used to be the Hotel Rundle - that he is itching to get into before the renovators move in next month.

"There's a lot of history in the place," he says. "Underneath us there's a cellar that's closed in. Back in '75, that was one of my first jobs, to empty that and then they sealed it up. The builders will find that when they (renovate). They'll go, 'oops, that's not on the plan'. There's a lot of stuff like that."

Store manager Pat Bailey says the building's secrets still surprise her, even after 10 years.

Just last week, she learnt the old well in the basement was one of 17 which used to service the building's original tenants. The well was forgotten for decades, until the late '70s, when an employee nearly fell through the crumbling flooring laid over its mouth. It has since been safely covered by a steel trapdoor.

Next to the well is the old vault that used to hoard papers worth putting under lock and key.

It is the reason some of its ledgers from the 1860s still exist, many in close to pristine conditions.

Stocktake manager Tom Brady was given the task of cataloguing the decades of stock books, share registers and catalogues. His most prized find among the 160 books is a volume containing the minutes from the first meeting of directors after it became a limited company in 1900, signed by one of the founders, George Scarfe.

The heftiest tome is a 10kg catalogue, filled with loose-leaf pages of products from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Inside the vault is the original safe that used to house the day's takings. It is so large and heavy, that, rumour has it, an interested buyer had to abandon the purchase because it would have cost more to move the safe than buy it.

Cabinets still hold yellowed pay slips and group certificates from the '50s and '60s.

In fact, some of the "graffiti" on the vault walls dates back that far. Something scrawled in 1981, at 9.17pm, presumably by an employee sneaking off for a rendezvous, is mostly scribbled out. All that remains legible are the tantilising words "Nothing happened!! Much to my disgust".

Harris Scarfe started as a hardware and household furnishing merchant, and even sold guns until the tragic winter's day in 1975 when a customer walked in, purchased a gun, loaded it and shot himself there in the store.

In the loading bay, Rod and Pat point out steel plates (only a few are now left embedded in the ground) that used to be part of a circular "slippery dip" down which parcels from upper floors were sent.

On the first floor, after negotiating a warren of corridors and stairs, is what used to be the Hotel Rundle.

"I still reckon the staircase kept going and there's a room up above us that no one's ever been into," Rod says, pointing up towards the boarded ceiling where, it appears, another set of stairs would have continued. The area is now used to store surplus stock, but attached to the ceiling in one of the side rooms is the rusting pulley crane by which the pub used to haul up kegs of beer.

The rig is still suspended above the antique door, which opens on the side of the building and a sheer drop to the ground below.

Inevitably, with old buildings come the ghost stories. Back in the 1940s, employees used to blame unexplained creaking and oddities on "Harry" the ghost, Rod says.

As the man called on when things break down, he has spent a few eerie nights in the building. "I've been here at two o'clock in the morning, by myself, and the goods lifts would start up and just go by themselves," he says. "You'd see them drop to the second floor, you'd hear the door open, you'd hear footsteps and then the lift comes back down to the basement and you're thinking 'well, I know I'm the only one here'."

To test it out, he left the building and set the motion-sensitive alarms to see if a stray person inside would set them off, "and, nup, no movement in the place".

Much of this history will be lost when the old building is gutted and renovated, with work scheduled to start next month.

Sunday, March 27, will be the last day staff at the historic site at 81 Rundle Mall. The store will then temporarily relocate to Rundle Mall Plaza from March 30, and hopes to reopen at its original location by Easter 2013.

The new "state-of-the-art" Harris Scarfe store will have 10,000sq m of space over two floors with views over the Mall and Grenfell St.

"I love this store, absolutely love it," Ms Bailey says. "Does it have to go? Absolutely."