Anything in life can become haunted. From houses to people to patches of land to toys, ghosts will attach to anything in their power to affect. This apparently includes retail stores!

See Also: Top 10 Famous Haunted Landmarks You Didn’t Know Were Haunted

Across the US (and England, apparently), retail stores like Walmart, Target, Sam’s Club, etc have all been the target of hauntings, whether from bad choices in placement or from strings of awful murders happening on the property. Ghosts of all ages and types, from benevolent to malicious, have started running amok in stores like a bad Ghostbusters remake.

The good news is that we now have a list of the 10 most haunted stores, so you can avoid them in future shopping sprees…or go to them on purpose, if you’re hunting more than just bargains.

10John T. King Used & Rare Books

In Detroit, Michigan, there’s no shortage of possible hauntings. In fact, you’d probably expect many places there to be haunted, given the amount of ruined buildings, abandoned factories, and the murder rate of almost a murder per day.

The most notable haunting in Detroit’s retail sector, however, seems to be the ghost that haunts John T. King Used & Rare Books. The store, standing four floors tall, housing over 1,000,000 books separated into 900 categories, is also home to a couple of ghosts!

The first ghost is reportedly a man who killed himself on the third floor of the glove factory in which the book store is now housed, after suffering heartbreak from being rejected by a coworker. He is supposedly responsible for many sightings, cold spots, and echoing footstep-like sounds in the building, and was authenticated by a psychic.

The second ghost was acquired alongside many books bought from the estate of a murder-suicide victim. Although not dangerous, the ghost reportedly annoys employees by generating cold spots and knocking scores of books off the shelves.

9 Market Basket Grocery Store

In Wilmington, Massachusetts, there’s a grocery store known as the Market Basket. This store is the employer of one Christina Bush, a 25 year old psychology major who has worked for the company since she was 14. Christina didn’t believe in ghosts, not had she ever seen anything weird in her local store, until March of 2019.

While standing at the bakery counter, ringing up another customer, Christina reportedly looked up and saw an elderly woman in a white nightgown and haircap standing, barefoot, a few feet away, staring at her. She looked down at the counter, then quickly back up…and the woman had vanished.

Startled, she searched the store for the woman, but she had vanished without a trace. Independent research into the situation by Christina turned up few clues, although others responded to her questions saying they had seen similar apparitions in the store, and one woman claimed to have seen that exact ghost in her own home, just a few blocks from the store!

8 San Francisco Safeway

The San Francisco Bay Area is no stranger to hauntings, but perhaps the oddest haunted place is the local Safeway in the Sunset District. Safeway, a national grocery chain, is best known for the jokes about their terrible house-brand ice cream, but now might be known for other reasons: GHOSTS!

The San Francisco Safeway is haunted by at least one incredibly eerie ghost, a little boy, about 8 years old. Appearing mostly at or around midnight, the child has been seen by multiple employees, usually sitting on the floor curled in the fetal position, or standing in a corner facing a wall, with his face hidden.

The Safeway was supposedly built on the site of an old hotel which was burned to the ground for insurance money. It’s unknown if the boy perished in the flames, or if he was there long before that. While his origins remain a mystery, his presence is a concrete fact to those who have seen him.

7 Dimond Center

In Anchorage, Alaska, the Dimond Center mall is a point of some contention. Although few dispute the notion that it is in fact haunted, the arguments come from how it came to be haunted in the first place.

Many people claim that the mall was built on a burial ground, the construction stirring up restless spirits. Others assert that no such burial ground could have existed, as the area was barren and layered with hard permafrost before the mall was built, thus the ghosts have to be from the many deaths at the mall (from things such as aneurysms, shootings, and Freon leaks).

They do seem to all agree, however, that the ghosts are mostly found lurking in bathrooms and hallways, and that the three most frequently sighted are The Woman, who supposedly died while mall walking, The Tall Man, and The Child. It might be worth a look if you’re ever in Alaska!

6 Alabama Sams Club

Oxford, Alabama made a tragic and highly cursed mistake in 2009: letting Walmart build a Sam’s Club in their town. This in and of itself would not normally cause too many problems, but this particular Sam’s Club decided to take up residence over an area that required them to bulldoze Native American cultural mounds, using the dirt as foundation fill.

Former mayor of Oxford, Leon Smith, insisted that the mound “ain’t never been a burial ground” and was a natural formation and at most used for “smoke signals”. The fact that the construction was plagued by disasters like a sinkholes and severe economic troubles didn’t seem to bother the people in charge of the project at all, as they plowed ahead with destroying the rock and dirt mound, while the Mayor took to claiming he was “full blood Indian” in an attempt to stave off criticism ( Mayor Leon was decidedly not Native American).

Although the store itself has not much Poltergeist-like activity since construction, the numerous setbacks and unfortunate accidents during construction suggest that the land is definitely haunted, and possibly cursed.

5 Guitar, Amp and Keyboard

Brighton, England has its fair share of ghosts, as does all of Britain, but a personal favorite is the rock and roll ghost of Guitar, Amp and Keyboard. The ghost has been caught on video at least twice being a spooky little devil and messing around with customers and merchandise in the store.

One video shows the ghost appearing as a full body apparition and striding towards a customer, who doesn’t notice it at all. The second, taken while the store was closed, shows the ghost (now invisible) rattling the guitars and pulling a price tag off of a Fender, throwing it to the ground.

Although their could be logical explanations for the moving guitars and snapping price tags, I can’t seem to think of any, nor could the store owners. Perhaps the ghost of a frustrated rock star stopped in for one last great performance on their way to the ferryman.

4 Seawall Walmart

Galveston, Texas, much like Brighton, has no shortage of ghosts and ghouls haunting its fair city. None have quite the impact, however, of the ghosts in the Seawall Walmart.

Built on the former site of St. Mary’s Orphan Asylum (good lord, Walmart, have some restraint in picking cursed locations to build!), the Seawall Walmart has been plagued with hauntings from the start of construction. St. Mary’s, destroyed in the hurricane of 1900, saw the deaths of 90 children and 10 nuns, 100 dead at one blow, that’s got to be enough bad energy to curse the land it stood on for at least 200 years.

And apparently it has, as the Walmart has several ghosts reported to be within its walls. The most notable is a child who cries out, heartrendingly, for its mother. The other ghosts mainly giggle and, if the employees are to be believed, play with and even steal pallets of toys! Personally, I think they’ve earned the right.

3 Sunnyvale Toys “R” Us

Ah, California, the land of sun, beaches, and apparently ghosts! A favorite being the ghost of the Sunnyvale Toys “R” Us, a ghost by the name of Crazy Johnny.

According to legend, Crazy Johnny was a preacher employed by one Martin Murphy, who owned the land the Toys “R” Us was built on. Crazy Johnny, who was supposedly suffering from encephalitis, was in love with Martin Murphy’s daughter, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, however, was in love with a lawyer, and planned to marry him. Crazy Johnny was so upset by the news that in his grief and rage he lost his grip on the axe he was using to chop wood and struck his leg, severing the artery and bleeding out in minutes.

Of course, he didn’t quite stay down, instead reportedly rising as the famous ghost of the Sunnyvale Toys “R” Us, opening and closing doors, whipping papers around, whispering over the intercom, and frightening several psychic investigators.

2 Pike Place Market

Seattle, Washington boasts that it contains the most haunted location in the entire state, and it very well might! Home to at least 5 distinct ghosts, the Pike Place Market is full of knocks, cold spots, and things that go bump in the night.

From the sightings of Princess Angeline, an elderly Native American woman with a red scarf and basket, to Jacob, a young boy who haunts the bead shop, the ghosts all have distinct personalities and living identities.

One of the ghosts, Nora the Psychic, is said to inhabit a crystal ball in Shiela’s Magic Shop, and moves the inventory through all hours of the night!

1 Murder Kroger

Atlanta, Georgia may not be the most haunted town in the state (that honor goes to Savannah, Georgia instead), but it does have the most unique hauntings. No civil war ghosts or lingering spirits of the Victorian era here, instead Atlanta hosts the infamous Murder Kroger.

Murder Kroger, as its name suggests, has been the site of at least 4 murders since 1991. The first, Cynthia Prioleau, was shot in the parking lot. In 2002, a dead body was found in a car in front of the Kroger, followed by a murder in a building which shared the parking lot with the unfortunate Kroger, and then yet another shooting in 2015.

Though no one had been able to provide evidence of ghost, many residents of the neighborhood surrounding the Kroger have reported that the entire place has a nasty energy to it, a feeling of anger.

Or did, until they tore it down and put up another Kroger in its place in late 2019. The new Kroger, with a roof covered in grass and beehives, has inherited the nickname, but supposedly not the bad juju…yet.

We all have to go shopping and for the most part, we don’t think too deeply about the overall experience. However, the companies selling us groceries spend a ton of money thinking about it, researching it, market testing it, and figuring out the perfect ways to get us to spend more money. They’re not beyond using psychological trickery to get what they want, and will happily use forms of legal deception to increase their bottom line. 

10. Grocery Stores Start With Floral And Produce To Prime Your Senses 

You may have noticed when going to grocery stores over the years that whoever is designing these things, no matter what company, is going to great lengths to force you to walk past the floral section first, followed by the produce being placed not too far away. Now, we could put forth crazy theories about all stores being built by big construction, that want to keep using the same template, maybe out of laziness or ease of just rapidly churning out cookie-cutter layouts. Still, the truth is that it just comes down to grocery stores knowing some basic human psychology and deciding on their own accord to use it against you. 

Stores realized that when buying things like food, people tend to buy more and put more trust in the store if they believe it’s all extremely fresh. By making people walk past the floral and produce first, you prime their senses to think that the rest of the store is fresh, even if it isn’t. Stores will go so far to pull this one over on you that nearly every grocery store will make you walk past a floral section first, just to emphasize freshness, even if they do very little floral business outside of Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day. 

9. Department Stores Prime Your Senses With Cologne

Department stores are starting to die off, but they still act as the “anchor” stores for a lot of major malls, and are a part of history, if nothing else. And of course, if you want to buy cologne or perfume apart from online, you still usually stop by a department store, such as Macy’s or JCPenney. Now, one thing you may have noticed is that the fragrance department is often very obvious and impossible to not walk by, much like produce, with a typically pleasant scent hitting you immediately. 

This priming of your senses makes you think all the clothing must be really clean and nice, as you smell nothing but nice things when you first walk through. This strategy makes sense, as you want people to associate high-end brands with high-end things, and the fact you usually walk past the jewelry as well doesn’t hurt either. However, this can also end up confusing consumers. Many consumers get home from the store and find that they feel their cologne and perfume smell differently than they did while testing it out live. This is a real phenomenon and it’s due to the store’s attempts to prime your senses, but it isn’t necessarily a deception. Because the store has so many people testing colognes and perfumes and sometimes pumps in nice smells, it can confuse your senses without meaning to. 

8. Sugary Breakfast Cereals Are Placed To Make Eye Contact With Your Kids 

Sugary breakfast cereals attempt to justify their existence by promising to be fortified with all kinds of vitamins and minerals that your kids need. They spend gobs of marketing money every year and constantly switch up their cereals so that they can continue to stay exciting in the eyes of your children. And when we say they’re marketing directly to your children, we’re not talking about conspiracy; we mean they have been doing it for years, and they are very open about it. 

And we don’t just mean having cute mascots, or advertising while your kids are watching cartoons, although they do that too. They have contracts with the grocery stores to ensure the product placement is suited to manipulate the growing minds of your young ones. In the USA cereal companies have a lockdown on an entire aisle, and they ensure that the cereals they want to sell most are placed at eye level with your kids. They also make sure the mascots for these products have wide, friendly eyes, toothy grins, and trustworthy faces practically begging you to eat the cereal.

7. Baking Premade Loaves Of Dough Gives Bakeries An Illusion Of Freshness 

You may have noticed that some grocery store bakeries will go out of their way to regularly advertise their fresh baguettes, bagels, and the like. And might even advertise that they have a fresh bread slicer for some of their lovers of various specialty loaves. This makes you feel like you’re walking past a real, fresh bakery, and it makes you want to buy some of those cakes, cookies, or other delicious baked goods on display. 

However, if you’re looking for fresh baked goods, you may want to go elsewhere, or just make your own. There’s little of anything fresh at a grocery store bakery. The loaves of bread are frozen and baked by the employees. The employees also put together pre-baked cakes sometimes. Apart from this, grocery store bakeries are mainly there for decorating purposes, as they take premade template cakes and put personalized messages on them for people. The illusion makes you feel even more like the store is fresh, but most baking is done at a commissary kitchen off-site. 

6. There Is A Good Chance All Of The Fish In Your Seafood Section Has Been Frozen

When you buy something that’s advertised as fresh, you tend to believe that it actually is, and would probably be pretty annoyed if you found out you were being tricked. When it comes to meat and fish, we tend to think that “fresh” means that this particular meat or fish was only ever refrigerated, and hasn’t even seen a freezer at all. The fast food chain Wendy’s is famous for trying to convince customers to choose them by emphasizing that their meat is never frozen. 

However, when it comes to fish, it exists in a weird place where most people just consider fresh fish to be anything you buy on ice from the seafood section, even though none of that makes any sense. Even if you live by a market near an ocean where you could have fresh fish delivered daily, the fact it is laid on ice to keep it sellable hardly makes it “fresh.” But this is sort of the problem with the entire idea of selling fresh fish in the first place. Some experts argue the whole idea is an illusion since, to keep it fresh long enough to get back from the shore, most fishermen immediately put their catch on ice — which automatically voids the entire concept. 

5. Stores Often Print Sales Knowing They Have An Unreasonably Low Supply To Meet Demand 

Stores will do whatever it takes to get you in the door, like promotions or constant sales, and they aren’t above a few dirty tricks. While most won’t outright lie to you, if nothing else because it is illegal, they are not beyond printing out nice sales knowing full well they’re not going to have enough product to meet the demand. Now, you may wonder how they can get away with this, but there’s a certain amount of legal skullduggery that can be applied. 

One of the original favorites is to use the limited supply trick with doorbuster sales on days like Black Friday to get people in the door, even though most stores only have a couple of the advertised items in stock, and others have none. Even with this disclaimer, the pressure has mounted and the stores seem to have ended this practice for the most part. However, it’s still fairly common for grocery stores to play around with you. Another favorite trick is to have a sale for a limited time, without the limited supply disclaimer, and just count on the fact you don’t realize you can ask for a rain check.

4. Ikea Makes You Walk Through A Labyrinth So You See Everything 

Ikea is famous for selling furniture with strange and confusing instructions, which people usually, after far too many hours and maybe a few punched walls and thrown Allen wrenches, end up more or less assembling properly almost despite them. The furniture has managed to make its way into homes and dorm rooms around the world, and the assembly model has become common among many furniture manufacturers since, who have seen the value of selling a compact product that a consumer can put together themselves. They also tend to be rather out of the way, which causes people to make little pilgrimages to them, so it’s certainly a memorable experience every time. 

The truth is that the fact Ikea is out of the way is just a part of its devious strategy to trap you in their web and get you to spend a lot of money. Ikea is not only out of the way, but it is also literally designed like a maze so that, unlike the normal up-and-down aisles, you will be more likely to visit every single part of the store and see everything before you leave. They also have their own restaurant perfectly positioned at the end of the store, just when you have worked up an appetite after your long walk, and when you are far from any other places to eat. 

3. Many Sale Prices Are A Calculated Lie, But People Want The Illusion Regardless 

We all love sales, and the stores know this, so they make sure to advertise them all the time. And, of course during holidays the amount of sales increases exponentially until it’s pretty much all we see. We feel good thinking that we beat the system or won something somehow, and the retailers win by making money. However, the truth is that most of these sales aren’t sales at all, and the retailers know full well what they’re doing. Capitalism!

You might imagine that there’s some regular price that retailers have for a certain item and that the sale is to get you to buy more to make up for a slow period or make the most out of a busy one. However, the truth is most stores are doing sales nearly all the time, and most sale prices aren’t them grabbing a little less margin, it’s the price they wanted you to pay for it in the first place. Now, before you go and grab your pitchforks for the big retailers, know that a big retailer tried to end this nonsense once and the consumer backlash was legendary. Basically, the CEO of JCPenney tried to make everyday low prices and end the constant fake sales, and the customers revolted.

2. Most “Best By” Or Other Similar Labeling Is Not Worth The Paper It Is Printed On 

You may have noticed that there are several different types of expiration labels on your products and wondered what they all mean. And the answer is a bit complicated. An actual expiration date printed on a manufacturer-sealed package may not always need to be followed, but it’s a pretty safe bet they’re trying to protect you.  However, labels that say things like “best by” or “best if used by” mean a lot more to the seller than they do to the consumer. 

You see, “best by” labeling doesn’t mean that the product has expired or is unsafe, it just means that the product has started to decrease in taste and texture quality, and the company doesn’t want that level of quality control to get past them. They are essentially making you their quality control agent after the fact, and saving money (while getting more of yours) by getting you to throw it out and buy more, more often. Expiration labels can get even more complicated because there are the ones put on products that are well sealed, and then there are ones like those on meat that are sold by the store itself. You may be surprised to know that it is legal for the store to change expiration labels on products as long as they create the initial label themselves. 

1. Stores Shift Products Around Regularly In An Attempt To Make You Buy More Stuff 

This is one many people complain about, and it drives pretty much everyone crazy. There’s probably not a person reading this who hasn’t at least once been confounded by their grocery store deciding that it’s time to reorganize the entire store, moving things around so thoroughly that you have to relearn the entire setup. You traipse around annoyed, ask employees, many of whom don’t seem to know either, and finally scout it all out again. The entire time, you curse whatever corporation decided this was a good idea, and start to wander into conspiracy territory, wondering if it’s all just a plan by the corporations to trick you into spending more money.

And we hate to say it, but for once the conspiracy theorists are quite correct. The grocery stores regularly reorganize because they want you to forget where everything is. They are doing this, as you might have imagined, so that you’ll see products you forgot about or maybe haven’t noticed before, and hopefully change up your shopping habits in a way that gets more money out of your wallet. This practice is almost universally hated by customers, but considering the grocers keep doing it, it probably works.