FAMILY and friends will say a final farewell to a familiar face from Haworth Main Street next week.

Stan Ledgard, 68, who ran all-things psychic shop Spooks with his wife Shirley for more than three decades, has died following a seven-year battle with cancer.

He passed away at the Marie Curie Hospice in Bradford on September 28.

Mr Ledgard grew up in the Girlington area, where generations of his family ran a sweet and tobacconist shop. After an education at Bradford Grammar School, he went to college to become a scientific and technical photographer, and worked in the civil service.

After several years in Stevenage, he returned to Bradford and got a job as a technician in the photography department at at Bradford College and at Percival Whitley College in Halifax.

He married Shirley in the 70s, and it was through her evening class in the supernatural that he developed his own interest in psychic studies, and eventually began teaching his own adult education classes on the subject.

The couple opened a model railway shop near the station in Haworth after he was made redundant from Bradford College, and they went on to open Spooks in 1983.

They bought a former run-down mill owner’s house in 1989 called Speak Institute at Mountain near Queensbury. They completely refurbished it and renamed it Mountain Hall, running residential psychic awareness courses.

Mountain Hall was sold about ten years ago, with Spooks becoming the couple’s main focus, but Mr Ledgard then embarked on a new activity as an author, publishing 14 books on a range of subjects.

Mrs Ledgard said: “Having spent more than 30 years at Spooks, many may recall his ready wit and deliberate eccentricity, as well as his psychic readings and his desire to help customers to recognise their own psychic abilities without resort to imposed beliefs.

“Variety was undoubtedly his way of life!”

As well as his wife Shirley, 64, Mr Ledgard, who lived in Queensbury, leaves hisdogs Lizzy and Charlie.