Labourer Michael Scheres says he and a pal unwittingly snapped the spook while working on the old Lewis's building, in The Headrow.

Michael, of Belle Isle, Leeds, said: "I could feel it had gone really cold, I was shivering and this feeling was shooting up and down my spine. Liam, the lad I was working with, took the picture. When he saved it came up with the ghost on. He nearly dropped the phone. I couldn't believe what I was seeing at first."

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Michael said he had been in two minds about ghosts before Tuesday's close encounter.

"I did and I didn't," he said. I believed in the afterlife but never thought they were among us until I saw that picture."

After the picture was taken, Michael says he looked into the history of the building, home to department store Allders until 2005.

The 22-year-old says he discovered that in the mid-19th Century some builders were working in an area close to the sighting when their wooden scaffolding collapsed.

"They were all killed," he said. "Whatever is on that picture might be one of them, or it could be someone from the graveyard and memorial garden next door."

Windmill Road resident Michael said one of his work colleagues had mentioned his own ghoulish experience.

He added: "He told he could see something going past out of the corner of his eye, and he kept getting cold, but whenever he turned around there was nothing there."

Michael isn't the only member of his family to have had a brush with the other side. His mum, Diane, claims that when she was about six she was visited by the ghost of a close friend of hers

"It was a couple of days after he had been knocked down," she said.

And in 2006, Diane says she was shown a mobile phone picture of a ghost by two of her friends.

Lewis's is not alone in having a resident wraith.

Temple Newsam House is said to have several ghosts, Kirkstall Abbey is haunted by a former abbot, while a phantom pianist is said to tinkle the City Varieties ivories in the dead of night.