Manchester’s Most Haunted: 10 spots to visit this Halloween

While Middleton’s Ring O Bells Inn dates back to around 1200, its tormented resident apparitions are born of a brutal Cromwellian massacre in the 17th century. Alongside comfortingly affordable drinks, visitors can expect stories of landlords pelted with stones in the cellar, and might even hear the unsettled stomping of slain Cavaliers for themselves.

Salford’s oldest building – dating back to 1177 – Ordsall Hall is a renowned hub of both local history and considerable paranormal activity. Packed with ominous entities throughout its existence, the building boasts a stellar line-up of poltergeists, including the customary ghost of a jilted bride, a young girl known to play with visiting children and the iconic White Lady – said to be the tragic daughter of Sir John Radclyffe, wandering the halls with a candle in and endless search for her twin brother.

With a facade which likely appears alongside ‘haunted’ in the dictionary, Worsley’s ominous gothic manor is said to contain a cursed skull atop its groaning oak staircase. Once belonging to Father Ambrose Barlow, who was mercilessly executed on Easter Sunday of 1461, the skull is said to haunt anybody who attempts to alter its location, following them to the grave with a perpetual scream.

Another famously haunted Mancunian manor house, another resident Lady in White casting about the unlit corridors in pale, weightless gossamer, letting out horrifying sobs as she drifts in agony between its endless bedrooms in search of her fiance, who was killed in a 17th century Roundhead siege.

Recently reopened, the hall regularly hosts family-friendly sing-along events.

Well-known to many Mancunians, the underground passages of unknown origin are said to have once housed a downtrodden underclass of ‘rat people’, whose unsettled spirits understandably roam the tunnels today. Alongside them, the mysterious apparitions of two dead children can be summoned with the use of paranormal instruments on one of the city’s best ghost tours.

Behind the slender, green tile-clad exterior, Manchester’s Peveril of the Peak pub apparently houses Manchester’s most helpful ghost. After four generations in the same family, the current landlords claim that there’s a friendly – if perhaps exasperated – spirit who’s reportedly cleaned up shattered glass and whisked empty pints to the dishwasher.

Still a fully functional pub after over 190 years in operation, the Greengate Brewery has a grisly history of worker deaths – one as recently as 2014. From its construction to the 21st century, bodies have been discovered at the bottom of its various vats and wells, with some linking the Greengate’s aberrant rate of demise to sightings of a white-cloaked figure disappearing between doorways.

Built in 1849 for a wealthy family of cotton manufacturers, Ryecroft Hall picked up an inevitable swathe of harrowed spirits during its time as a First World War hospital. Featuring all the classics, from sudden changes in temperature to a small Victorian girl roaming the grounds, as well as somewhat less inexplicable reports of cigarette butts falling from a balcony, Ryecroft Hall enjoys a rich reputation among ghost-hunters throughout the region.

Performed with sincere superstition since a 1606 debut riddled with disaster, Shakespeare’s Macbeth has always carried the Scottish curse: tragedy will befall anybody who speaks the name Macbeth, other than as called for in the script during performance and rehearsals. In 1947, sceptical actor Harold Norman broke the only rule as the titular character during a run at Oldham’s Coliseum Theatre, and was promptly stabbed in a mistimed sword-fighting scene. In the years since, Norman has reportedly returned to the theatre on various opening nights, seeking revenge for his death, with audience members experiencing d cold sensations, moving seats and generators switching themselves off.

Beginning in 1891 as the headquarters of the Refuge Assurance Company, the Kimpton has spent the last 26 years as a popular upmarket hotel with stirring views of the Manchester skyline. The tastefully appointed city-break hotspot hosts businessmen, honeymooners, the-boy-done-good anniversary Instagrammers and, according to reports, the ghost of a grieving war widow who died by hurling herself down the main staircase. Guests have reported such an eeriness that they didn’t last the night, while others have heard the sound of children playing in the early hours, coming from the infamous room 261.