Not every old building contains a tangible atmosphere (whether for good or ill) that captures generations of people. Tabley Old Hall, once situated on its pretty little island, certainly had this characteristic and those visitors who produced or published accounts always attested to its appeal.
The Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote of her visit with friends: 'Here we rambled, lounged and meditated; some stretched on the grass in indolent repose... if it rained, what merrymaking in the old hall! It was galleried, with oak settles and old armours hung up, and a painted window from ceiling to floor. The strange sound our voices had in that unfrequented stone hall!'
Tabley Old Hall, c.1900
Writer Richard Le Gallienne described, in his 1900 Travels in England, the sense of character he found at the Old Hall: 'We often say that certain old houses make one feel that their long dead occupants have only left them a few moments ago; just flung out of doors to go a-hawking, or just left the tapestry-frame to gather flowers in the meadows. The fancy is indeed hackneyed enough, – yet there are a few old houses that really inspire it... Warm human breath still seems to hang in the rooms.'
A View of the Old Hall, Tabley, Cheshire
1776 (?)
Samuel Stringer (1750–1784) 
For Le Gallienne, a touch of wistfulness was attached to his experience of this venerable building. He was also aware of but dismissed ghost stories associated with Tabley Old Hall. 'Local sentimentalists,' he wrote, 'have invented vulgar ghosts for its occupants'. For Le Gallienne, they could have nothing in common with the exquisite vision he had created with his prose.
A ground floor room at Tabley OId Hall
The 1672 virginal (on the left) is now on display in Tabley House 
One of the earliest printed mentions of ghosts occupying the Old Hall can be found in an 1878 volume of The Builder. It is a brief but intriguing comment in a review of an exhibition by the Institute of Painters in Water Colours. There the artist John Fulleylove exhibited two pictures, one of Tabley Old Hall: 'a dear old haunted-looking house', the writer describes, 'with a garden gay in the foreground with great rank poppies.' The reviewer had probably never visited Tabley but imagined that ghosts would be quite natural to such a building. A different interior view by Fulleylove shows the porch in glorious colour.
In 1895, The Gentleman's Magazine published this account: 'Of course there is a ghost room, securely boarded up, and a ghost story, which used to be admirably told by the aged attendant, who said she was not afraid to live in the house. She related that a groom had once slept there, and was wakened up in the night by hearing strange sounds. It must have been the ghost, for the ears of the dog which slept beside the bed was standing erect.'
A few years later, in 1898, William Robert Credland, Deputy-Chief Librarian of Manchester public libraries, published Days Off: Pen and Pencil Sketches in Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Elsewhere. He included a visit to Tabley Old Hall, where he was shown the doorway to a small room, not 'opened within the memory of man... called the ghost room, whereupon you immediately feel your back hair becoming pleasantly agitated, and your nerves tingled with delight'.
The gallery at Tabley Old Hall
Where ghosts supposedly gazed down on the living occupants 
Credland recounts the story: during the 'foggy past', there was a grand celebration, where a man became jealous of his wife paying attention to another man. After a brutal fight, the husband was killed – the wife then 'seized a dagger and stabbed herself to the heart'. To avoid scandal, the two bodies were sealed in the room. 'And so when the nights are dark and the winds howl around the old house, making airy sounds which have some wild resemblance to music, there may be seen a knight and his lady leaning over the balustrade of the musicians' gallery, and apparently watching some lively scene below.'
The gallery at Tabley Old Hall
The Old Hall 'knight and his lady' appeared on dark and windy nights. The fantastically carved fireplace can now be seen in the Tabley House tearoom 
In retrospect, his account was the high watermark for the ghosts and their narrators. Upon her inheritance of the estate in 1895, Lady Eleanor Leighton-Warren waged a one-woman campaign against the Old Hall being seen as a tourist destination. She reduced the number of visitors to single figures and imposed stringent conditions on their access. She also determinedly swept the ghosts out of Tabley Old Hall and they never dared to show their spectral shadows again.
The Honourable Eleanor Leicester Leighton-Warren (1841–1914)
George R. Chapman (b.1834) 
Richard Le Gallienne's 1900 account noted Lady Leighton's 'very natural indignation' at the invention of 'vulgar ghosts'. It must have been made clear to any garrulous occupant of the Old Hall that they had to stop telling spooky stories: only the reckless or unwise would have defied such an order.
Tabley Old Hall
Eleanor Leighton Warren perhaps telling a charwoman (rolling down her sleeves) to stop telling ghost stories about Tabley Old Hall 
There is a glimpse of Lady Leighton's power in an anecdote told by the Manchester historian Fletcher Moss, reported in The Manchester City News in 1899. Rather foolishly, he had attempted to circumvent Lady Leighton's rules of admittance to Tabley Old Hall and asked a local to let him across to the island. He then reported his interlocutor's worried refusal, 'her ladyship would soon be after me, for they had spy-glasses at the hall and were always watching.'
Another view of the Great Hall gallery where the 'ghosts' liked to appear
The Old Hall was seen as poignant and romantic, and the ghost stories perhaps as a catalyst for delightful shivery feelings, drawing closer to the fire and away from the shadows. However, some people found it a disconcerting building where anything could be believed.
One account reveals how a ghost story could emerge from an unexpected experience. The following was sent in 1872 as a contribution to Charles Darwin's investigation of the expressions of emotions by Arthur Munby, famous for his fascination with working-class Victorian women and his marriage to the servant and diarist Hannah Culwick.
The old staircase at Tabley Old Hall
Munby describes visiting one of the Old Hall's chambers, 'an antique bedroom', and explains he happened to be wearing mourning dress of dark clothing and 'a black Louis XI wideawake, the very shape of hat which Mephistopheles wears at the opera'. Absorbed in his peaceful surroundings, Munby was happened upon by an old woman (he presumes the housekeeper's sister), surprised to find him standing quietly alone, in his archaic clothing. The visibly shocked woman 'uttered a wild and piercing scream' and, in turn, frightened Munby: who 'half fancied her a thing "uncanny", being in a house so old and lonesome... and then I realized the oddity of the situation and ran after her to reassure her.'
Munby and the female occupant met in the corner of the gallery
While very different from the ghost story recorded in The Gentleman's Magazine, it is an intriguing anecdote. Neither Munby nor the housekeeper's sister were entirely at ease in the Old Hall and were quickly terrified: one by what she saw and the observer by her reaction. It remains a curious and awkward account, out of character with the usual rose-tinted descriptions of the Old Hall.
The ruined Tabley Old Hall, 2024
Now Tabley Old Hall is a ruin but remnants, photographs, paintings and furniture can be seen on a visit to Tabley House. The supposed sealed room would have collapsed like the rest of the building brought down by subsidence, neglect and the elements. But Credland's elaborate version of the ghost story has had a fairly good afterlife, reproduced several times in the twentieth century. There was even an addition to his version when Peter Underwood commented in his 1978 Ghosts of the North West: 'their ghosts are doomed to haunt the house they knew in happier times until their bodies are found and buried in consecrated ground.'
But, of course, the Old Hall's ghost stories are entertainment, elaborated over generations in their many retellings. While the Old Hall collapsed on its island, its ghosts lingered in print to delight, annoy and intrigue readers.
Sarah Webb, Trustee and Volunteer at The Tabley House Collection Trust
