Greater Manchester was created in 1974 from parts of Lancashire and Cheshire, and the join is still visible in places. Its landscape is predominantly urban, the product of one of the most intensive periods of industrial expansion in British history, and the built fabric that expansion produced, mills, terraced housing, civic buildings, commercial premises, survives in varying states across the region. Some of it has been repurposed, some demolished, and a good deal simply left to accumulate a history of its own.

The region’s ghost lore tends to be rooted in the ordinary. Hauntings of pubs, domestic houses, and former workplaces are more characteristic of the archive than apparitions in country houses or ancient churches, which reflects the communities who built and occupied these buildings and left accounts in the local press rather than in estate records. Greater Manchester has always been well covered by its newspapers, and that press record has preserved a body of haunting material that is, in the better cases, more thoroughly documented than equivalent accounts from rural areas.