Hyde is a former cotton town on the eastern fringe of Greater Manchester, built up rapidly in the nineteenth century around its textile mills. It retains a landscape of mill-era terraces and public buildings, and its character was shaped by the industrial expansion that transformed it from a rural township into a substantial manufacturing centre within a few generations.

Haunting reports from Hyde are rooted in the everyday fabric of a working town. Accounts are associated with ordinary houses, former commercial premises, and buildings long since demolished, and they draw on the experience of communities living close together in places that were already old when the reports were first set down.