Manchester is one of the great industrial cities of England, its history running from a Roman fort at Castlefield through a medieval collegiate church to the cotton warehouses and civic institutions of the Victorian period and beyond. The city’s rapid expansion during the nineteenth century demolished much of its earlier fabric, but what survived, the cathedral, the old collegiate buildings, the Victorian civic quarter, has generated haunting accounts of corresponding weight.

Its ghost archive is large and varied. Reports range from apparitions in former telephone exchanges and abandoned railway stations to older traditions connected to the city’s pre-industrial past. Manchester has always been extensively covered by its press, and the archive benefits from that documentation in ways that accounts from less-recorded areas often do not.