412 Manchester Road

412 Manchester Road in Heaton Chapel is a large Victorian building that has served various commercial and residential purposes. During the First World War it was occupied by a Polish immigrant family, who experienced a series of disturbing events shortly after moving in. One of the teenage daughters was first disturbed by a vanity box opening and closing on her dressing table. Later, she was woken to find a black figure with a grotesque face standing at the foot of her bed, screaming what sounded like “Try and find me.” On several occasions, she and her sister saw the same figure, around six feet tall and carrying a lantern, descend the stairs into the cellar where it would pause beside an old well before disappearing into the wall. Their father, a practical man not given to imaginative explanation, had his bedclothes pulled from him by invisible hands while alone in his room. Enquiries into the building’s history revealed that it had previously housed Irish navvies brought in to work on the Heaton Chapel railway, along with a number of prostitutes. When the building was cleared after their departure, the bones of several infants were found beneath the floorboards. The question of what became of the women, and what lay at the bottom of the cellar well, was never answered. The family believed the figure to be the murderer returning to the scene of his crime.