Highgate Hall in Hayfield, built in 1588, is associated with the ghost of a murdered Scottish pedlar whose bones were unearthed in the garden around 1770 and subsequently buried in Hayfield churchyard.
According to local tradition recorded across several Victorian and Edwardian sources, the reburial was not enough to settle the spirit. The ghost was said to linger near the hall and the old well where the pedlar died, appearing by moonlight on Highgate Green. One version describes the ghost as imprisoned in the well itself, sealed beneath a stone slab and reached by a flight of steps. Another has it hovering around the hall. A local verse, quoted in the Glossop Record in 1865, names the hall as the boggart house and places the ghost dancing on Highgate Green at midnight.
By the 1930s the story was already being described as belonging to the days of “our grandfathers.” When the hall was put up for sale in 1965, the estate agent’s notice in the Stockport County Express mentioned the haunting as a selling point.
