Quarry Bank Mill at Styal, one of the best-preserved Georgian cotton mills in Britain and now managed by the National Trust, is associated with a number of reported hauntings centred on the Apprentice House, where pauper children were boarded from 1790 until 1847, and the upper floors of the mill itself.
The most documented figure is known as the Woman in White, said to appear in the attics of the Apprentice House and on the top floors of the mill, though staff consulting the records of accidents and fatalities found no female deaths that might account for her. The end attic, where Mrs Timperley, wife of the house superintendent, was laid out after her death in 1835, is described as the most consistently unsettling part of the building. A cold spot is regularly noted on the stairs between the attic and the medical room below, remarked upon by visitors with no prior knowledge of the history, and it was here that workmen renovating the attic in the 1980s reported seeing a figure while working in the room below. A staff member locking up alone at dusk described feeling a presence directly behind her in the same space, while a dog accompanying another member of staff refused to climb the stairs to the attic and would not re-enter the building afterwards. The custodian’s children, who lived in the cottage attached to the house, described seeing a lady in old clothes standing at the foot of their beds when they were young.
In the schoolroom, visitors have described the sensation of being watched near the fireplace, and on one occasion a visitor refused to enter at all, saying the house had an evil presence. In the mill itself, staff have reported a female figure on the top floors, moving through spaces where the records suggest no woman ever died.
In 1998, the Wilmslow Express Advertiser reported that a paranormal investigation team had photographed anomalous cloudy shapes near the mill and along the lane to the park lake on a clear evening at dusk, with the mill’s chief executive confirming that sightings of a mysterious woman in white in the surrounding woods had been reported on a number of occasions.
