Samlesbury Hall

Gilbert de Southworth acquired half the manor of Samlesbury by marrying Alice d'Ewyas, and in 1325 he built the present hall to replace a house destroyed in Robert the Bruce's raids into Lancashire. The Great Hall is his; the striking south-west wing, with its quatrefoil timbering, was added in about 1530 by Sir Thomas Southworth, a soldier in the Scottish wars and High Sheriff of Lancashire, who turned a defensive manor into a comfortable family home. Samlesbury was the Southworth seat for more than 300 years.

The family were stubborn Catholics through the Reformation, and their troubles are the soil the ghost stories grow in. In 1612, the year of the Pendle trials, fourteen-year-old Grace Sowerbutts accused her grandmother Jennet Bierley, her aunt Ellen Bierley and Jane Southworth of the hall of witchcraft, child murder and cannibalism. At Lancaster Assizes the judge concluded that Grace had been coached, and the "Samlesbury witches" walked free, an unusual outcome in that grim year. The White Lady's story of a forbidden love between a Catholic Southworth daughter and a Protestant neighbour, ended by murder, belongs to the same century of religious hatred, though the sources place it variously in Elizabethan and Stuart times and no record of the killings survives.

In 1678, with no direct male heir, the Southworths sold the hall to Thomas Braddyll. It passed through a succession of owners and uses, at one point being let as a farmhouse and later as a boarding school, before Joseph Harrison bought it in 1862. He entertained lavishly, ran up ruinous debts and shot himself in 1878. In the early twentieth century a building company bought the hall intending to demolish it; local businessmen raised the money to save it, and in 1925 ownership passed to the Samlesbury Hall Trust, which still runs it as a free-to-enter historic house today.

The White Lady is the sighting people come for, and the reports are remarkably consistent in one respect: she is seen as often outside the hall as inside it. Staff and visitors describe a woman in pale, old-fashioned dress crossing the grounds or the fields towards the road, and the story of bus drivers stopping at the A677 stop for a passenger who never boards has been repeated for decades. Inside, she is reported on the stairs and in the upper rooms, usually as a fleeting figure rather than a face-to-face encounter.

Television has been here more than once. Most Haunted filmed at Samlesbury in 2004, with Yvette Fielding and Derek Acorah exploring a house they introduced as the scene of several murders driven by religious intolerance; during the night Acorah appeared to be taken over by a spirit calling herself Dorothy, referring to "father" and "the devil". The programme returned for a Most Haunted Live broadcast, and the American series Ghost Hunters International also investigated the hall. As always with Acorah, whose methods were later challenged by his own colleagues, the possession is best filed under entertainment; the hall itself neither endorses nor denies what the cameras recorded.

Away from television, the hall's own Ghost Project and visiting groups such as Haunted Happenings and Paranormal Eye report the standard repertoire: knocks in answer to questions in the Priest Room, footsteps in the Long Gallery, and a persistent sense of being watched in the Great Hall. Photographs of the "bloodstain" in the Priest Room circulate widely. The sceptical view is that a 700-year-old timber house creaks, that the stain is simply an old mark on old boards, and that the White Lady is a classic folk motif attached to a real family's real sorrows. Even so, the number of people who claim to have seen her on the road is hard to wave away entirely.

Samlesbury Hall is on the A677 at Samlesbury, roughly midway between Preston and Blackburn in Lancashire, and is easy to reach from junction 31 of the M6. The hall and gardens are open to the public most days of the week, typically from late morning to mid-afternoon, and entry to the house is free; check the hall's website for current days, because it closes to visitors on some days for weddings and events. Inside you can see the Great Hall, the Long Gallery, the Priest Room and the exhibitions; outside there are gardens, bee-keeping, a play area, a cafe and a well-stocked shop. The hall is a medieval timber building with stairs and uneven floors, so parts of the upper storey are not step-free. There is free parking on site.

Ghost hunts run regularly, both the hall's own Great Victorian Ghost Hunt with the Samlesbury Hall Ghost Project and overnight events by independent operators, all for adults only. There is no accommodation in the hall itself, but Preston, Blackburn and the villages of the Ribble Valley have plenty of hotels, pubs with rooms and cottages within twenty minutes' drive, and Clitheroe makes a good base if you want to combine Samlesbury with Pendle Hill.