There’s a ghost train in Manchester. A dead nightclub owner who still shows up on CCTV from time to time. A yellow dog and a headless hound. Girls on fire and old soldiers standing by the feet of beds with daggers drawn.

Hannah Beswick, the “Manchester Mummy,” so terrified of premature burial that he arranged to be interned above ground in event of her apparent death, in case she should suddenly awaken. She was embalmed and stuffed into a grandfather clock case, and her ghost still walks the factory eventually built over the ground her house stood on.

They even have a park named for a haunting: Boggart Hole Clough, Boggart coming from a German word meaning “gate ghost.” The nearby Bridgewater Canal and the Wet Earth Colliery, where the engineer James Brindley magically made water run uphill, helped kickstart the Industrial Revolution. The first industrial estate in the world is over at Trafford.

I am speaking on Friday at Haunted Machines and FutureEverything, and as you read this I’m on the ghost train heading towards tomorrow.

 

READING: WERNER HERZOOG - A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED, Paul Cronin (UK) (US)