Ghosts of England

A librarian's table still bears the Devil's own hoofprint. A ghost-tour guide leads a smiling stranger around a corner - and watches him vanish into thin air. A pub landlady has shared her bar with something unseen for fifty years, and wouldn't have it any other way.

Manchester built the modern world. It was the first great industrial city, the beating heart of the global cotton trade, a target for Hitler's bombers and, decades later, an IRA bomb that tore through its very centre. Rebuilt again and again across two thousand years - Roman fort, medieval manor, Cottonopolis, Blitzed metropolis - it is a city that has never stopped keeping something of everyone who lived through each version of it.

In Ghosts of Manchester, you will step into the libraries, theatres, town halls, and back-street pubs where the city's past refuses to stay past. From the genuine burn mark left by a summoned Devil in one of Britain's oldest libraries, to the real 1993 case that drove a family from their home and returned five years later next door, this collection gathers the true, documented hauntings of a city that rarely gets the paranormal reputation it has earned.

Drawing on historical record, first-hand witness accounts, and contemporary news reporting, this book grounds every chapter in a real building, a real event, and - wherever the record allows - a real name.

Step into the fog off the Irwell and discover:

• The Devil's Hoofprint: the scorch mark at Chetham's Library, and the Elizabethan sorcerer who left it.
• The Massacre on St Peter's Fields: the real 1819 tragedy beneath the Free Trade Hall, and the haunted reputation it left behind.
• The House That Would Not Let Go: the 1993 poltergeist case that made national news - and came back.
• The Man Who Vanished Mid-Tour: a ghost-tour guide's own encounter with the very history he tells for a living.