Hanley Town Hall

Designed by Robert Scrivener and originally built as the Queens Hotel in 1869, the Town Hall was acquired by the town of Hanley in 1884. The following article entitled ‘Could Hanley Town Hall be haunted?’ was published in The Stoke Sentinel on 1 April 2014.

HANLEY Town Hall could be haunted after a medium claimed she saw a ghost while investigating spooky goings on.

According to clairvoyant, Christine Walsh, from Northwich, the angry face of a man appeared, accompanied by floating lights, in the public gallery of the old courtroom.

After seeing the eerie apparition, Christine decided to do some further investigating and found some interesting results.

“When I first saw it, it freaked me out a little because it appears to be angry,” she said. “So I decided to see if there was any connection to a death or spirit and the courtroom.

“What I found was that in 1880 there was a sudden death of a man outside the court room.

“Apparently he was waiting in the corridor for the court to open so he could sit in the gallery and watch the proceedings but while he waited he keeled over and died.

“I wonder if this is the ghostly face I saw?”

Christine explained there are several reasons why ghosts appear and why they ‘haunt’ the last place they visited alive.

“Ghosts appear for many reasons, some because they are simply captured in the moment,” she said.

“Or because they wanted to be seen or because they have unfinished business. There are also historical hauntings that hang around in the air like a video tape just replaying.

“Many spirits visit the place they died, often because a traumatic thing happened to them there. Or it may simply be because the place they died in has a special memory for them and they enjoyed being there.”