Haunted places in the United Kingdom

British ghost stories can be surprisingly well dated. The Wesley family recorded the knocks and groans of a poltergeist they called Old Jeffrey at Epworth in 1716 and 1717. Tales of apparitions at the Tower of London go back to 1816 and 1817. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall has a famous, much-disputed photograph from 1936, and a young engineer said he saw Roman legionaries marching through a cellar in York in 1953.

About half of the places here are castles and old inns, with abbeys, manor houses, pubs and tunnels making up the rest, and many of them can be visited. The UK also has a long habit of awarding titles: Pluckley was listed by Guinness in 1989 as Britain's most haunted village, while Chillingham and the Schooner Hotel are each billed as the most haunted of their kind.

Those titles deserve some suspicion. Historians trace Furness Abbey's eerie image largely to Gothic writers, and the "Kreed Kafer" episode at Bodmin Jail became a famous Most Haunted hoax. Our pages say where a story comes from as well as what it claims.