The Manor Road Ghost – Ilkeston’s Unsettling Haunting

Manor Road was formerly known as Manners Lane following the acquisition of the land by the Manners family, but before that time and certainly well before the nearby colliery was opened, there existed in the vicinity mineral springs fairly rich in Iron and SulphurIt.

This has been suggested in the past that this ghost is that of a woman who was murdered whilst attending the spring and that her body was discovered one morning lying at the bottom of a well, which had been dug to facilitate extraction of the waters.

It is well known that wherever mineral springs are freely available to large communities, particularly during the eighteenth century, they were constantly attended by substantial numbers of people, by night and day, in all weathers and seasons in the hope of a cure for their physical ills.

 I think that the committal of any serious felony, particularly murder at such a place, in these circumstances can be, substantially discounted, especially as there is no mention of such a crime in existing records and further, the apparition is not that of a woman but of a man.

Legend of the Man in Robes

There is the ghost of a man wearing robes and a tall headdress of a nature associated with necromancy. If such manifestations have a purpose, then that of this one is not clear.

There were several sightings on the night of Saturday, January 6th, 1923, when the local Theatre Royal on Lord Haddon Road was presenting ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers’ but I am not suggesting any connection.

During the late ’20s and early ’30s, several ghost-hunting parties were raised to locate the phantom but none were successful, possibly because they seemed to concentrate their activities towards the top of Manor Road which is not the appropriate area.