Marple Hall

The hall was said to be haunted by King Charles the I, and the daughter of a Roundhead, who was murdered by her father when she fell in love with a Cavalier during the English Civil War.

The murderer was called Henry Bradshaw; his daughter used to have a secret lover in the form of a royalist officer who came to the hall in secret. On one of his clandestine visits his presence was discovered, and a servant managed to drown him in the nearby river Goyt. The girl is said to have pined away through want of her lover and eventually died of a broken heart, returning as a sad spectre to haunt the hall and the banks of the river Goyt, where her lover was so treacherously murdered.

The brother of Henry Bradshaw was John Bradshaw whose name appears on the tribunal that led to the death warrant of Charles the I, probably the reason Charles was also thought to haunt the hall.

Marple Hall fell into disrepair in the 1940s and after being ransacked by vandals was considered a total ruin by 1957 when it was offered for a second time to Marple Council. The Council demolished the Hall and now the grounds where it stood are grassed over.