Chetham's Library, founded in 1653 in the medieval buildings that had once housed the college attached to Manchester's parish church, now the cathedral, has as good a claim as any building in the city to genuine antiquity, and its ghost story fits that setting. A robed figure, usually described as a monk or priest, is said to drift silently between the library's dark wooden book stacks and alcoves, sometimes accompanied, in the fuller versions of the story, by a low, mournful chant, said to come from a priest connected to the college's early days who was executed during the Reformation-era suppression of the monasteries for defying the dissolution.
The library's site carries a genuinely tangled history that gives this kind of story somewhere to attach itself: the buildings stand close to, and in part overlap, the site of the vanished medieval Manchester Castle, and the whole complex has been continuously occupied for the better part of six centuries. A separate and quite different piece of building folklore, unconnected to the robed figure, concerns a hoofprint-shaped mark on a windowsill known as Satan's Hoofprint, popularly associated with the Elizabethan mathematician and occultist John Dee, who has a documented connection to the site as warden of the college in the early seventeenth century.
No specific date, name, or documented death has been traced for the robed monk himself in the sources consulted for this entry, and the story exists only as a piece of library lore passed on to visitors rather than a case with any surviving contemporary record, hence the dubious confidence rating given here. Even so, the pairing of a genuinely old and historically layered building with a correspondingly old-fashioned ghost story is a comfortable fit, whatever the story's actual evidential standing.
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