Clegg Hall, a Grade II listed building standing about two miles northeast of Rochdale, carries one of the region's most fully developed boggart legends, first set down in writing by the Victorian folklorist John Roby in his influential collection Traditions of Lancashire and retold many times since in local ghost-story and folklore compilations.
The story, traditionally dated to the fourteenth century, though the surviving building itself is a seventeenth-century structure, concerns a member of the Clegg family who murdered his two young orphaned nephews, the rightful heirs to the estate, by throwing them from a balcony into the hall's moat, in order to seize their inheritance for himself. In a detail that distinguishes this boggart legend from more straightforward murder-victim ghost stories, it is not the murdered children whose spirits are said to haunt Clegg Hall, but the murderer's own, said to have been driven by guilt over what he had done to remain bound to the place. One striking element preserved in some tellings has the children's own voices warning their returning father "Father beware!" before the killing, suggesting a slightly different or expanded version of events than the bare outline usually given.
The legend was given further popular currency through a ballad, "Sir Roland and Clegg Hall Boggart", composed by the Rochdale writer William Nuttall and communicated to Roby by Nuttall himself; in Nuttall's version the murderer is named Sir Roland and the killing carried out with a dagger on the children as they slept in their beds, rather than the balcony-and-moat method given in the bare prose tradition. As with most boggart legends of this vintage, no contemporary fourteenth-century record survives to corroborate the murder itself, and the story should be read as a well-preserved piece of Lancashire oral and literary tradition rather than documented local history, which the traditional confidence rating here reflects.
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