Dalston Hall, a fortified pele tower dating from the fifteenth century and now operating as a hotel near Carlisle, carries one of Cumbria's most elaborate hotel-ghost rosters found anywhere in this collection, an unusually large and specific set of named figures rather than the single, generic haunting that most comparably old buildings settle for. Lady Jane, described consistently in Tudor dress, is the best-known and most frequently reported of the hall's ghosts, her period costume placing her origin firmly within the house's earliest working centuries.
The cellar carries its own separate identity, associated with an entity nicknamed the Handyman, blamed specifically for moving barrels and causing other disturbances within the building's working storage areas, a presence defined by function rather than appearance. A considerably more overtly malevolent figure, called Mr Fingernails and described by those who report him as a black mass rather than any recognisable human shape, adds a genuinely darker note to the hall's otherwise varied cast. A further tradition tells of a courtesan said to have been dragged by her hair somewhere within the building, a violent fragment of story with no fuller context attached to explain who did the dragging or why.
Sad Emily rounds out the roster, the name given specifically to a spirit associated with Room 4, where young women staying at the hall are said to have reported being violently affected in ways the surviving accounts do not spell out in further detail. No documented history connecting any of these figures, Lady Jane, the Handyman, Mr Fingernails, the dragged courtesan, or Sad Emily, to a real, named historical individual has been traced for this entry, and no single date ties any of them together. The roster reads, honestly, as an accumulation of separate guest and staff stories built up gradually over the hall's long working life as a hotel, rather than as one single, coherent historical account with a unified origin.
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