Derby Cathedral, formally the Cathedral Church of All Saints, has a reported ghost tradition of its own that centres less on a dramatic haunted-house set-piece and more on a single, quietly tragic story. Most reported sightings around the cathedral are of a tearful woman holding a child, a fairly generic grieving-mother image without a name or date attached. The more distinctive and more often repeated story, though, belongs to a man remembered as John Crossland.
According to the story, in a period when it was considered acceptable for those who passed a death sentence to avoid carrying it out themselves, so as to keep their own conscience and standing clear, Derby Gaol found itself needing an executioner for three condemned prisoners: a father and his two sons. The father was offered his life in exchange for hanging his own sons, and refused. The elder son was then offered the same deal, to hang his father and younger brother, and he too refused. It was the youngest son, John, who agreed, executing both his father and his brother with his own hands in order to save his own life, and who went on to serve as Derby's hangman for the rest of his working days as a result.
Whatever became of John Crossland after that, local tradition holds that his spirit still walks the grounds of Derby Cathedral, understood as a man forever seeking a forgiveness that, given what he did to save himself, the story implies he can never quite receive. No specific date, burial record or documented historical source is given for the Crossland family or the case itself in the material available, and the story should be read as local oral tradition, repeated by Derby ghost-tour writers, rather than a documented historical event, but it remains one of the more genuinely melancholy stories attached to any site in the city.
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