Ford Green Hall in Smallthorne is generally described as the oldest building still standing anywhere in Stoke-on-Trent, a timber-framed farmhouse originally built for Hugh Ford and occupied continuously by his family for around two centuries before it eventually passed through other hands entirely. It now operates as a small museum of local life, its rooms carefully furnished in period style to give visitors a genuine sense of how the house would have looked and felt during its working centuries as a family farmhouse.
Its best-known reported haunting is a small and genuinely oddly domestic one, distinct in tone from the grander, more solemn hauntings recorded at many comparable old houses elsewhere in this collection: a cat, seen by a number of different visitors running quickly into one of the parlours, which, on being followed or specifically searched for immediately afterward, turns out not to be there at all, vanished as completely as if it had never existed in the first place.
No specific date or named witness is attached to any of the individual sightings, and the story has the genuine flavour of an accumulated staff anecdote, repeated warmly to visitors on tours over many years, rather than resting on any single documented incident with firm evidential weight behind it. It has nonetheless been told consistently enough, and fondly enough, over that time to have become the house's own signature ghost story, a small vanishing cat standing in, in its own modest way, for the countless real animals that would genuinely have lived and worked alongside the Ford family across two centuries of ordinary farmhouse life.
Comments