Gainsborough Old Hall was begun around 1460 for Sir Thomas Burgh, and its great hall, kitchens and medieval roof structure survive today with unusual completeness for a building of its age. The hall passed through several owning families, spent time as a coaching inn, and later housed shops and offices before becoming the museum and visitor attraction it is today, giving it a very long working history for ghost stories to accumulate around.
The most frequently told is the Grey Lady, a figure in Tudor dress associated with a corridor that staff and visitors have come to call the Ghostly Corridor, after a long-hidden door was uncovered there during renovation work. Some versions of the story give her the name Elizabeth Burgh and connect her to the hall's founding family; others tell an entirely separate tale of an unnamed lord's daughter, forbidden from marrying a soldier she had fallen in love with because of his poverty, who is said to have died of heartbreak and to now walk the same part of the building. The two tales are not always kept distinct in local retellings, which suggests a single core haunting story that has picked up different explanatory details over the years rather than two genuinely separate cases.
A more recent addition to the hall's ghost lore is the reported sighting of a small boy in the west range, now used as the hall's gift shop. Staff and visitors researching the building's history found record of a boy who died at the hall during the Victorian period, and have since connected that record to the sightings, though the link is inference rather than anything documented at the time. Taken together, Gainsborough Old Hall's hauntings read as the layered folklore of a genuinely very old building rather than a single well-evidenced case, but the building's real and well-documented history gives the stories more to hang on than most.
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