The Golden Ball, an old public house standing on Morecambe's waterfront, occupies a site with a genuine, well-documented history of press-ganging, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice of forcibly conscripting men, often drinkers seized directly from pub premises with little warning, into Royal Navy service regardless of their own wishes or circumstances. This was not folklore but real historical practice, a genuine source of terror for coastal communities across Britain during the period, and the Golden Ball's own location on the waterfront would have made it exactly the kind of establishment where press gangs regularly operated.
Local tradition holds that the restless energy of men taken unwillingly from the building still lingers there today, unhappy phantoms resentful of having been dragged away from home and family without warning or consent, their service to the Navy beginning not through choice but through violent, unwanted seizure from an ordinary night's drinking.
This is a haunting explained by a real and thoroughly well-attested historical practice, even where the specific ghostly detail itself cannot actually be verified against any surviving record, the genuine terror of press-ganging giving the Golden Ball's reported unrest a plausible historical foundation that many of the county's thinner, more generic hauntings simply cannot claim for themselves.
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