Greestone Stairs is one of the steep, genuinely ancient stepped streets that drop sharply away from the cathedral quarter on Lincoln's hill, a piece of medieval urban geography old enough and atmospheric enough in its own right to have naturally attracted more than one ghost story over the centuries. Local ghost-story collections attach two entirely distinct figures to it: a woman said to have come from the former St Joseph's convent nearby, seen descending the steps while carrying a baby, and separately, a man in clerical dress who appears standing under one of the lampposts, in some versions of the story said to have taken his own life by hanging himself at that exact spot.
Both stories are told as fairly standard local hauntings rather than as documented incidents with any named witnesses or firm dates attached to anchor them to actual historical events, and the two figures, the convent woman with her child and the clergyman beneath his lamppost, do not obviously connect to each other in any way beyond simply sharing the same stretch of ancient steps.
As with much of Lincoln's older ghostlore recorded elsewhere throughout this collection, these tales seem to have built up gradually around a genuinely atmospheric and very old part of the city, rather than growing from any single investigated event with clear evidential backing, the steep, shadowed stairs themselves apparently providing exactly the right setting for two entirely separate stories to take root and persist side by side.
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