Hall i' th' Wood earns its place in English industrial history entirely independently of any ghost story: it was here, in 1779, that Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, the machine that combined the earlier spinning jenny and water frame and went on to transform cotton manufacture across Lancashire and beyond. The hall itself, Grade I listed and part-timbered, has origins going back to around 1483, making it a genuinely old survival on Bolton's northeastern edge, and it now operates as a museum in Crompton's honour under the care of Bolton Council.
Alongside that well-documented history, local ghost-story directories attribute a haunting to the hall involving several separate figures: a man dressed in green, a man dressed in black, and two named women, Mary and Betty. No further narrative detail, specific incident, or dating is given for any of these figures in the sources consulted for this entry, and none of them has been connected to any documented historical resident of the hall, whether from the Crompton family's own tenancy or the building's earlier medieval history.
Given the near-total absence of supporting detail behind what amounts to little more than a named list of figures, this entry is rated dubious. It is recorded here nonetheless because Hall i' th' Wood's status as one of Bolton's most historically significant buildings makes even a thinly sourced ghost story worth noting for completeness, alongside the considerably better documented history of the building's actual industrial significance.
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