Hannah Beswick's story is one of the more genuinely well-documented pieces of macabre English social history to survive attached to a specific Greater Manchester address, and it long predates the twentieth-century ghost sightings that later became attached to it. Beswick, a wealthy woman of Birchin Bower in Hollinwood, developed an intense and well-recorded fear of being buried alive after witnessing, or being told of, her brother John's eyelid flickering during his own funeral; on examination by the family physician, Dr Charles White, John was found to still be alive, an experience that appears to have permanently shaped Hannah's own wishes for her eventual death.
When Beswick died in February 1758, her body was embalmed rather than buried, on her own instructions, and kept above ground so that it could be periodically checked for any sign that she too might merely be in a deep and prolonged state of suspended animation rather than genuinely dead. For a period her preserved body was kept in an old clock case at Dr White's own home. Eventually bequeathed to the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society, her mummified remains went on public display, earning her the popular name the Manchester Mummy, or the Mummy of Birchin Bower, and remaining a documented, catalogued museum exhibit rather than a rumour or legend.
Birchin Bower itself, Beswick's former home, was eventually demolished to make way for the Ferranti electronics works, and it is here that the story crosses from documented eccentric history into ghost story proper. In the 1950s, around 35 employees of the Ferranti works built on the site independently reported seeing a figure dressed in a black silk gown and white cap gliding across what had once been the house's parlour, vanishing at one particular flagstone each time, and identified the apparition, evidently from existing knowledge of the local legend, as Hannah Beswick herself. Her remains were finally given a conventional burial in 1868, more than a century after her death and on the initiative of the Bishop of Manchester rather than her own family, and some retellings of the story hold that her spirit's restlessness, manifesting in the later Ferranti sightings, stemmed from the fact that her own explicit wishes about never being conventionally buried had ultimately been overridden. Given the well-documented historical facts of Beswick's embalming, museum display, and eventual 1868 burial, this entry is rated documented, while the later Ferranti apparition sightings remain, as with any such report, a matter of witness testimony rather than independently verified fact.
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