Hardwick Hall is one of the great show houses of Elizabethan England, built between 1590 and 1597 for Bess of Hardwick after she had already outlived four husbands and amassed one of the largest fortunes in the country. Its famous motto, more glass than wall, describes a house built deliberately to display wealth through vast expanses of window, and it survives today in a remarkably complete state, cared for by the National Trust.
The most persistent ghost story attached to the hall is simply Bess herself, reported over the years walking the Long Gallery where the house's collection of tapestries and portraits still hangs much as it did in her lifetime. Other reported figures include a woman in blue seen in various parts of the house and, more distinctively, a monk seen in the grounds by two witnesses driving through Hardwick Park in January 1976, though the connection between a monastic figure and a house built well after the dissolution of the monasteries is not explained by any specific local legend.
The hall's other notable haunting concerns Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher and political theorist best known for Leviathan, who served for many years as tutor to the Cavendish family at Hardwick and Chatsworth and died at Hardwick in 1679 at the age of 91. Tradition holds that Hobbes wished to be buried on the estate he had called home for so long, but that this was not granted, and that his spirit has walked the grounds ever since in search of the rest he was denied. Alongside these named figures, Hardwick has a long-running background hum of smaller reported phenomena: children's voices heard with no children present, doors that open by themselves, and books found lying on the floor of rooms that were locked, which staff have generally treated as a mild curiosity rather than something to build a ghost tour around.
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