The Hoad Monument, a prominent lighthouse-shaped tower standing on Hoad Hill above Ulverston, was built in 1850 specifically to commemorate Sir John Barrow, the Ulverston-born explorer, dedicated Arctic promoter, and long-serving Second Secretary of the Admiralty after whom both the Barrow Strait and Point Barrow, Alaska, are still named today, a genuinely significant historical figure whose achievements in exploration and naval administration reached well beyond his own modest Cumbrian birthplace.
Local tradition holds that his own spirit haunts the very monument built specifically in his honour, a fitting enough idea given how directly the tower's whole purpose was to keep his memory permanently present within the town he came from.
No specific reported sighting, no firm date, and no actual account of what the haunting itself is even supposed to consist of has been traced for this entry beyond that general attribution, which reads very much as the kind of tradition that attaches itself naturally to a landmark built explicitly to memorialise one particular man, whether or not any specific experience actually originally prompted the belief that he still walks there.
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