The clocktower building on Oxford Street that now houses the Kimpton Clocktower Hotel was built in phases between 1891 and 1932 as the head office of the Refuge Assurance Company, to designs by the architect Alfred Waterhouse and, in its later phases, his son Paul. It is one of Manchester's most recognisable Victorian and Edwardian commercial buildings, and after decades as an insurance office it became the Palace Hotel and, more recently, the Kimpton Clocktower Hotel.
The building's principal modern ghost story concerns a staircase that, in the building's insurance-office days, was reserved for male staff only. According to the accounts collected for this entry, a war widow, grieving and in a moment of despair, threw herself down this staircase to her death, and it is her presence that visitors and staff now report on and around it. Room 261 is consistently named as the room in which the crying associated with her is heard most loudly, and some guests staying there report hearing the sounds of children playing during the night; unexplained children's voices are also reported along one corridor of the hotel more generally.
No primary source, such as a contemporary newspaper report or coroner's record, naming the widow or dating her death has been traced for this entry, and the story circulates only in tourism- and hospitality-oriented retellings of the hotel's history, which is reflected in the single_report confidence given here. Even so, it is a good example of how a building's own internal architecture, in this case a staircase whose gendered access rules speak to the working conditions of a Victorian insurance office, can end up supplying the shape of the ghost story eventually told about it.
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