The Bell and Bottle at Kirkham, a former public house now converted into a working restaurant, occupies a site carrying a traditional connection to a genuinely sad nineteenth-century tragedy: a young stable lad, working in the stables that formerly stood on these same premises, is said to have been trampled to death by a horse he was tending, an entirely plausible kind of fatal accident for anyone working closely with large, powerful animals in that era.
His ghost, remembered simply and affectionately as the Stable Lad, is said to appear only occasionally within the building today, a brief and genuinely melancholy presence rather than any dramatic or frightening haunting, his rare appearances entirely consistent with the quiet, understated nature of the tragedy that supposedly created him in the first place.
That gentle, infrequent quality fits naturally with the site's own gradual transformation from working stables into a hospitality venue over the many intervening years, the Stable Lad himself seeming to have faded almost as thoroughly from active haunting as the stables where he once worked have faded from the building's own physical structure.
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