Forty Hall was built between 1629 and 1632 by Sir Nicholas Rainton, a merchant who became Lord Mayor of London, on a hill overlooking the former royal palace of Elsyng. Enfield Council bought the house in 1951, and it has been open to the public since. The writer Jay Hollis grew up beside the park and has written both about the house and, in his book Haunted Enfield (2013), about the borough's other hauntings.
The first floor landing is the focus. In the years before the 2010 to 2012 renovation, visitors would ask if the house was haunted because they had felt watched on the landing. In the 1980s an electrician repairing a socket felt he was being watched the whole time by what he called a friendly presence. A security guard fled one night after hearing his name called there and would not go in after dark again. In the 1990s a local paper told of a cleaner who often felt someone standing behind her, and when she looked over her shoulder she could see an arm in a black garment, though turning further showed nothing. She also found the sheets of a four poster bed in an adjoining room disturbed. All About London repeats that the bedclothes in what locals call Raintons Bedroom were found disturbed when the room was sealed off.
Hollis is candid that one story does not stand up: the ghost of a servant girl locked in the cellar in the 1700s is now thought to have been invented by a member of Enfield's Parks Authority in the 1960s to increase visitor numbers. He also reports a ghostly white carriage drawn by four white horses, seen emerging through the hedge on the road at the eastern end of the park by a young couple, which he links to the footprint of Elsyng Palace revealed by Enfield Archaeological Society excavations. Forty Hall is tagged traditional because the accounts are anecdotal but come from named categories of witness over several decades.
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