Mary Ann Cotton was hanged at Durham County Gaol on 24 March 1873 after being convicted of poisoning her own stepson with arsenic, a single conviction that only hinted at the true scale of her crimes. She is widely believed by historians to have actually killed considerably more people over the years, including several husbands, a lover, a friend, and as many as eleven of her own children, most of them for the sake of small amounts of insurance money, making her one of the most prolific serial killers in the entire history of British crime.
The Dun Cow on Old Elvet, standing close to the old gaol where she was finally executed, carries a long-standing nickname as the Hangman's Pub, earned because it is said to have been used regularly by the prison's own executioner both before and after carrying out hangings there.
Local tradition holds that Cotton's own restless spirit followed the hangman back to the pub after her execution, and staff and customers over the years have reported beer pumps interfering with themselves, objects moving without explanation, footsteps echoing through empty corridors, and occasional glimpses of a figure standing in the bar. The pub's genuine history as the hangman's own regular haunt is a matter of solid local record; the haunting itself rests, as with so many comparable pub stories, on the kind of repeated but ultimately unverified staff reports typical of old buildings carrying a genuinely grim history behind them.
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