Nostell Priory takes its name from the Augustinian priory that once stood on the site before the Winn family built the present Palladian mansion directly over it starting in 1733, a house now cared for by the National Trust and celebrated today for its remarkable Chippendale furniture and genuinely fine Robert Adam interiors. Its ghost story is considerably more recent and more domestic than the building's grand architecture might otherwise suggest: a maid known simply as Nancy is said to have died in the 1920s in a tragic accident involving the house's own service lift, putting her head into the shaft to check on the exact position of the car and being caught fatally as it moved unexpectedly.
Nancy's reputation among staff and locals is notably gentle for a ghost associated with such a genuinely grim accident; she is consistently described as friendly rather than frightening by everyone who mentions her, and those who live or work near the priory speak of her continuing presence with a kind of easy, genuine familiarity rather than any real dread.
As with many country house ghost stories recorded throughout this collection, the underlying accident itself is not independently documented in any source found for this particular record, so Nancy's own death, like the haunting that followed it, rests entirely on inherited tradition rather than on any verified historical record that could actually confirm the details of what happened to her.
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