The Old Rectory on Steeple Row, close to Loughborough's own parish church, is named consistently in local heritage and folklore round-ups as one of the town's most frequently mentioned haunted buildings, appearing again and again across different local lists compiled over the years. Unlike some of Loughborough's other reported hauntings recorded elsewhere throughout this collection, no single detailed incident, named witness, or firm date has actually survived attached to this particular story; it appears mainly just as a name repeated in lists of the town's haunted sites rather than as any developed narrative in its own right.
This is a case where the project's own relaxed research bar genuinely matters more than usual: the story is worth recording honestly as a real and recurring piece of local tradition, one that clearly holds real currency among Loughborough residents, but readers should understand it as a genuinely thin one, considerably closer to simply "this building has a reputation" than to any documented account of what was actually seen, by whom, or under what circumstances.
The Old Rectory stands, in that sense, as a useful reminder of how much local haunted-building folklore actually consists of little more than repeated naming rather than developed storytelling, a real and persistent reputation that has, for whatever reason, simply never grown into a fuller narrative the way some comparable buildings elsewhere have.
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