Plumpton Hall, near Ulverston, is the setting for a local legend that genuinely survives in two distinct and somewhat contradictory forms, worth recording here honestly as such rather than smoothing the two versions together into one artificially unified story. In the more commonly told version, a woman holding an infant appears once each year, said to be labouring under a curse laid directly on her by a homeless, hungry sailor whom she had once turned away from her own door in a moment of unkindness.
In a second, quite different telling, the entire haunting is inverted: the ghost is not the woman at all but a sailor, returning home after a long absence at sea to find his own wife and child waiting in the house, mistaking them for genuine spirits in the dark confusion of the moment, an experience so shocking that it is said to have turned his hair white on the spot.
Both versions plainly share a core image, a sailor, a woman, a child, a moment of real terror connected to turning away or being turned away, but they disagree entirely on who is actually the ghost and who is the one being haunted. No documented source resolving which, if either, version might actually be the original has been traced for this entry; it is recorded here with both readings given honestly side by side rather than choosing arbitrarily between them.
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