Raikes Hall in Blackpool, latterly known as a working public house, is said to date back to an earlier existence as a genuine convent, and it is from this much older period that its resident ghost is traditionally drawn: a nun who took her own life by drowning nearby, and whose spirit has reportedly continued to return to the hall ever since her original death.
As with much of Blackpool's older ghost lore recorded elsewhere throughout this collection, the story trades on a claimed earlier religious use of the building rather than on any specific, individually documented tragedy that could actually be checked against a surviving historical record.
The drowned nun's own story remains, in that sense, defined almost entirely by the building's claimed convent past rather than by any developed personal narrative, her identity and the exact circumstances of her death left as vague and unresolved as the convent history itself that supposedly explains her continued presence.
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