Renishaw Hall has been home to the Sitwell family for generations, and is probably best known today for having raised the Sitwell literary trio, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, three of the more colourful and iconoclastic figures of early twentieth-century English letters. The house's ghost story, though, predates their fame and reaches back to building work carried out by their father, Sir George Sitwell, in the 1880s.
While reworking a set of bedrooms to expand the hall's grand staircase, workers made an unsettling discovery: a coffin, dated to roughly the seventeenth century, that showed clear signs of having once held a body, traces of clothing and hair remained inside, but which was otherwise empty. No explanation was ever established for why the coffin had been left in the fabric of the house, sealed away, with no body actually present.
The bedroom directly above where the coffin was found has carried a female haunting ever since. Guests staying in the room have reported being woken during the night by the sensation of cold lips kissing their cheek, sometimes more than once in a single night, an intimate and specific piece of activity that has made this one of the more distinctive reported hauntings in Derbyshire's country houses. A second, apparently separate figure has also been reported elsewhere in the hall: a servant girl, described consistently as having grey hair beneath a white cap and wearing a blue dress with a dark shirt, suggesting a domestic worker from an earlier century rather than any connection to the mysterious coffin itself. Between the two, Renishaw's haunting has stayed remarkably consistent in its details across more than a century of being retold, which is part of what has kept it one of the better-known ghost stories in this part of Derbyshire.
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