Wirksworth's Red Lion was once the town's principal coaching inn, and it still carries the physical evidence of that past in its narrow, low archway, built to let stagecoaches and mail coaches pass directly through the front of the building into a yard beyond. That archway is also the setting for the pub's ghost story: a coachman, manoeuvring his vehicle through the tight passage, is said to have been caught out when his horses suddenly took fright and lurched forward before he had time to duck his head beneath the low stonework. He was decapitated on the spot.
His ghost, described consistently as a dark, headless figure dressed in a dark green cloak, is said to have haunted the Red Lion ever since, a piece of local tradition old enough that no specific date or coachman's name survives with it, which is typical of this kind of coaching-inn accident story. The tale fits a recognisable pattern found at old coaching inns across England, where a genuinely dangerous piece of everyday infrastructure, a low archway built for a horse-drawn era rather than anything larger, has understandably attracted its own accident legend over the generations the building has stood.
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