Workington Hall, now a substantial ruin in the town of Workington, was for centuries the seat of the Curwen family, who sheltered Mary, Queen of Scots here briefly in 1568 after her flight from Scotland, a genuine and historically significant episode in the hall's long documented history. The hall's best-known ghost is Sir Henry Curwen, remembered locally as 'Galloping Harry', a sixteenth-century figure with a reputation as a womaniser and gambler alongside his genuine documented interest in horse breeding, said in local tradition to have bred 'very fine' horses on the estate during his own lifetime.
His ghost is associated with the sound of galloping heard in and around the ruins, a fitting echo of the very activity he was best remembered for while alive, riding and breeding the horses that gave him his memorable nickname.
A separate strand of the hall's wider haunted reputation concerns the childish voices of children playing and singing nursery rhymes, heard in and around the building, which local speculation connects to children of prisoners held in dungeons at Workington during the Border reiver period, deported or otherwise ending up in dire conditions with a plausibly high mortality rate given the harsh realities of that turbulent frontier era. This specific causal link is offered here as theory rather than as a documented finding in the sources available for this entry, worth noting honestly as speculation rather than established fact.
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