Belgrave Hall is a Grade II* listed Queen Anne-style house on the northern edge of Leicester, built between 1709 and 1713 for hosiery merchant Edmund Cradock and his wife Anne — both of whom died within two years of the house’s completion. Today it’s Leicester’s most famous haunted address, on the strength of a single piece of 1998 CCTV footage that made headlines around the world.

Ownership passed through several families over two centuries — the Simons, the Vann family, hosiery manufacturer Thomas Morley — before railway entrepreneur John Ellis took possession in 1847 with his wife and seven daughters. After Ellis’s death in 1862, his widow and five unmarried daughters remained; the “Belgrave sisters,” including Charlotte Ellis, became prominent figures in Leicester civic and suffragette circles. Leicester Corporation bought the Hall in 1936 for £10,500 and opened it as a museum; it now operates as a heritage site with limited public open days rather than a full-time museum.

In the early hours of 23 December 1998, security cameras recorded two pale, glowing figures moving in the grounds outside the Hall. The story broke nationally on 2 February 1999 (BBC News: “Museum gives up the ghost”) and was picked up by media worldwide. Curator Stuart Warburton invited the International Society for Paranormal Research (ISPR) to investigate; their conclusion was that the figures were most likely a falling leaf caught in cold, rainy conditions rather than anything paranormal — a genuine apparition of the height suggested by the footage would have stood over ten feet tall. The ISPR nonetheless reported cold spots and “residual forces” elsewhere in the building, and released a DVD of their findings.

The footage produced the Hall’s best-known named ghost, though the identification is speculative: many accounts attribute the figures to Charlotte Ellis, though no source explains why she was singled out over her six sisters. Other recurring figures include the “Victorian Lady,” seen on the lower staircase gazing into the garden and heard walking the upper floors, along with less-consistent “Green Lady” and “Grey Lady” sightings. A separate story holds that an elderly man fell to his death on the second-floor staircase and has since been seen wandering the upper floors — when the ISPR investigated without prior knowledge of the building’s history, they independently reported a strong male presence upstairs, a child spirit linked to tuberculosis, and a male spirit associated with a fatal fall, all of which reportedly corresponded to documented occupants and events. Staff and visitors also report shadows, cold spots, unexplained footsteps, and the smell of freshly baked bread drifting through the building when nothing is being cooked.

Television has kept the story alive. Living TV’s Most Haunted investigated in 2003 with celebrity guests Vic Reeves and Nancy Sorrell, in a notably rough episode; Ghost Hunters International investigated in 2008 and, like the ISPR before them, concluded the original figures were most likely people in reflective jackets rather than anything paranormal; the Hall also featured on Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files in 2012. Three separate inquiries, over almost a decade, have consistently failed to authenticate the footage that made the Hall famous — readers weighing how much stock to put in the rest of the claims may find our guide to how ghost hunting evidence gets evaluated useful context.

Ghost stories and disputed CCTV aside, Belgrave Hall earns its place here for genuine local significance: a rare surviving early-18th-century Leicester merchant’s house, home for 76 years to the family that brought the railway to the city, its walled gardens preserved intact in the middle of a modern suburb.