A616 road

The A616 road cuts through South Yorkshire's Peak District fringe, and its Stocksbridge Bypass stretch has earned a reputation as one of Britain's most haunted roads. As construction neared completion in 1987, security guards patrolling the site reported strange sightings: two officers that September saw a group of children in old-fashioned clothes gathered near an electricity pylon, who vanished as the men approached. Locals link the apparitions to a mining disaster and a stagecoach accident that killed children during the area's 18th- and 19th-century industrial past, when Stocksbridge and Deepcar were dense with coal pits and steelworks. Drivers have since described hearing phantom singing of "Ring a Ring o' Roses" near the pylons, a floating monk tied to a groundsman buried on unhallowed ground, and a leaping figure that seems to hitch rides with passing cars. Whatever the source, the bypass remains a fixture of regional ghost-lore.