Haunting in an Old Inn

Name:            Lindsey Jeffs
Email:           L.A.Jeffs@wlv.ac.uk
Location:        Midlands UK
Type:            Ghost
Date:            Thursday, July 06, 2000
Time:            06:13 AM

This happened to myself and husband a couple of years ago.

It was sometime at the end of October we decided to go out for a drink and visited a pub about 20 minute drive from our house. We had been to this pub several times before, it was a favorite, in a small country town.

This particular night there was no one in the lounge of the pub, we got our drinks and sat down. I sat with my back towards an old inglenook fireplace, my husband on the opposite side of the table. We chatted about everything and nothing, the conversation certainly did not include the supernatural.

As we chatted, I suddenly felt that someone was standing behind me, in front of the fireplace. I stopped talking and watched my husband whos hair had started to stand on end, the atmosphere in the room seemed to have become electrically charged, the presence moved to my right hand side where very briefly we both saw a figure of a man, no color just monotone. I could feel where the presence was. It moved away from the fireplace towards the gents toilets. The 'charged' atmosphere changed, it seemed to dissipate. While this was going on I had impressions running through my mind of a old spirit, from about 1600s who had lived in this place and was a smuggler. My husband couldn't believe what had happened. We were just about to leave but were so startled that we felt another drink was needed. My husband asked the landlady if anyone had ever experienced anything unusual in her inn, she became very defensive asking us what did we mean etc. When she had heard our story, she told us that we were the 14th couple/ person who had experienced something 'strange' in the lounge or the toilet area. Some people had even been pushed down the steps. These things always happened in the winter months, never in summer.

She and her husband had never experienced anything in the fourteen years she had been there, but were interested in others experiences. I later found out that the lounge had been houses that backed on the to the inn, the front being Georgian and the back older from the 1600s. The town is also on a river, and had been a notorious place for smuggling.

We have visited this place numerous times since and have not had the experience repeated. It certainly wasn't scary just fascinating.