Image credit: hotpot.ai
Spooky salutations!
So sorry I couldn’t quite get it together to post in time for actual Halloween, but much like Black Friday which used to be one day but is now several, the Creepy Season likewise encroaches well into the start of November now, so I’ve extended my deadline accordingly.
Pubs and hauntings go together like bread and butter. Tap ‘Haunted Pubs’ into the YouTube search bar if you want to bore yourself silly with hours of shoddy footage filmed by amateur ghost sleuths in ancient inns, having conniptions on night-vision cameras. It’s fucking endless.
As are the many books on the subject.
In one of the books I recently read about tales of ghostly goings-on in pubs, I was not only regaled by hundreds of accounts of apparent supernatural disturbances in watering holes up and down the land, but I also discovered my two favourite book appendices of all time.
The 1985 edition of ‘The Haunted Pub Guide’ by Guy Lyon Playfair (an author credited as being among other things a ‘psychic consultant’ on the BBC’s terrifying 1992 Ghostwatch program) contains Appendix i: WHAT IS A GHOST, ANYWAY?
A question for the ages. Guy does not shy away from this tricksy old query which gets many folks’ knickers in a twist. Instead he calmly lays it out as he sees it: “We do not know what a ghost is.”
Brilliant.
He elaborates: “The word is one we use to describe the assumed cause of a number of phenomena that we cannot explain…”
Likening it to philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell’s claim about electricity being “not a thing like St Paul’s Cathedral, but a way in which things behave. We can describe that behaviour…and the circumstances in which it takes place, and that is all we can say about electricity.”
According to our Guy: “The same applies to ghosts. We know something about the way they behave, but we cannot explain them any more than we can explain why electrons move around the way they seem to, and make electricity. They just do.”
I’ll be honest here, I don’t know much about science book, so the question of whether or not the behaviours of ghosts or electrons are wholly inexplicable is a matter I feel both myself and Mr Lyon Playfair are entirely unqualified to answer, but this explanation sounds plausible to me, so I’ll go with it.
The appendix then goes on to list the top ten signs and symptoms of spectral phenomena in order of the frequency with which these occurrences are reported in his book. They are: Apparitions, Footsteps, Psychokinesis, Bedroom invaders, Cold Spots, Autonomous Doors, Anomalous Electronics, Invisible Presences, Things Off Shelves, and (my personal fave) Phantom Nudgers, which all sounds like a fairly standard night in round my place, to be honest.*
Then there’s Appendix ii: HOW TO SEE A GHOST
In it, he implores us not to be try-hards at ghost spotting, as they “…do not appear on demand. The worst possible thing to do if you would like to see a ghost is to try.”
He continues with a lengthy diatribe on the general dos and don’ts of interacting with phantasmic entities, cautioning the reader against the use of Ouija boards especially.
He rounds off with an argument for the merits of ghost hunting, suggesting that it is “…not only worthwhile but also necessary. We cannot tell what lies hidden behind the range unless we go and look.”
Despite the author being a self-proclaimed paranormal investigator, he maintains a healthy incredulity towards a number of reports and anecdotes of hauntings. The Jolly Sailor in Whitburn being a case in point. He was called in to investigate a series of unfortunate happenings the landlord and landlady of the time, Bill and Christine Bloxham, reported shortly after they moved in to the seaside tavern in 1983.
Starting with Mr Bloxham receiving stitches after a lamp fell and cracked him on the cranium, followed by a cabinet falling off a wall in front of Mrs Bloxham, to beer leaking through the ceiling of a room, despite there being no obvious source, the report goes on to include floods, ‘water flow failure’ and a small fire, which many (including the licensees) were ready to attribute to paranormal mischief-making.
Guy’s highly practical response to it all is to put it down to ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another) syndrome, and to contact a buildings surveyor to rule out the many more probable mundane causes behind them. He also recommends a visit to a hypnotherapist for the landlord to avoid the pitfalls of auto-suggestion, which can mean that “…If you believe an incident to be paranormal, it is likely that you will get more of the same, and your fear and expectation can reach the point where your house really is haunted - by you.”
Other cases offer no such clear cut resolutions though, like The King’s Cellar in Croydon, itself now a ghost pub after demolition of the site it once occupied.
An unlikely location for a haunting since it was built as part of a shopping centre in the early 70s. Nevertheless it had allegedly been plagued by poltergeist-like activity, which saw off numerous bar staff and managers over a period of at least 30 years, and left investigators stumped for rational explanations.
The building was constructed on the site of an old fire station, during which time bones were found. It’s also thought a young girl jumped or fell to her death from the neighbouring tower block, landing on the pub’s roof. Stories of apparitions of a young girl dressed in lace who’d appear in various locations around the bar, and was once heard to moan the words “help me” were reported to investigators. Ghostly laughter along with billowing spirals of smoke, and strange smells were also experienced by many staff members. One manager was driven out after a few nights alone on the premises, when whole rows of glasses were seen to fly off the shelves, as though being swept off with force, smashing to the ground some distance away. The tills would also malfunction, in spite of electronics engineers testing them to find no technical fault. Echoing the site’s former function perhaps, they would ring up a total of £999 which even for a bar near London is an excessive bill.
I’ve run two Pubs myself and things going bump in the night was pretty par for the course, though would typically have a more corporeal cause.
The first of these two pubs had previously been an insalubrious spit-and-sawdust side street boozer called the ‘Whitesmith’s Arms’ (a pub I was always warned in no uncertain terms to avoid like the plague) until my former spouse transformed it in the mid-nineties.
He renamed it to break any association with its chequered past, and turned it into a popular student hang-out in an area of Cheltenham that was rich in student accommodation but poor in student-friendly pubs.
‘The Junction’, as it came to be known, was reportedly haunted by a spectre referred to as the ‘Grey Lady’.
This absolutely textbook apparition consistently failed to manifest in my presence, for which I’m thankful, however on some occasions after hours I would unaccountably hear the sound of bar stools screeching across the bare wooden floor, as though being pushed. God knows what was making all that noise but I doubt such a pro forma spook could muster the will to chuck furniture around. I mean Grey Lady, come on. Give me something I can believe in!
During my time there, any cause for sensations of dread or unease felt could be more usually explained either by the company of some sketchy punters, or as a result of my awful marriage, but then there was the cellar.
The cellar was dark and huge. It ran the length and breadth of the building, and was partitioned into separate rooms. The room where the barrels lived was the smallest section, and the furthest away from the internal entrance point, as it had to be accessible from the road by the dray. From a small door located in the back bar room, it had steep wooden steps going down into it.
Once down there, you’d have to feel your way through a massive unlit expanse filled with myriad old crap before reaching the plastic curtain of the keg room. This held the only source of light, and it wasn’t always reliable. Often you’d find yourself, mid-barrel change, suddenly plunged into pitch darkness so that you’d have to run the gauntlet back up to the bar and flick the fuse box back on, or remember to take a torch and recite the Lord’s Prayer.
It was genuinely creepy as fuck, and what heightened the sense of pure dread felt when going down there was the reaction it elicited from my ex-husband’s dog, Candy.
A big and fearless Rottweiler cross, she was his absolute shadow, I mean she’d walk through fire to stay by his side, but she would not follow him down those cellar steps.
Nothing else scared that dog, she’d happily wade into a bar brawl to break it up but the cellar’s doorway was a threshold she would simply not cross. In fact she’d lie flat at the top of those steps and growl and whine, with her ears back and hackles raised at things unseen, whale-eyeing the darkness until whoever went down there came all the way back up. I still shudder to think about the serious bad vibes down there.
I suppose if you’re ’Team Sceptic’ then the most obvious explanation for the dog’s behaviour would be that she was simply picking up on and reacting to the emotions of any human who, quite understandably would be shitting themselves at the thought of entering such a dark, damp and forbidding space, which was easily accessed from the outside by anyone so inclined - a feeling exacerbated by the fact that the pub, in its previous incarnation, had been a notoriously rough one.**
Haunted or otherwise, it has now joined the growing ranks of ‘Ghost Pub’, as it closed it’s doors for good in 2014, and was predictably sold off to developers.
Photo of The Junction at Gloucester Road Cheltenham credit: Camra.org
You can plot a trail of these ghost pubs down the Gloucester Road now, beginning with The Junction at the top near the actual junction with Tewkesbury Road, to the Hop Pole next door whose luck took an unrecoverable turn for the worse shortly after the landlord committed suicide there, via the long-vanished Albion and Bricklayer’s, past the New Penny and the Calcutta, to the Midland Inn by the station, right down to the Leckhampton Inn where Gloucester Road meets the A40.
All gone, and mostly forgotten, some completely razed with a brand spanking new building in its place.
The last traditional pub left standing against the odds down this skid row of failed licensed premises, The Kings Arms, was ironically always known as the roughest and crappiest one of the lot but, thanks to a comprehensive tarting up in 2016, it’s now a thriving local which even the Cheltenham chapter of Camra deems pretty passable.
Mark Fisher wrote in Ghosts Of My Life about Hauntology; the experience of living at what he considered to be the end of history, and the disorientation felt by a culture that was speeding up whilst simultaneously self-terminating in a ceaselessly recursive, futile, nostalgia-for-the-future-fest of aborted tomorrows.
Well the vanished pubs of my youth are the ghosts of my life.
As dislocating as it feels to visit the places where they once stood with their ad hoc decor, alcopops and invariably shite beer, while navigating the endless iterations of new craft beers and micro breweries that spring up in the dying embers of The Pub’s history, recalling its past glory with a weak simulation, I reckon I could get a solid day’s work out of touring old Cheltenham town and mapping out the ghost pubs therein.
My second pub, The Swan Inn, a large country pub on the outskirts of Gloucester, didn’t have a resident spook, none that made itself known to me or my dogs at any rate. The most chilling thing about that place was the dreadful credit history attached to it, thanks to the ambivalence of previous lessees when it came to paying utility bills in a timely manner or exchanging goods for money (the back wall of the bar was so dotted with pin holes made by unpaid tabs it looked like the stuff of a trypophobe’s worst nightmare)
Aside from the odd inexplicable slamming door up in the residence, if it’s tales of hair-raising experiences you’re after here, I refer you once more to my own dreadful and ill-advised marital union. This pub is still a going concern but I’m too haunted by memories of my time there to ever re-visit it.
Another book I found in the genre of paranormal pubs is ‘Haunted Taverns’ by Donald Stuart. Filled with a collection of short stories that have more of an apocryphal vibe than Guy Lyon Playfair’s more personal anecdotes, it lists some of the more classic accounts of well-known haunted places like The Jamaica Inn in Bodmin, or The Ostrich in Colnbrook, along with a few of the lesser documented cases, such as the pub haunted by a duck, or one bothered by the ghost of a black cockerel!
It also introduced me to the term ‘indwell’ to describe a resident spirit, which I think makes them sound kind of adorable.
Pubs, inns, taverns, whatever their classification, they seem like natural candidates for a haunting or two. Existing as we do in an ancient land full of these ancient places of social gathering and common ritual, and saturated as we are in the continuing legacies of this dying communal history, is it even possible not to be haunted by it all?
Even places where the vanished pubs once stood are thick with the atmosphere of a centuries old past so steeped in this way of alcohol-fuelled social life, they’re almost tangible.
Pubs hold in them our histories, and cast shadows of our past and so are all, it turns out, absolutely haunted as hell.
Toodle-oooooooOOOOOOOOooohhhh
*Shortly after writing about the flying glasses in the former Croydon bar, my own personal pint glass which I’ve had for many years, managed to ‘fall’ four or five inches from a completely flat surface into a plastic washing up bowl whereupon it shattered loudly and violently into tiny pieces. My other half, who I’d normally describe as the absolute Captain of ‘Team Sceptic’ was himself entirely spooked by this anomalous event, but was all the more so when I pointed to the line, freshly typed, relating to a similar occurrence!
**The Whitesmith’s Arms as it was known hosted some of the most violent members of local crime families, and my ex-husband, a rugby playing tough former police officer who feared little, felt moved to sleep with a carving knife by his bedside, a (very illegal) firearm under his pillow, and a cricket bat by the door.
During some initial research for this post, I accidentally typed ‘Haunted Pug’ into google and rest assured, it’s a thing hehe.