Product Details

• Published on: 1984
• Binding: Hardcover

Customer Reviews

Ghostly nuns and a haunted skittles alley
If you are seriously contemplating a ghostly tour of Great Britain, "Haunted Inns" can be used as a companion guide to Marc Alexander's "Haunted Churches & Abbeys of Britain," "Haunted Castles," and "Phantom Britain."

If you book reservations as suggested by "Haunted Inns," you won't have to ghost-watch through the midnight hours in some damp, ruined abbey. You can try for a sighting in the comfort of your own hotel room---

Although, I don't know how comfortable I'd be if `Mad Maude' came floating horizontally between the four posters of my bed, and I woke up eyeball-to-eye-socket with the ghostly nun (see chapter on "Mad Maude and the Weston Manor Hotel," Weston-on-the-Green).

The author himself suffered a painful encounter in the haunted skittles alley at the `Holman Clavel' Inn in Blagdon, Somerset.

Sandra Biggs, whose marvelous line drawings depict each of the haunted inns in this book, had her own ghostly encounter at `The Lord Crewe Arms,' Blanchland. This is one of the inns whose history the author narrates in loving detail. It has a heroine, Dorothy Forster, whose deeds outstripped those found in the wildest of fictional romances.

Her spirit is supposed to haunt the hotel that was once her home.

Many of the inns in this book started life as a manor house or abbey. An exception is the `Ferry Boat Inn' of Holywell, whose ghost supposedly lived her brief, mortal life during the reign of the Saxon King, Edward the Confessor! In the "Guinness Book of Records," the `Ferry Boat' lays serious claim to being the oldest hostelry in England.

"The White Lady who haunts the Ferry Boat Inn in the very heart of the legend-ridden Huntingdonshire fenland, is probably the longest established ghost to glide mysteriously in any English hostelry. Yet the fascination of her tragic story has not diminished during the last ten centuries. Recently over 400 people congregated on the anniversary of her death in the hope of seeing her wraith rise from an old tombstone set in the floor of the inn's bar."

I can vouch for the tombstone, although not the ghost since I was not visiting the `Ferry Boat Inn' on the anniversary of her suicide (St. Patrick's Day). According to the author, one of the more unusual supernatural manifestations that goes beyond the usual banging of doors, and dogs that growl and bristle at the tombstone, is an unearthly dirge that can only be heard by women who visit the bar.

"Haunted Inns" is well worth reading for the history of these fascinating old British inns, even if you do not believe in ghosts.