Mysterious Britain & Ireland

Monthly Archive: April 2010

Apparitions / Black Dogs / Hauntings

Shap A6 Black Dog

A Phantom Black Dog was said to haunt the A6 around Shap Pass, roughly nine miles south of Penrith. In his book Ghosts of the North, Jack Hallam states ‘Many drivers reported seeing, in the beam of their headlights, a big dog loping along for 200 to 300 yards, before disappearing over a stone wall at a place where there is a 300ft sheer drop’.

Apparitions / Haunted Pubs / Hauntings / Poltergiests

The Crown and Horseshoes, Enfield

The Crown and Horseshoes public house is an 18th century Grade II listed building and can be found on Horse Shoe Lane, by the canal. The Crown and Horseshoes has in the past had a reputation for being haunted. “Other than the footsteps and the mysterious banging of doors, nothing much happens these days”, Joan Forman told the author and investigator Andrew Green in 1976.

Apparitions / Haunted Hotels / Haunted Pubs / Hauntings

The Kings Head Hotel, Cuckfield

The Kings Head Hotel is no longer open for business and the building has been changed into a residential mews (Kings Mews). However, this hotel which dated from at least 1832 (when Pigot’s Directory of Sussex showed James Webber as the landlord) had a reputation of being haunted by a ghost known locally as Geranium Jane.

Apparitions / Haunted Hotels / Haunted Pubs / Hauntings

The Coylet Inn, Loch Eck

Standing on the bank of the seven mile long Loch Eck (and previously known as the Lock Eck Inn), The Coylet Inn is an old coaching house dating from 1650 that originally catered for travelers going between Glasgow and Dunoon. The Inn is reputedly haunted by the apparition of a ‘Blue Boy’.

Apparitions / Haunted Pubs / Hauntings / WWII Hauntings

The Kings Arms, Peckham Rye

132 Peckham Rye was once the address of The King’s Arms public house, which was hit by a bomb during a World War II German air raid I which eleven people lost their lives. The pub was rebuilt and overtime eventually became a nightclub named Kings on the Rye before finally being demolished in the late 1990’s by a block of flats.

Anniversary Ghosts / Apparitions / Hauntings / Road Ghosts

White Lady of Shooters Hill

In the years around 1830 the area surrounding the Shooters Hill and the Well Hall Road junction was said to be haunted by strange “unaccountable noises” and the apparition of a white lady. The haunting was thought be some to be connected to the skeleton of an unidentified female skeleton unearthed by a labourer on 10 June 1844. The woman had a long golden hair and a fractured skull.

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Articles / Folklore / Folktales / Scottish Folktales

Earth Dogs

A mythical creature that may be confined to one area of Banffshire in Scotland, according to Walter Grigor in his ‘Notes on the folklore of NE Scotland’ published in 1881, the Yird Swine were a “dreaded ..animal” that lived in graveyards and burrowed through the earth feeding on the dead bodies.

Apparitions / Haunted Pubs / Hauntings

The Lord Eldon, Knutsford

The 300 year old Lord Eldon public house is thought to be haunted by the ghost of Annie Sarah Pollitt, daughter of James Pollitt the landlord of the Lord Eldon in the late 19th century.  She was also, in 1864 crowned the first May Queen of Knutsford’s famous Royal May Day fair.

Haunted Pubs / Hauntings

The Cauliflower, Ilford

The Cauliflower at 553 High Road, Ilford, is a popular live music venue and whilst Deryck Jones was the landlord it had a reputation of being haunted, with the case being written about in ‘The Publican’ and ‘The Haunted Pub Guide’ (Guy Lyon Playfair 1985). The date the Cauliflower was built is unknown, but in 1897 plans were made to make the pub into a hotel.