Folklore About Pubs: Murderous Landlords, Famous Crimes & Ghosts

As we saw last week with the folklore of pub names, the pub is a familiar part of British life. As such a hive of activity, it stands to reason that there would also be plenty of folklore about pubs around Britain. After all, the more activity there is in a place, the more opportunity there is for stories and legends to crop up about people and events.

The Romans brought their ‘tabernae’ to Britain when they invaded in 43 AD. They sold wine to passing soldiers, but the shops changed their offering to ale since the Britons preferred their homegrown brew (Johnson n.d.).

Tabernae became taverns, and they continued to adapt through further invasions by Angles, Saxons, and Vikings. People went to taverns for food and drink, and inns for accommodation. Over time, they all became public houses, and eventually pubs in the 16th century (Johnson n.d.).

Nowadays, pubs try to find all sorts of ways to differentiate themselves. Look at Britain’s most remote pub (The Old Forge, Inverie), Britain’s highest pub (Tan Hill Inn, Swaledale), or Britain’s lowest pub (The Admiral Wells, Peterborough).

But what folklore about pubs can we find, beyond the origins of their names? Let’s find out!

What is the oldest inn in the UK?

Several pubs try to lay claim to being the UK’s oldest inn. Why not? It’s a great selling point! And if they can’t claim oldest pub, they’ll claim a subcategory of that. Look at the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, established in 1520 and which claims to be Britain’s oldest riverside pub. Drury Lane’s White Hart Inn claims to be London’s oldest pub (Moore 2019).

Yet these things are also quite difficult to prove.

One of the oldest seems to be The Old Ferry Boat at St Ives in Cambridgeshire. It’s apparently been serving alcohol since AD 560. That said, its foundations may be 100 years older than that, making the claim a good one. The Old Ferry Boat appears in the Domesday Book. Like any good pub, it’s supposed to be haunted. But more on haunted pubs later.

The Guinness Book of Records names Porch House in Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswolds as England’s oldest inn. Formerly the Royalist Hotel, it’s certified as opening in AD 947. You can apparently find witch marks on the 16th-century stone fireplace in the dining room.

Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem in Nottingham also lays claim to the title. According to legend, Richard the Lionheart and his men used the pub as a gathering place before setting off for the Crusades in AD 1189 (Lowe 2021). This explains the pub’s strange name. There’s no evidence to verify the tale, although it’s possible Nottingham Castle used the caves behind the pub for brewing beer in 1067.

Fame and Infamy: Literature and Crime

If you can’t be the oldest pub, you can certainly look for other claims to fame. Plenty of pubs boast literary connections to encourage punters to visit. As an example, The Llandoger Trow on King Street in Bristol dates to 1664. It provided the inspiration for the Admiral Benbow Inn in Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. According to legend, Daniel Defoe also found Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe in the pub.

Then there’s Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street in London. There has been a pub on the site since 1538, and it was rebuilt in 1667 following the Great Fire of London. Apparently, this pub counted Dr Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Orwell, and P.G. Wodehouse among its customers. There is some doubt that Dr Johnson ever visited, but people assume he must have done as he lived nearby.

These connections can help inspire others to visit. Perhaps the Muse loiters in the bar, ready to whisper in your ear. Or maybe you want to soak up the atmosphere these literary legends found so appealing.

But when it comes to the pub and its place in the community, plenty of pubs also have links with criminal cases. The Ten Bells in Spitalfields was allegedly the favourite pub of Mary Kelly and Annie Chapman, two of Jack the Ripper’s victims. Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell in The Blind Beggar in Whitechapel in March 1966. More pubs claim links with Dick Turpin than he can have ever actually visited in his lifetime.

In these cases, notoriety is the currency, with people visiting to feel a connection with an infamous event. The legends elevate the pubs from mere drinking dens to the backdrop of some heinous crime. We might not be able to visit the crime scene itself, but we can still soak up the atmosphere of a place associated with the criminals. Speaking of which…

Murderous Landlords

The Sheep Dog, long since demolished, stood near Lydway, Wiltshire. In Sweeney Todd fashion, the landlord, Tom Burry, apparently had a trapdoor in the floor. When customers fell into the cellar, they’d be robbed and murdered. Burry was caught when a pedlar managed to escape and raised the alarm. The authorities raided the inn, where they found bodies buried in the cellar. The landlord was hanged for his crimes (Westwood 2005: 789).

It looks like it wasn’t the only inn where this happened. P. H. Ditchfield related a tale told to him in the 1880s about a coaching inn on the Wantage to London road. Apparently, the inn had a paddock, and a tree blew down. Someone found a skeleton among its roots. This would be bad enough, but then the same thing happened with another tree in the paddock.

Eventually, the villagers asked why bodies were turning up beneath the trees, and the story finally came out. An old man in the village explained that when he was young, people suspected the landlord of murdering customers. No one ever found any bodies so the accusations came to nothing. The only thing anyone could prove was that he was fond of planting trees. The old man went on to suggest that they’d find more bodies beneath the other trees in the paddock! (Westwood 2005: 17)

And landladies…

Sir Walter Scott described the Mumps Ha’ pub in his novel, Guy Mannering (1815). He later admitted it was based on Mumps Hall in Cumberland, whose landlady was Margaret Teasdale. An 1866 handbook for the area claimed Teasdale drugged her guests and robbed them when they died. She even dumped the bodies in a pond near the pub (Westwood 2005: 142). The editor of a 1993 edition of the novel pointed out that no one found any mention of her in the local graveyard.

Marjorie Rowling, in her Folklore of the Lake District (1976), claimed Teasdale was a witch. According to Rowling, someone found a child’s skeleton and the bones of a Hand of Glory in a secret stairway hidden in a cupboard (Westwood 2005: 142).

Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson suggest that these sorts of legends were symptomatic of the fears travellers had in earlier centuries (2005: 18).

Criminal Landlords

Cannard’s Grave Inn stands near Shepton Mallet in Somerset, taking its name from an 18th-century landlord named Giles Cannard. He helped highwaymen and smugglers, which explained how he grew rich. He’s also reputed to have gotten customers drunk so he could rob them. When his forgery crimes were discovered, he hanged himself to avoid standing trial. As a suicide, he was buried at the crossroads, and according to local legend, he still haunts the area now (Westwood 2005: 651).

A short snippet in the Daily Mirror from 1967 claimed that Cannard was a highwayman after closing time, and was the last man hanged for highway robbery in England. This, it seems, explained his burial at a crossroads (1967: 18). That said, a sale notice in a 1977 newspaper claimed Cannard was hanged for sheep-stealing (Wells Journal 1977: 22).

Yet elsewhere, Ian Addicoat explains the village was named after Tom Kennard, who was hanged for sheep-stealing (2013). The pub sign originally bore the image of a gibbet, but in the 1990s, the pub changed its name to the Cannards Well Hotel. It’s now the Well Inn.

It seems Kennard also went by the name Giles Cannard and was indeed the pub’s landlord. He sold the names of guests carrying wealth to robbers, although, in one version of the story, some merchants caught onto his scheme and organised a mob. Tom hung himself to avoid capture. In another version, he was in league with a local highwayman. Someone spotted ten stolen sheep in the yard and he was hanged for the crime.

Ghosts are Common in Folklore About Pubs

With all these murderous landlords, it’s hardly surprising that we’d find so many haunted pubs around the British Isles. You can’t even move in York without stumbling across a pub claiming to be in the ‘most haunted’ in the city. Newcastle upon Tyne boasts various tales of Civil War ghosts in its pubs, including King Charles I himself in the Old George Inn.

The Banshee Labyrinth on Niddry Street in Edinburgh lays claim to being Scotland’s most haunted pub. It’s built into Edinburgh’s Vaults, which could explain the volume of sightings. Customers report glasses thrown against the wall by invisible hands, objects appearing out of nowhere, and unexplained noises. A workman saw a woman in the pub during renovations. While sobbing, she looked up at him and he realised her eye sockets were empty. She screamed and disappeared, and moments later, the workman received the news that a family member had died. This awful story apparently explains the pub’s name (Swan 2021).

Wales’ Skirrid Mountain Inn is notorious for supernatural activity. It’s believed to be one of Wales’ oldest pubs, and many of the ghosts seem to be linked with the room once used as a courtroom. According to local legend, 182 people were executed in the building. Guests have seen figures in the building, while they also smell lavender before the appearance of an 18th-century barmaid. People have even found strange marks on their necks (Fiddler 2019).

Daphne Du Maurier made Bodmin Moor’s Jamaica Inn famous, and it was originally a house built in the late 18th century. People have reported all sorts of ghostly activity, including voices, the sound of carriages on cobblestones, and a man in a tricorn hat who walks through doors. Its most famous ghost is a customer who left the inn without finishing his drink. Locals found his body on the moor the next day. It’s believed he returns to the inn so he can finish his drink.

So why do we get so many tales of haunted pubs?

I’m not going to get into the old joke about the way they’re full of spirits. But I think there are possibly three reasons. Two serious, one facetious. The first is that pubs are a hive of activity. Lots of human life happens in a pub. We often celebrate, mourn, argue, and connect in the pub. If you believe the theory that activity ‘imprints’ on a location, then it’s unsurprising that a pub would absorb those emotions.

The second reason is that British pubs are often rather old. Even those that are only fifty years old have still ‘seen some things’. The very old pubs are often connected with historical moments, like civil wars, riots, protests, and famous criminals. It’s entirely possible that this sheer wealth of activity over such a long period of time makes these pubs more apt to be haunted locations. There is also the fact that this long history makes it more likely that people would assume the buildings would be haunted.

But the facetious reason is that pubs create circumstances where it’s easy to mistake something for a ghost, especially if it’s late at night, badly lit, or you’ve had one too many. Pub staff often report phenomena when they’re working alone at night, while customers see all kinds of figures and activity over drinks. Given you’re often already in an old building, and thus primed to expect something out of the ordinary, you might be more likely to see it. Or maybe that puts you in a better frame of mind to see something your rational mind would otherwise ignore? Who knows?

What do you make of folklore about pubs?

A lot of these legends have tended towards the murderous and the criminal. In some cases, these legends help to preserve very real fears that people had about staying in strange places when far from home. Elsewhere, the pubs appear to have served as a cover for illicit goings-on, with the pub providing an ideal gathering place for people to plan their crimes. The status of Skirrid Mountain Inn as a former courthouse perfectly blends the combination of pubs and legality.

We often find folklore wherever we find human activity, and pubs are the perfect illustration of how a snippet of a life becomes tangled up with a building. With every retelling of the story, the snippet takes on more meaning, more colour, and more scope. A legend is born, and now the pub has a new claim to fame. As we saw with the pub names last week, pubs themselves become storehouses of local history, especially the less salubrious or ‘official’ history that rarely makes it onto a blue plaque.

I wonder if the Romans could have foreseen this when they first imported the tabernae?

What’s some of your favourite folklore about pubs?

References

Addicoat, Ian (2013), Haunted Pubs of the South West: True Ghost Stories, Stroud: Amberley Publishing.

Daily Mirror (1967), ‘Pub With A Grim History’, Daily Mirror, Wednesday 17 May, p. 18.

Fiddler, Geoff (2019), ‘Experience: I own a haunted pub’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/oct/25/experience-i-own-a-haunted-pub.

Johnson, Ben (n.d.), ‘The Great British Pub’, Historic UK, https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Great-British-Pub/.

Lowe, David (2021), ‘Myths and legends of historic Nottingham pubs’, Nottingham Post, https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/history/myths-legends-historic-nottingham-pubs-287196.

Moore, Peter (2019), ‘Cheers! The 14 oldest pubs in the UK, according to their claims…’, Wanderlust, https://www.wanderlust.co.uk/content/oldest-pubs-uk-britain/.

Swan, Catherine (2021), ‘The ‘most haunted pub in Scotland’ where 16th-century tyrant tortured ‘witches”, The Daily Record, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/most-haunted-pub-scotland-16th-25251332.

Wells Journal (1977), ‘Cannard’s Grave Inn sold’, The Wells Journal, Thursday 24 February, p. 22.

Westwood, Jennifer and Simpson, Jacqueline (2005), The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends, London: Penguin.