When it comes to haunted places, few are better than the haunted British pub. Whether it be historic city taverns or remote country inns, hostelries boasting resident ghosts are well-regarded parts of our nation’s cultural fabric. I once owned such a place on Dartmoor, the Royal Standard Inn, home to a noisy ghost I’ve detailed for Really Haunted before.
This was half my inspiration for embarking on a haunted pub crawl of my beautiful corner of Britain, an adventure that’s documented on a new YouTube channel.
The other half came from experiences enjoyed in other pubs. As a brewery rep a decade ago, I travelled throughout Southwest England selling craft beer. Virtually every business I visited had a tale to share.
The landlady of The Tree Innat Stratton told me her elderly mother regularly engaged in conversations with the figure of a woman only she could see. The Coombe Bartonin nearby Crackington Haven named their ghost George. At the now defunct Chichester Armsin Chillaton, the landlady combined the best of both stories. The pub’s ghost was called Charlie and he mischievously unplugged her Sky TV after hours, also unlocking the front door. However, when he turned the deep fat fryers on one night, nearly setting fire to the kitchen, her patience frayed. She told me,
“I said Charlie, that was dangerous and it was stupid. Don’t do it again! And he hasn’t done so since.”
Speaking of which, I put the idea for a haunted pub crawl on my own back burner before stumbling upon the perfect people to join this adventure. George Wall hosts a YouTube channel about Dartmoor, and as well as being a great broadcaster, he’s a proper sceptic who refuses to believe in the supernatural. The perfect foil for me, who having lived in two haunted properties (I also rented a haunted cottage in the Devon countryside) is ready to take every claim at face value. Acting as the rational middle ground is paranormal investigator Abbie Dent, who as chair of Haunted Devon, has been a guest on my spooky radio show, Supernatural Chronicles.
We met up in Exeter to discuss our plans. Appropriately enough at the 15th century Ship Inn, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of Sir Francis Drake. I can act the sceptic here, for Drake’s associations are believed to be the invention of a 19th century landlord keen to cash in on the tourist boom. He even went as far as to allegedly forge an old letter from the notorious sea dog, claiming The Ship was Drake’s favourite boozer, which he then pinned to the pub’s walls!
After a few failed attempts at getting this project off the ground, we finally visited the first stop on our haunted pub crawl. We chose a place in the Tamar Valley, The Olde Plough Inn at Bere Ferrers, the kind boasting all the usual country pub charms: ceiling beams, wood burners, real ales from local breweries, tasty grub, gravestones on the floor…
Yes, you read that part right! The pub’s flagstone floor does indeed contain ancient headstones taken long ago from the village churchyard.
Having never been on a ghost hunt before, I wasn’t expecting a lot to happen. The Olde Ploughhas been called one of Devon’s top ten most haunted pubs, yet current landlady Sarah has been there twenty years and experienced nothing out of the ordinary before our visit.
Note I said before our visit!
For all sorts of exciting things happened. To start with, Abbie set a REM pod on a table near a spot where people had, in the past, claimed to see an old woman’s ghost materialise through the wall. Interestingly enough, Sarah said there was once a door there, dating to when the pub had been cottages built in the 16th century. The device notes changes in temperature by beeping and setting off lights to illuminate the air getting hotter or colder. We sat down near the bar to start chatting about what we’d do next and were joined by my girlfriend Emma and George’s wife Une. This was when events took a turn for the strange.
The REM pod began acting “out of parameter” – that’s how Abbie described things. I’ll say it did! The lights remained off as there was no change of temperature, yet it started playing a tune by altering the tone and frequency of the beeping sounds it’s designed to produce.
Filled with curiosity, we raced over, Abbie taking the lead whilst George filmed. She placed an the Ovilus III on the table, an ITC device which takes environmental and EMF readings and transfers them into a phonetic dictionary. Abbie asked whether there was a spirit present. And if so, where was it from? The Ovilus III threw out the word ‘Beery’, which meant nothing to us outsiders. It did to Sarah. She explained that ‘Beery’ is the nickname local people give to the Bere Peninsula, specifically its small town Bere Alston and village Bere Ferrers, where we were.
Giving dowsing a go, my girlfriend joined Abbie in trying to conduct a conversation with this spirit. We learnt she was an old woman called Nancy who’d lived in the pub when it remained separate cottages. Whilst I want to avoid plot spoilers (highlights can be seen on our YouTube channel) she revealed why she remained there, so many years after calling it home.
The spirit was kindly and benevolent, keen to communicate in a pleasant atmosphere. Afterwards, Abbie’s colleague at Haunted Devon pored over our recordings and found EVP’s (electronic voice phenomena) which include a woman’s voice humming a tune.
This was a fantastic experience and one that exceeded my greatest expectations. The video is on YouTube now and we can’t wait to find the next inn to visit on our haunted pub crawl of the region. Like I said earlier, virtually every pub has a ghost story to share, so we have no shortage of places to choose from.
Spirits Of A Different Kind plan to visit as many haunted pubs as possible this year and document their haunted pub crawl on a YouTube channel. You can join in with our adventure by visiting https://www.youtube.com/@HauntedPubCrawl
