Many are fascinated by the thought of haunted country inns, especially if the hostelry in question is in a famously creepy part of Britain. Lawrence McNeela was the landlord of an old tin miners’ pub on Dartmoor. It was here he saw (and heard) a ghost for the very first time.
GOING THE WAY of so many rural pubs, the Royal Standard in Mary Tavy is sadly no more. A string of landlords have tried, and failed, to make a success of running the place, so it is now being converted into housing. The new residents are going to get a real surprise when the work is finished and they move into their new abodes.
For the Royal Standard is already home to at least one ghost!
Originally a miners’ pub and chip shop, it was frequented during Victorian times by tinners working at the nearby Wheal Betsy and Devon Friendship mines.
The men were paid in tokens which could be used to purchase goods and services, beer and spirits included. Possibly also the company of women. Such establishments often doubled as brothels in those days, and a row of fifty stones leading to the pub from the moor is still known locally as Annie Pinkham’s men, after a renowned 19th century barmaid.
There may have been an earlier inn on the site. British pubs earn their royal epithets by having a genuine connection to the Crown and this particular one relates to the English Civil War.
Defeated in a skirmish at nearby Sourton, a group of cavaliers raised the eponymous royal standard here and asked for any locals willing to fight for the king’s penny to join them. A number did and the roundheads were subsequently vanquished. Interestingly, the ghost of a cavalier has been seen at Sourton’s infamous Highwayman Inn.
I know the Royal Standard well because I was its last landlord. Nobody told me it was haunted when I took ownership in September 2014; indeed, most locals would later swear blind that it wasn’t. However, I hadn’t been there long before my first paranormal encounter.
It was almost midnight on a Friday the following month and two late stragglers remained propping up the bar. Feeling very tired, and desperate for them to leave, I was astonished to see the ghost of a lady walking through the bar. She wore a rich gold dress, maybe a ballgown, and had long brown hair curled into ringlets. This was almost all I noticed before she vanished into thin air. A quick search of the pub’s various darkened corners and nooks and crannies confirmed her disappearance.
This ghostly lady was encountered many further times. I saw her again in my upstairs flat when she turned to stare at me. An expression of surprise was on her face, as though she was as amazed by my presence as I was hers. One night I was awakened by footsteps crossing the lounge floor to my bedroom door.
It took a couple of moments for me to remember that I was alone in my flat, and the footsteps had no obvious explanation. On another occasion, the same sound was heard on the stairs leading from the flat by a small number of young people drinking at the bar.
My barmaid Kat saw the lady when working alone one January night. It being the quietest time of the year, I was away skiing, and Kat was managing the Royal Standard for me. Closing time came and she stood alone with most of the lights switched off. A villager had promised to come to her aid, should she ever need any help whilst I was away. Seeing the phantom scared her so much, she had to telephone him to drive down and chaperone her safely outside!
On another occasion, Ali, one of the barmen, was in the pub with a different villager, enjoying a beer when his shift finished. I was away, the two men were the only people present, and they’d decided to treat themselves to an impromptu lock-in. Their fun ended when they heard what sounded like a chair being thrown down in fury onto the stage area at the other side of the bar. Knowing there was nobody there to do such a thing, they put down their glasses and fled.
The ghostly lady was often very noisy, almost as though she wanted her presence noticed by the living. Most nights my sleep was disturbed by banging noises coming from somewhere in the building. They may have been old pipes or walls settling; I really couldn’t say for sure what caused these sounds.
There is no innocent explanation for the time my girlfriend heard pans clattering in the kitchen and glasses being smashed. Filled with trepidation, she ventured into the room, only to find everything peaceful and calm. Not a single pan was out of place and no glasses were damaged.
What caused the paranormal activity is impossible to say because most of the locals swore blind that the pub wasn’t haunted. Only one publicly said otherwise, and she claimed it was visited by the ghost of a “Lady Tavistock”.
For a long time I searched online and found no trace of such a personage, the closest match being the infamous Lady Mary Howard of Tavistock’s Fitzford Manor. However, I recently came across Lady Diana Spencer (1710 – 35) who may have adopted this title when marrying John Russell, the 4th Duke of Bedford.
Following the dissolution of Tavistock Abbey, the Russell family became the largest landowners in the area. Why Lady Russell (nee Spencer) haunted the Royal Standard is a mystery. It could be due to an earlier structure standing there or the close proximity of the so-called King’s Highway, which once ferried coaches carrying important people to London.
Either way, the portrait I found of her shows a striking similarity to the apparition I witnessed. Another portrait, of her sitting as a child with her mother, shows the older female wearing the same gold dress I saw during the night in October.
Possibly just coincidences, who knows?
As a post-script, another strange event happened in the pub, shortly before I closed its doors for good in December 2015. One of my most sceptical patrons, an old fairground gypsy with the nickname Blue arrived one lunchtime and asked me where the other man was.
“What other man?” I asked in bemusement.
“The one I watched walk in before me,” Blue answered.
He said he’d followed, at some distance, a man he saw walking up the road to the pub. Even witnessed him enter. However, there were two problems with his statement.
Firstly, the front door had been locked before Blue arrived and knocked on it. And secondly, there was no such customer in the building.
