HAUNTED HOSTELRIES

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33141, 3 February 1973, Page 10

HAUNTED HOSTELRIES

The Haunted Inns of England. By Jack Hallam. Wolfe Publishing, Ltd. 223 pp. England is so full of old inns that it is not very surprising to learn that there are some two hundred which are reliably reported to be haunted. In this thoroughly serious and unsensational survey of these ghost-ridden hostelries Jack Hallam works systematically through England, county by county, telling as much as is known or rumoured about each inn and the ghost (or ghosts) which frequents it. In some cases the information is very sketchy indeed. About The Ship, in Hove, for instance, we are told merely that it was from its earliest days a hunting ground for press-gangs and a hiding-place for smugglers, and that “either activity could have provided a dark deed to account for the ghost of a seafaring man who is said to haunt the old cellars . . .” In other cases, however, we are given long and detailed accounts of hauntings by eyewitnesses, as at The Royal Oak, Lang-

stone Village, Havant, where the ghost, that of a naked one-legged man, has been tentatively identified with an itinerant evangelist last seen in the area about 1933. While in no way inclined to deny the existence of ghosts or the reality of psychic phenomena, this reviewer does feel distinctly sceptical about some of the explanations of the ghosts’ identities. Why, can be shown by taking just two cases, both involving those very popular providers of ghostly presences, monks and nuns. The first is that of Mad Maude, a nun supposed to haunt the Weston Manor Hotel, at Weston-on-the-Green, near Oxford, since she was burned at the stake for immoral behaviour. The story is on two counts clearly spurious. First, because nuns were not, either during the Middle Ages or at any other time, incinerated (in this life at least) for immorality, and, second, because Weston Manor was never, as the story has it, a monastery. The second case is that of The Cooper’s Arms, in Rochester. Here the visitant is a monk "who was walled up and left to die for committing some unforgivable sin.” Again the explanation is patently absurd. The Coopers’ Arms may have been, in times past, the monastery brewery, but even in a beery haze the brethren are unlikely to have immured one of their number, whatever the “unforgivable” sin. Even in the Middle Ages, questions would have been asked, and one or two clerical consciences would have been wrung. To criticise the explanations of the identity of these ghosts is not, it should be stressed again, to assert that the inns are not haunted. Rather it is to make the point that this very entertaining account of England’s haunted hostelries would be the better for an occasional critique of the explanations offered by the locals, whose much-vaunted “knowledge” is often no more than a muddled farago of rumour, superstition and mis-read history. The book's organisation is first-rate, and so is the restraint with which the hauntings are recounted. The photographs are good, though occasionally inclined to go a little too ostentatiously for “atmosphere.” But perhaps as many as a third of the historical explanations are so feeble or derivative as to be laughable. The question we are left with is whether the author was aware of this.