The Pub And Its Ghosts

So being almost 17 now, I know that I haven't written an account for a long time. Why? Well, I have had a lot of exams and skating, but I also have a job, which makes me kind of glad that I waited, and I hope you will be glad of the wait to.

So, I work in a pub as a waitress. This pub is "The Bell Inn" which is in FINEDON not ADDINGTON or any other Bell Inns! It is the oldest pub in England with a reputed license since the 1020 or something in the 1000's, so you can expect that there would be a lot of ghosts. Personally, I don't go around telling people I am kind of a ghost hunter, because I would imagine some people would think it was weird, right? Anyway, I am a big believer in fate, and trust me, I am very stubborn. So when I was desperate for a job, I was going through the Yellow Pages, searching online and asking everyone that I knew, even though my parents told me to stop. But I kept going and going and came across the Bell Inn, and had never ever been there before and me, being me, jumped at the job and worked from the next day.

On arrival, the pub from the outside doesn't actually look that good or big. However, when you open the door, you will be thrust into history and could easily get lost. There are two entrances, and throughout this 'story' I will be talking about the car park entrance, which takes you, straight into the front bar. Standing behind the bar, there is another bar to your left, and to your right, so the wooden bar makes a kind of 'U' shape, and where there is no bar directly behind you, there is a door, which has a passageway with three doors; one for the owner's house, one for the kitchen and the other to the cellar. In the kitchen, there is another door, and when you open it, there are two rooms either side of you. One is the old barn (a spare dining room) and the other is the main dining room. There is a small flight of stairs at the end of this main dining room which takes you down to the left side bar and then you simply follow the carpet round to the front bar and so on. Now, customers are not allowed in the passageway leading to the kitchen/house/cellar etc. Now that's out of the way, I can begin, because those features are very important.

So, a few weeks into my job, we have no customers for the first hour, so me and the owners (call them Jane and Derrick) get talking. Jane and Derrick are the nicest people you will ever meet, and to be honest, I had no idea that they were into ghosts and such. However, into our conversation, Jane mentions that they have had ghost hunters and paranormal researchers into the pub because of its haunted past, and they found the following;

"Two children, a boy and a girl, who were no older than 5, who used to live in the house with their family (the house that extends from the pub, where Jane and Derrick live, has a massive 10 bedrooms!) and their mother was a Duchess (not sure what of, but they believed that the Duchess' husband was a landlord). They call Jane 'the Duchess' apparently and they play upstairs and out in the passageway (which kind of explains the footsteps we always here) " and "A woman who likes to stand out by the girls bathrooms (the bathrooms are to the entrance), nice and tall in the corner, but she sometimes wonders about the bathrooms and likes the smell of the flowers Jane puts in there," and "an old monk who travels through the pub from time to time and who likes to explore" and they also captured a load of orbs on film and on pictures and stuff.

After finding this out, Jane then went on to tell me her experiences with the paranormal at the pub, which are the following;

"Whilst cleaning in the kitchen one night, I went out into the old barn to put something away. When I turned around, there was a monk staring at me in the window. He must have been quite short, because I could only see his head. He was pale and staring at me, not moving and remained there for a couple of minutes, and then, the next moment, he was gone," and "one night when I was sitting in the bar with the customers, the room suddenly went cold and there was a man standing at the bar, totally out of period. It was definitely a ghost. He wore a black tall hat and a black coat, and was drinking from an empty bear glass and had a big bushy beard. Everyone I asked couldn't see him, and when I looked again, he was gone" and they have heard so many noises in the day and night etc.

Apart from Jane and Derrick, the customers have had a lot of experience to. On Saturday nights when I used to work, there were customers coming up to us and asking us if we had ghosts, and the man I was working with at the time (David) and I said yes, and then the customers would tell us of the man with a beard that Jane had saw, and sometimes even the monk. No one has yet seen the children or the lady by the bathroom, but the bathroom door will open and then slam shut some nights, scaring us all!

Now for my experiences at the fabulous pub! I can't remember the order of which they happened, but here I go. The one that scared me the most was when I was in the kitchen on a Saturday night. It was about 9pm and there were a few customers in the front bar and no one in the dining room or old barn (the old barn is off limits on Saturdays and dining room had no one eating because we don't serve food after 8:30pm) and Jane and Derrick were in their house, David was in the bar. Simply washing dishes, I heard a knock on the door leading to the old barn, which is heavy and wooden, so it was loud and made me jump. I turned around, and there was no one there, but it knocked again and again. I got nearer to the door (it has a key in a lock in it, and you can't even tell there is a lock/key from the other side of the door) and all of a sudden, the key began to turn and it clicked as it became unlocked, and then the key and door handle jangled around for about 30 seconds, and there was more banging on the door, but softer. I was so scared, and when it stopped, I locked the door, and the key was freezing cold. It took me a while, but I gradually unlocked the door and went out in the old barn, but there was nothing there, but the room was freezing.

The old barn is by far the creepiest place in the pub. It was kept as a barn for ages before it was converted into a room in the pub, so I don't know what went on and that. However, there is something about it that makes shivers goes down my spine, and I constantly feel like I am being watched. Luckily, as I don't work on Saturdays any more, I don't have to deal with the old barn much! But when I used to work there, I would hear footsteps treading around the fireplace on the concrete floor and things would move past the windows (it's not a very well lit area). Between the dining room and the old barn, there is a wall with two arch ways in it which have like curtains hanging between them. Often, these would move and sometimes shut themselves when they had been left open, or would open themselves after being shut. The lights would also turn themselves on and off (the controls/switches are in the bar area and I cannot reach them) which was a pain because it was a trek to the switches.

Another awful experience was in the main dining room on a Saturday night. I was cleaning the cupboards and it was dark (simply because I had been in there all afternoon and hadn't really moved from that area, so didn't bother going to the lights) and I was on my own. There was no one in the bar apart from Jane, Derrick and David. All of a sudden, there were loud footsteps creeping up the small flight of stairs from the side bar, and they continued up towards me, and then just stopped, and the room went cold.

There are some various other small experiences as well; when in the bar, I have heard footsteps go across the passageway and when I have been out near the cellar, there will be a lot of tapping and clicking, and recently there was the sound of running and then a cold breeze coming past me. The bar doors will slam on their own, as will the kitchen door and bathroom doors. I have been in the bathroom when there is a sudden smell of flowers or something horrible (not just a general toilet smell) and I have been in the loo recently, when I heard the door open, and then the other toilet door open and shut, but when I have finished, there is no evidence of this, and no one has come in/gone out of the toilets. It is also constantly cold in the old barn, and often gets cold in the kitchen, and then becomes really hot. Also in the kitchen and old barn, I have been touched on my arm, which is freaky. There was also the sound of a dog growling once, which was really creepy as there are no dogs in the pub at all. Sometimes if you are in the front bar, you can feel something go round your feet; Jane says this is the children. Things also go missing and don't come back for weeks, and then suddenly reappear! In the house (which I have never been in), there are reports of various shadow figures and footsteps, which can be heard even when everyone is downstairs. Jane says one of the rooms in the house is uncomfortable to be in and things move about in the pub as well.

Yeah, so that's the lovely haunted pub that I work in. Hope that you find this interesting, even though it is a bit long!