Behind the Bar: Landlords and Landladies Who Live with Ghosts

Who is Resident in YOUR Pub.

Running a pub is a full-time job that never really ends. There are always a myriad of tasks that need doing, from the stock, the staff, the bookings, the late nights, to the ordering, training and contact with the brewery alongside managing your own family time. Yet, what about if you added resident spirits to that list? Perhaps the job has just taken on another dimension.

Over the year I’ve spoken to Inn keepers who don’t just tell ghost stories, they actually live them. Their words, more than any EVP or blurred orb, are the ones that have stayed with me. Would you like to hear the first example? Well, it is really common for the pub team to give the spirit a name and to say hello whenever they feel a presence.

The pub is a home, not just a business

People can be forgiven for forgetting that for many publicans the pub is also home, although I have come across quite a few who will no longer reside at the pub. Their bedrooms are located above the bar, their personal lives threaded through the back rooms, one can imagine that the school run starts early under the same eaves where the landlord locks up at midnight.

One Landlord put it simply: “You often hear lots of RUNNING FOOTSTEPS upstairs… and you have that feeling that you’ve just missed someone, we know no-one is there.” Those footsteps aren’t a one-off anecdote because they’re the soundtrack to a normal day for some people.

Living in a haunted building certainly brings oddities and sometimes a large personal jolt... “The first night we moved in… I woke up in the night and felt as there were loads of people in there. I moved bedroom, I just had the worst night ever,” one landlady told me. You can imagine trying to put the kettle on the next morning after a night like that! Could this have been the residents saying hello to their new room mate? Remember, spirits were people and can be a curious bunch.

There was no-one there!

landlords report

Certain experiences come up again and again. Cellars with sharp, inexplicable cold spots. Shadows that pass just out of the corner of your eye. Objects that move when no one is near them.

“I’ve seen golden orbs… literally just spinning around,” one Landlord said, describing an orb that appeared and hovered in the bar. Another described a physical moment you can’t shrug off, “One of the pump clips… moved probably foot and a half off the shelf and down onto the floor, and it was just sat bolt upright.”

Sometimes the evidence is simple and domestic, for example a glass that jumps from a level surface and smashes for no reason. “A glass jumped off… smashed… completely level,” one pub owner recalled "the whole room stopped and stared". These are not at all theatrical tales, they are said in a matter of fact way, to the average person, they are unmistakable.

It just lifted off the counter

How keepers cope

Not every landlord wants a ghost story on the front window because, do all their guests and regulars want to share the space with a ghost? Or would it put people off coming or settling or relaxing? The responses vary widely:

• Some embrace it, tell the tale over pints and put a ghost night on the events board.

  
  

• Others keep quiet because it’s private, and they don’t want ridicule or the risk of weird customers. I have heard tales of people coming in with EMF meters and reaching over other guests meals! (Honestly, I am told that it happened).

  
  

• Some find comfort in the presence: “It doesn’t feel malevolent...there’s someone or something here, but it’s not mean and it feels like a good energy.”

  
  

A practical, respectful approach runs through many of the interviews. One keeper described how they treat the place and its unseen residents: “Be good mannered about it, just trying not to upset anyone.” That attitude, polite, steady, hospitable, Barry and I feel is the default way a lot of people who share their home with something from the past should approach this, with kindness and respect and a humour. In fact, you can read about the time the spirit wouldn't let me speak and kept cutting me off... we all laughed including the spirit. (Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker 2025).

When the living and the unseen intersect

The pub has been and I think will remain a social hub, a community gathering spot and therefore a magnet for memories and experiences. Births, funerals, weddings, drunken arguments, wartime recruitment, last orders, all of that emotional freight piles up and the energy is absorbed into the building. One Landlord told me about seeing a figure that couldn’t have been someone who simply walked in that night: “I saw someone with a grey hoodie walk past the hatch… I had a locked door the other side, nobody could have come in that way.” Moments like that make you question the geography of a building as much as the metaphysics.

I have found that sounds and music sometimes bridge the gap between the worlds. Recently, I played a track to engage a presence, Scarborough Fair and “it the cat ball just started flashing, stop, flashing, stop. flashing...” as if approving and wanting more, in fact I ask and often tehy say yes. For those on both sides of the bar, it can feel like a conversation and be uplifting to give more than we ask.

Evidence, tech and the stubborn ordinary

Many pubs have the use of CCTV and capture images but the strangest experiences involve the ordinary, a chair that moves, the chill of a cellar, a dog that won’t go down the stairs. “We have recordings where sensors tripped downstairs but we didn’t hear it upstairs,” I was told, "the hand-dryer in the ladies went off, but the alarms weren't triggered, how?" disbelief can be heard in their voices, for me somehow proof that some things happen in a different register to human hearing and vision, a different part of the bandwidth of our senses.

Pub teams report being nudged, felt, or touched too. “I’ve had people say they’ve been pushed… just touched in this part of the room,” and those tactile moments stick with staff and customers alike long after the story is told.

Why Landlords and Landladies matter to the story

As investigators, it’s tempting to chase for perfect evidence, a clear EVP, a thermal image, an unmistakable video, and yes it is thrilling to get those. However, the human testimony, the landlord who changes bedrooms after a night of faces in the dark, the barmaid who won’t go into one room, the owner who accepts a strange presence as part of the furniture, THAT is where the heart of pub hauntings lives.

Landlords are custodians of buildings, of the energy and also of the many memories. They sweep the floors, tell the jokes, count the takings, and manage the living legacy of a thousand small moments. All the Licensee's have told me the same thing, in the gentle, almost weary way keepers do, that the pub is “the cornerstone of the community”.

If the pub has its ghosts, then the people who run it are the ones who live with them, and the ones that keep their stories alive too, itself another important pub task.

Dedication to Those Licensees who Live With Ghosts

To the many Owners, Landlords, Landladies, Managers and their staff - you are all amazing. Thank you for sharing the stories that both Barry and I have had the privilege to record, and experience. Coming Soon...

Ghosts on Tap: The Top 10 Haunted Pubs in Hampshire

New Pub - New Adventures.

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