Beer & Spirits: Haunted Hostelries of Cambridgeshire

A guide to the haunted hostelries of Cambridgeshire with an extra twist.

Explore the haunted hostelries of Cambridgeshire and experience a palpable sense of timelessness in the cities, towns and villages where ghost stories and strange happenings are an integral part of our folklore.

Thumb through a ghostly gazetteer listing over sixty locations of reported sightings, sounds and sensations.

Sightings of people from the past including Mary Queen of Scots on her way to Fotheringhay Castle; the highwayman Dick Turpin; the writer Daniel Defoe; the eighteenth-century murderer Gervase Matcham; poor Mary Ann Weems, murdered by her husband in 1819; Jeremiah Newell of Ely who mistook a steaming dunghill for his bed; and Harry ‘Kirky’ Kirk, employed as assistant to the hangman Albert Pierrepoint. Reports of a cat walking straight through a wall, of a small hand print mysteriously appearing on a mirror, of a vase of flowers flying across the room, a pint glass floating from table to table, shoe laces untied repeatedly, and tidied up playing cards.

Sounds of persistent knocking, footsteps, rubbing hands, jangling keys, rattling door latches and beer tankards, of bottles clinking in the middle of the night, babies crying and of English Civil War troops amassing.

Sensations of cold spots, of an unseen presence close-by and a tap on the shoulder; the odour of rotting flesh, of pipe tobacco and of lavender; vibrating beds and tugging at the blankets by unseen hands.

‘The Last Round’ and ‘The Old Waterman’

Enjoy two original ghost stories by Trevor Bounford. Compelling tales, not for the faint-hearted but bound to put you in the right frame of mind for strange encounters.