The Haunted Village Pubs of Worcestershire part 1

The Bull's Head Inn is a Georgian building in the village of Inkberrow is well known In the local area to be haunted. The village was first recorded in 789 and was called Instanbeorgas, meaning Insta's Barrows. There are two pubs in Inkberrow, The Bull's Head Inn and The Old Bull, a 16^th century timber framed building, where it’s believed that William Shakespeare once stopped off when he was travelling to Worcester to collect his marriage licence to Anne Hathaway. In 1645 during the English Civil War, Charles I stayed overnight in the vicarage and left his maps behind, they are now held at the County Record Office. A local legend says that Charles the 1^st buried his soldiers wages somewhere in the village but they have never been found.

From the 1960s to 1993, the landlady and her husband of the Bulls Head experienced a lot of activity which turned them from being completely sceptical to being believers in the paranormal.

While the landlady was serving breakfast one morning, a man from Yorkshire was staying at the inn, when he noticed a stream of liquid pouring from the ceiling. He told her that he thought that they have a leak. She went out to have a look and realised that there was no water source in the room above that part of the building, it was just an empty room. When she looked on the floor for the liquid, there was nothing there. The guest helped her look and he confirmed that there was no liquid.

A local barman used to stay at the pub on occasions to help out early the next morning. When he stayed over, he would always be up early and let the cleaner in. One morning, the landlady was walking down the stairs and he asked her where she went so early in the morning. He said that he got up around 6am and answered the door because he heard the landlady calling him, there was no one there. Minutes later it happened again.

After the Christmas rush in the pub, the landlady’s parents went to stay for her mother’s birthday. After the pub had closed and locked up, her father went to bed and the rest of the family sat in the pubs lounge. After a few minutes they heard her father calling her husband so he went upstairs to see if he was ok, he was asleep. He went back down the stairs and they heard it again. Her mother was so frightened that she hid behind the bar and refused to come out.

A few days later, the landlady was walking down the stairs and she saw the door at the bottom open, catching a glimpse of the back of a long pale frilly dress. She rushed down the stairs and ran into the room shouting “I’ve got you". But there was no one there.

A guest who was interested in ghost stories was told by the landlady that the pub was haunted and didn’t believe her. After a good night’s sleep, he woke the next morning telling the landlady, “I didn’t believe you when you said the pub was haunted, but I woke up this morning to see a woman sitting on the bed".

One morning in February 1991, a guest went down the stairs asking if the pub was haunted. He said that he’d got out of bed early in the morning and as he went to the bathroom he looked over his shoulder and saw someone else getting out of the bed.

A guest from America was staying on the first floor and early one morning the landlady heard him shouting. She quickly got out of bed and went to the top of the stairs, witnessing the ghost of a beautiful woman walking up towards her. She had entered the guests room and left, walking up the stairs. She described her as looking perfect, she looked in her 40s and had long blonde hair, she was wearing a long white silky dress. She said that she fluttered up the stairs and she didn’t feel scared at all, she then just disappeared. She told the American guest that it was a ghost and he didn’t believe her. Throughout the rest of his stay, he kept asking where the beautiful blonde was.

In the summer of 1977, a local teenager who was friends with the landlady’s daughter used to stay over at the pub on occasions. One night she was woken up by something cold and wet touching her from her hip to her shoulder. She sat up to suddenly hear a whoosh sound shoot across the room from her side and out through the closed door.

One day in 1990, a woman was helping the landlady out by doing some ironing. She said that she felt as if someone else was in the room. She turned around to see a young girl fading away. She described her as wearing a long pale blue dress and wearing a hat with a scarf over it. She had long blonde hair and was very pretty. Her clothes looked like they were from the 17^th century and she looked around 20 years old. The local people of Inkberrow believe that a young seamstress died in the area in the 17^th century and she returns from time to time.

A little further down the road from the Bulls Head is a bungalow where in 2006 a father and son were working as removal men and moving the family out of the bungalow. The bungalow has a basement room and the father asked his son to go down there and fetch the rocking chair that was near the fireplace. He went down there and there was an old man sat on the chair smoking a pipe. He waved his pipe as if to say hello to the removal man. He went back upstairs to tell his father that he couldn’t bring the chair up yet as someone was sitting on it. The owner of the bungalow overheard this and asked who was sat on the chair as no one else was there. He told him about the old man smoking a pipe and described him wearing brown trousers and a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up. The house owners face dropped, he then told them that it sounds like his wife’s father who used to live in the basement area, he died 6 months ago.

There is an old ghost story known as Old Buckle, The Headless Horseman, who is supposed to travel along the road between Throckmorton and Bishampton. The story has been told over a few generations with many not realising that there was much truth behind the tale.

When a researcher was searching for the will of an ancestor, John Frederick Buckle, he came across the true story behind the ghost. On the 25^th of January 1879, John Buckle who was a tenant farmer who went to Alcester to pay his rent and to meet a business associate from Birmingham in a local pub. He heard news that the business associate was going to be very late so John had to spend the day in the pub to wait for him. He finally left the pub at 11.10pm. Around a quarter past midnight, the landlord at the Bulls Head in Inkberrow heard the sound of a horse and cart going up the drive next to the inn. He went outside to investigate and found that a cart had been turned over with the body of a man lying under it. It was John Buckle, the landlord described him as having his head turned under his body.

The Old Mug house in Claines near Worcester is one of only two pubs in England that are built on consecrated land. The church was built in the 15^th century on the site of an earlier church and the Old Mug House was most likely built around the same time. In the middle ages it was considered respectable to drink ale and wine and many churches owned there own ale houses which also brought in a tidy profit. The Old Mug House was lucky as many of the church owned breweries and pub were closed during the short reign of Oliver Cromwell who was a puritan.

The Old Mug House has been known to be haunted for many years. An old legend says that the ghost goes to the pub of the pub and shouts “beware", he then walks into the church and plays the organ. During a renovation in 1972, an external wall was damaged during a storm. A shiny object buried within the wall which turned out to be the silver head of a Bishops crook that once belonged to a previous Bishop of Worcester. It’s now used by the Claines Boy Bishop.

A landlord who run the pub from 1938 until 1982 was always sceptical about the hauntings but he did admit that he could never figure out what the unexplained noises were that would happen all over the pub and the mallet that he used to tap the beer with was never where he left it.

The landlords wife was more open to the idea of the paranormal and found the pub a strange place. She claimed that they would often hear glasses rattling and footsteps all over the pub when no one else was there. One day she heard someone going up the stairs, she rushed to the door and locked it behind them. She then called her husband and they went up the stairs to see who it was but there was no one there.

At night, she used to leave a plate of biscuits on a shelf in case their children woke up hungry in the night. They never used to get up in the night and very often the biscuits would be gone. They thought that it may be mice but they never found any crumbs or droppings and no other food ever disappeared.

From 1989 another couple took the pub on, they were both sceptical about the ghost stories but it wasn’t long before they changed their minds.

From the first day in the pub, their dog would bark and howl when he was in the kitchen. The entrance to the cellar was in the kitchen where many strange things occurred. Things were always moving around in the cellar and the doors were often opening and closing. When a group of people stayed over in the cellar to raise money for a local charity, they claimed to have heard children singing the nursery rhyme, Pop Goes the Weasel.

One Sunday afternoon, about three months after moving in, they invited some friends who were staying in the village from London and some local neighbours round while the pub was closed. Suddenly they heard a crash from behind the bar. They ran over to investigate and they found that about 12 glasses had been smashed on the floor. They were broken to the extent that they were in tiny pieces, indicating that they were smashed with a great force. Their friends who were staying in the cottage next door were so scared that they packed their luggage and went back to London.

Only a few weeks later it happened again. The barman and their niece were standing at the bar talking when they heard a crash from behind the bar again, the same things happened. The glasses were smashed so hard that you couldn't tell how many glasses had been broken.

In 2017, a couple managed a pub for six months in the village of Bournheath near Bromsgrove called The New Inn. After running the pub for around two months they started to experience some strange things. Objects in the kitchen would be moved and the fridge would often be turned off in the night, causing them to have a lot of food wastage. During the next few weeks they started to experience some strange activity in the restaurant. Their son worked the bar with his friend and they had to lock up. They separated went all over the pub to check that all of the doors and windows were closed and locked and then they met in the middle behind the bar which is at the centre of the pub. They heard a noise coming from the restaurant side of the pub and went to investigate when they both witnessed a chair sliding across the floor as if it was being dragged by an invisible person.

One night, a barmaid was fetching some wine from the restaurant side of the bar when she came running into the bar saying that she saw a woman wearing a Victorian style dress that walked through the kitchen wall towards her.

After speaking to a small group of locals, many who had been using the pub for many years to play cards and dominoes, told them that one night when they were in the middle of a game, a brass kettle that was in front of the open fire at the other end of the bar room was suddenly thrown at them. They looked at the kettle and it had a dent in the top from that night.

They heard that many people had witnessed seeing the ghost of a man who would stand near the fireplace and in the corridor to the toilet area. None of the locals knew anything about the history of the pub so they done some research of their own. They found that a man was killed in the pub after a bare knuckle fight in 1889. After an argument over a brass button, the two men, Thomas Price and Albert Waldron, they decided to settle the dispute with a fight. The fight lasted three rounds before Alfred was knocked to the ground, the final blow taking his life. The locals insisted that Price should be punished for murder but the coroner ruled that his sentence should be reduced to manslaughter.

The couple were sat in the bar one afternoon at the weekend, talking to a local couple who went in often and they told them about the story behind the ghost and the woman said that Alfred Waldron was her great great grandfather and that she knew of the ghost story but didn’t believe that anyone had experienced anything.

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