The Haunted Inn

On a lonely fell is a coaching inn
where the locals stare and sometimes grin,
imbibing ale and swigging rum
as unsuspecting grockles come.
Those who choose to stay the night
will wish they hadn’t, with hindsight.
Wrapped in sweaty nightclothes’ trammel
and listening for the keyhole’s rattle,
the naïve and malleable ponder and sigh
at the fata organa in a stranger’s eye,
the touch of his hand and sinister warning
to take the opportunity to wake next morning
by getting the coach to other staging posts
without a reputation for resident ghosts.

Kim M. Russell, 2017

Related image
Image found on hauntedhappenings.co.uk

My response to Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Wordle #169

Week 169

21 thoughts on “The Haunted Inn”

    1. It’s near Stroud in Gloucestershire – but I didn’t know about it being a haunted inn until I started to look for a suitable image and only used the picture because it looked like fictional inn I wrote the poem about.

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      2. My husband used to work behind the bar in the Old Hall Inn (which is now somebody’s home) where they used to see a grey lady and things like keys and glasses were moved around. There is also one in Worstead, not far from me, called the White Lady. I’m fascinated by them.

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      3. did you ever see anything yourself though? I live by the old execution site right outside the gaol in abingdon. to add to the effect in the 19th century the house was owned by an anatomist who got his bodies from the workhouse and buried them along my wall!

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      4. Not in a pub, but when I stayed with friends who rented the lodge house of a missionary school outside Navan in Ireland, and in a flat I rented in South London, I experienced hauntings. Also, when I was four I regularly chatted with my great grandfather, according to my gran.

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      6. Our cottage is over 150 years old and is attached to what was once the village stores. Our neighbours often see the ghost of an old lady who sits in a chair in their living room, although she has been seen in other parts of their house, I sometimes smell tobacco smoke in our house and neither of us smokes. But our cottage has a friendly atmosphere and we’ve lived here for seventeen years very happily.

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