Who Haunts the Ancient Ram Inn?

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
The Ancient Ram Inn is touted as one of Britain's most haunted establishments, sitting on land that dates back to the Bronze Age.

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St Mary the Virgin Church, Wotton-under-edge

The Ancient Ram Inn is one of England’s oldest inns and can be found in the village of Wotton-Under-Edge in Gloucestershire. It is famed to have such terrifying ghosts that those trying to spend a whole night have fled through a closed window. Anecdotal evidence paints a dark and disturbing past of witchcraft, murder, torture, kidnap and satanic worship providing a source for the numerous spirits that are said to inhabit it.

It's believed a structure of some type was built in 1145. The deeds are mostly in Norman French, which substantiates the age of the settlement. William FitzRobert heir to Lord Berkeley, served as the first Rector of Wotton. 

Much of Wotton-Under-Edge was destroyed by fire in the reign of King John (1199-1216), however the building survived. Located on Potter's Pond, streams were diverted to lay the foundation for St. Mary the Virgin church. The once large pond, now dry was used for Wotton Mill. What's left present day is an underground stream that runs under the inn and surfaces beyond it.

Some theorize that like other sites of medieval cathedrals, it was picked specifically to coincide with ley lines. One of the ley lines at the Ram Inn runs between Ley Farm and Hetty Peglar's Tump (aka Uley Long Barrow). The burial barrow was named for Hester Pegler who owned the land in the 17th century, and dates back to Neolithic times. John Humphries who owned the inn after 1969, claimed the line ran through the center of Stonehenge, and the other through Glastonbury Tor. The redirection of water is known to open portals. The area in ancient times was known as Synwell, which is believed to be Celtic for Seven Wells.

During the 13th century besides the erection of the church, there was a school, almshouses and the Wotton house of friars.

Connected with the church, the original inn was larger than its present form and had been a home to the local priest. It also served as a "keeping house" for stone masons and workers used in the construction of St. Mary the Virgin Church. The church was consecrated in 1283 by Godfrey Giffard, Bishop of Worcester, however it took 171 years to complete the structure since Gerinus, a vicar recorded it in 1154, and it was deemed completed in 1325.

In 1469, William, Lord Berkeley and Viscount Lisle engaged in a private battle, where Viscount Lisle was killed and the lands in the Wotton area, which had been disputed over for 200 years reverted to the Berkeley family.

Around this time it came into the possession of Maurice de Bathe, and stayed in the de Bathe family for almost the next two centuries. Through the next 400 years it changed hands many times and went by different names. At one point it was known by the locals as The Old Sun, and in 1694 as The Tan House. It was then that Edward Wallington and Edward Birton passed ownership to Jonathan Nelmes, the mayor. In 1724, it was referred to as Horse Pool House.

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An ad from Cheltenham Ales featuring the Ram Inn c.1939

In 1820, it became the property of Cheltenham Original Brewery Company, who licensed it out as an alehouse. This is also when it became known as The Ram Inn. As a pub it also bottled and sold its own mineral water, sourced from a spring behind the inn.

In 1882, it was licensed to Thomas Mizen, and then in 1906 V.G. Vooght transferred it to Rufus Morley, and by 1950 the licensee was Arthur F. Smith.​

Throughout the years the building deteriorated. The interior was infested with death watch beetles and the walls were crumbling. It had no running water, which it still doesn't, and was slated for demolition. It was closed for three years when it was saved by John Humphries who purchased it for £2,600 in 1969.

He had plans to complete renovations himself, and open it as a guest house since he was prohibited from using it as a pub and compete with other pubs in the area. Old Cotswold stone walls were uncovered, and in one room an artificial wall was cleared away to reveal an ancient fireplace. Original wattle and daub partition walls (sticks plastered with cow dung and straw) were revealed, and upstairs the attic still had tree limbs that supported the roof. The Roman tiles on the roof were to be replaced with Cotswold stone tiles. He also had plans to re-open two windows which were bricked up in the dim past.

Humphries also had plans to make it a museum in memory of Stephen Hopkins, America's most famous Pilgrim Father. He left Wotton, was shipwrecked in Bermuda in 1609 and arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in 1610. He returned to England in 1614 and sailed on the Mayflower in 1620, with his second wife and their children.

​​Humphries was using timbers and Cotswold stones slates from an old barn that belonged to Hopkin's descendant, a local famer named Graham Hopkins.

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John Humphries with his wife and 3 daughters outside the Ram's Inn c.1969

During the renovations it was found the inn had the oldest wooden window frame in Britain; as well as the earliest surviving board for the game Nine Men’s Morris, which appears carved into a stone inglenook dated to 1540.

In 1971, Humphries bought the former mortuary next door. 

John Humphries believed the site went back to pre-Christian Britain, when it was a pagan burial ground. He claimed a wooden post in the building dated back to 3,000 B.C., and that besides burying the populace in these grounds, ritual human sacrifices were carried out there.

Alternately there is no proof the building predates 1495, and it's theorized it was originally a domestic house involved with the thriving wool trade, and about 100 years later it was a church house which lastly was used as a public house. That another structure existed prior to the 15th century, was demolished and the present structure was erected on its foundation is very possible.

Around 1976, the Humphries separated when John admitted his homosexuality, which up to 1967 was illegal in the UK.

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Dead cat found immured at the Ancient Ram Inn dates back at least 400 years

By the early 1980s ghost investigators were being invited to the old Ram Inn to experience the hauntings, the most infamous being the Bishop's Room (once the Berkeley Room) situated on the first floor.  The ghost of a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel is seen in the corner. There are also reports of monks, nuns, men and women and even a Roman Centurion on horseback who came in through the wall of the room, witnessed by a plumber working that day. It's believed the devil worship took place in this room.

The Bishop's Room supposedly earned its name when Reverend John Yates, a one time Bishop of Gloucester attempted to exorcise the pub, without success and he said it was " the most evil place I have ever had the misfortune to visit".  It's an unverified story, and it's not sure when this occurred since in 1984 John Humphries said, "I want to find out what's behind it all (hauntings). I don't want it destroyed by exorcism." 

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Bishop's Room at Ancient Ram Inn

A local dowser had told Humphries that the inn was built on an old graveyard and that beneath the floors were scores of bodies, many of them children who were the victims of human sacrifice. The dowser also located an old well beneath the floorboards.

In a spot where Humphries had found an ancient bayonet, the dowser said the body of a woman killed by soldiers was buried there.

Later Humphries claimed the dowser was accurate when he dug up part of the floor at the foot of the staircase, and found children's bones. He also found daggers in the pit, which a later archeological report described they were of "great age". In 2014, they were stolen from a glass cabinet and were not recovered.

Humphries also found a mummified cat immured in the Bishop's Room's inglenook. Historically placing a cat in the structure was used as a talisman against witches. The Stroud Museum confirmed the cat was dead before being placed in the building, and could be 400 to 500 years old.

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Ancient Ram Inn, unknown date

He also found the remains of a woman and a baby buried under the kitchen floor. The kitchen had once been a tack room for the former stables occupying the far end of the ground floor. Allegedly behind the bar another woman is buried, a victim of a highwayman. Ironically there is a story that two highwaymen hid in a space between the roofs.

According to Humphries when he was sent the copy of a will belonging to Thomas Waight of Synwell, a tanner who owned the inn in 1694, paranormal activity increased. The photograph of Rufus Morley once a keeper there also disturbed the ghosts.

John Humphries believed there were at least 5 ghosts at the inn. Visitors had seen a cavalier, a lady called Elizabeth, Tom the Tramp, a monk and a shepherd.

Visitors are said to complain of feeling a presence, hearing strange bangs, cold spots and an incident when a bed was raised off the floor and the person thrown to the floor.

Humphries said he kept seeing the ghost of a very old man upstairs, which he thought was Thomas Waight.

Three young people exited the inn via a window in the middle of the night because they were so scared.

Humphries described a presence that was so "strong and awful that it will follow you out of the room, into the car park and along the road."

Two men who stayed in the Bishop's Room had such a frightening experience they had to be exorcised by a vicar at the church. He banned them from returning. Humphries described the "presence" in the Bishop's Room as one of "doom, gloom, death and despondency and the temperature in the room drops to zero."

He believed that the increase in paranormal activity was due to his alterations of the building.

In 1999, Julie Hunt took at photo at the Ram Inn which captured what she believed was the photograph of a ghost on the stairs.

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John Humphries c.2015

Humphries also reported the existence of an incubus and a succubus at the inn. He claimed the incubus would torment him at night.

The barn which dates back to the 18th century has not been spared, which some historians believe was once the site of a Saxon church. There is a report of an aggressive dark shadow that measures 7 feet that guards the doorway.

There are also burials around the inn that date back to when the Black Death swept through Europe in 1348.

Humphries was the only one in the family who never moved out of the inn. When the inn was experiencing a rash of burglaries, a CCTV system was installed. Noises of breaking furniture and other odd noises would be captured even though the only one inside the structure was John Humphries.

Strangely though, despite its age dating back hundreds of years the inn never received publicity as a haunted site, until the arrival of John Humphries in 1969. Early 20th century touring guides or older works of folklore for the area do not make reference to it in this context at all. It's unknown if the ghostly occurrences described by late 20th century ghost hunters were a result of being primed by Humphries' stories.

Prior to his death in 2017 at age 89, the inn was cluttered by a man who obviously was a hoarder, with a penchant for the macabre. Like a man obsessed he was buried in the local cemetery from a spot that overlooks the inn and faces the property. His daughter Caroline now runs the inn, as a place where paranormal investigators can visit for a chance at a firsthand ghostly encounter. It is listed as a Grade II building.

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