The history of Wotton-under-Edge

Builders raised the house and later added a storey

The Ancient Ram Inn is a late-medieval building in Wotton-under-Edge that now runs as a guesthouse built around its reputation as one of the most haunted houses in England. Older stories claim it dates back to 1145 and once housed the masons who built St Mary the Virgin, Wotton-under-Edge next door, though the surviving timber and documentary evidence point to the later date instead.

The earliest deed that survives, from 1350, records a tenement here passing from Maurice de Bathe to a man named Peter le Couk. By 1532, the building was held in trust for the church by eight local men, all described as yeomen of Wotton-under-Edge. Sometime in the mid-to-late 1500s, builders added a whole upper storey and updated the roof with heavy collar-trusses, work that still survives.

A brewery pub closed and a rescuer stepped in

By around 1820 the building was working as a public house, known locally as the Ram Inn. An archaeological survey of the yard outside later turned up the remains of five walls from 19th-century mill buildings and a 20th-century printing works, buried under decades of demolition rubble. The pub itself kept pulling pints until 1968, when the last one was served and the doors closed.

That same year, John Humphries bought the building from the brewery for £2,500 to stop it being knocked down for road widening. He turned it into a guesthouse and later opened it to ghost hunters, claiming he was grabbed and thrown from his bed on his very first night there. Humphries lived in the building until he died in December 2017, aged 89, after nearly fifty years as its owner.

Ghost stories of witches, bones and murder piled up

Once Humphries opened the place up, the stories piled on fast. He said he found children's bones under the staircase, and took them as proof of old ritual sacrifice on the site. Guests and ghost hunters began reporting dark shapes in the room they came to call the bishop's room, and an old innkeeper's ghost pacing the former bar. One room earned the name "the Witch's Room," after a story that a woman hid there in the 1500s, accused of witchcraft, before being burned at the stake. Another tale told of an innkeeper's daughter murdered in the attic, with visitors since saying they've heard something heavy dragged across the floor below. Some who tell the building's story reach back further still, claiming the ground itself was a pagan burial site some five thousand years old, with sacrifices carried out here long before any house stood on it. In 1996, the Grade II* listing first granted in 1952 was refined and reconfirmed, recognizing the building's late-medieval fabric rather than any of its later legends.

Investigators keep filming a building still run by family

Humphries' death in December 2017, at 89, ended an ownership that had lasted almost fifty years. The guesthouse has carried on since under his family, still run around the reputation he built for it as one of England's most haunted buildings. Ghost-hunting groups, television crews and paranormal investigators from as far as Denmark and Sweden have filmed overnight stays here, and one television crew's night at the inn became an episode of the comedy troupe The League of Gentlemen's own ghost-hunting documentary. The Ghost Club, the oldest paranormal research group in the world, investigated the building in 2003 and recorded nothing unusual.

Alongside the ghost stories, the ground has given up more solid traces of its working past. An archaeological survey of the yard found the remains of five walls from 19th-century mill buildings and a 20th-century printing works, all buried under demolition rubble from a later age. The surviving deeds, mostly written in Norman French and now held at the Gloucester Records Office, describe the building in one phrase as dating from "time immemorial."