The Bishop's Room

At the bottom of Potters Pond, in the old market town of Wotton-under-Edge, there is a building that leans. Its timbers sag. Its roofline dips. It looks less like a house than something that has been sitting in the same place for a very long time and has grown tired.

This is the Ancient Ram Inn. It is said to date from 1145, built to lodge the masons who were raising the church of St Mary the Virgin across the lane. For centuries afterwards it was an inn, a stopping place on the roads that ran along the Cotswold edge. Travellers drank here, quarrelled here, slept here and moved on.

It poured its last pint in 1968. Since then it has acquired a different reputation: as one of the most haunted buildings in Britain.

The stories begin before you are properly inside.

The stairs at the Ram are steep, narrow and worn into hollows by eight centuries of boots. Visitors climbing them in the half-dark have reported a hand in the small of the back. Not a stumble, they insist, but a push: firm, deliberate, from someone who is not there when they turn round. Some people go up those stairs very slowly. Some keep a hand on the wall the whole way, and their eyes behind them.

At the top is the room everyone comes for.

The Bishop’s Room is the heart of the legend, and its guest list has never quite emptied. Those who claim to have seen its occupants describe a crowded room.

There is a cavalier. He is the boldest of them: a man in the dress of the Civil War, with a sword at his side, who crosses the floor in a few long strides and walks straight into the far wall, where perhaps there was once a door.

There are two monks, standing quietly together in the corner. They do not walk or speak. They simply watch, as if waiting for a service that will never begin.

And by the door, there is a shepherd. He waits patiently with his dog at his heels, a man who has come in from the hills for the night and has never been told it is time to leave.

None of them, it is said, pays the living much attention. That is somehow worse. To be ignored in a room by people who should not be in it is to understand that you are the visitor, and they are the ones who belong.

If the Bishop’s Room is crowded, the attic above it is the opposite. Nobody claims to have seen anything there. People only hear it.

Those who have tried to sleep in the rooms below describe the same sound, in the small hours, when the town outside is silent. Something heavy is being dragged, slowly, from one side of the attic to the other. It stops. And then, after a pause long enough to make you think it has finished, it begins again.

Nobody has ever found out what it is. Fewer people than you might expect have gone up to look.

The Ram has drawn ghost-hunters, television crews and the merely curious for decades. Some leave scornful. Some leave in a hurry, before the night is out, their bags thrown into the car without being properly packed. Almost all of them, whichever kind they are, find themselves looking back at it from the end of the lane.

The old inn just leans there, as it has for centuries. Waiting for its next guest.

Would you spend a night in the Bishop’s Room?