13 places in Bristol you didn’t know were haunted

The season of ghosts and ghouls is upon us, and as we itch towards All Hallow’s Eve at the end of the month, here are 13 haunted places across Bristol just waiting to be unmasked.

1. Llandoger Trow

This historic pub has been a popular drinking spot for actors, seamen and even pirates since 1664. The building is said to be home to 15 ghosts, including a young boy who wore leg braces and whose footsteps can be heard echoing around the empty top floor.

2. Christmas Steps

Once known as Knyfesmyth Street after the tradesmen who plied their wares, this narrow medieval lane was also briefly renamed Lonsford’s Stairs for a Cavalier officer killed on the steps during the Civil War. Other ghostly sightings include a young Victorian girl and a woman dressed in black who joined an inhabitant at their dinner table.

3. The SS Great Britain

Brunel’s world-famous ship is reportedly still occupied by many spectres of former passengers and crew from its two centuries of public service. The most famous is Captain John Gray, who disappeared on November 26 1872 during a voyage to Australia and whose hobnail boots can still be heard scratching the ship’s deck as he plunges overboard.

4. Odeon cinema, Union Street

On a summer’s evening in 1946, during a screening of The Light That Failed at the cinema on Union Street, manager Robert Jackson was found dying by cinema staff having been fatally shot in an armed robbery that went wrong. The case has never been officially solved, though in 1993, whilst on his deathbed, a Welsh crook named Billy Fisher confessed to the murder.

5. Bristol Old Vic

The theatre is home to one of Bristol’s most famous ghosts, Sarah Macready, an actress and theatre manager whose hazy form can be seen draped in mourning black for her late husband. Her lavender scent is regularly smelled backstage.

6. All Saints Church

The church on Corn Street dates from the 1200s but the most intense period of haunting took place in April 1846. Mr and Mrs Jones, who lived in the adjacent vicarage, were so plagued by a nocturnal poltergeist that Mrs Jones leapt out of her bedroom window in fright. Jones was reported by the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette of “being certain…that we will die if we sleep another night in the house”.

7. Bristol Cathedral

A phantom monk dressed in grey is said to lurk around the cathedral and nearby Central Library, always appearing around 4.30pm. He’s not to be confused with All Saints’ second ghost, a monk dressed in black who was spotted walking down the church aisle around Christmas 1948.

8. Oldbury Court Estate

Bristol’s third monastic ghost used to hold mass at a time when Catholics were being persecuted, and so to hide from the authorities he would clamber into a small space called the Priest’s Hole. On one occasion he became trapped and starved to death, and is now most often sighted by the footbridge, only to fade away into nothing when approached.

9. The Dower House

The yellow mansion that sits alongside the M32 is haunted by the ghost of 17-year-old Elizabeth Somerset, the Duchess of Beaufort. She died in 1760 when she fell from her horse and broke her neck. The galloping hooves of her horse can still be heard by visitors to Stoke Park.

10. Ashton Court Estate

On clear nights there are stories of a ghostly headless horseman circling the estate, ladies dressed in grey and even phantom hounds, while workers carrying out renovations on the mansion say they would arrive each morning to find their equipment scattered about, no matter how neatly they had left them the night before.

11. Arnos Manor Hotel

Built in 1760 as the private home of business merchant William Reeve now a hotel, room 160 is permanently occupied by the ghost of a nun who committed suicide after falling pregnant, and whose corpse was bricked into the walls to bury the scandal.

12. Platform 5, Temple Meads Station

The busy train station formed the backdrop for a dramatic act of passion and heartbreak in October 1917. Private Albert Cross was returning to active duty in France and was saying goodbye to his wife Bessie when she told him she had fallen pregnant by another man. He coldly shot her with his rifle and handed himself in to the police.

13. Pembroke Road

Back in the 19th century, murderous highwaymen frequented this road in Clifton. Formerly known as Gallow’s Acre Lane for the public hangings that took place on the Downs, dwarf highwayman Jenkins Protheroe was hanged there for his crimes in 1783 and Protheroe’s ghost can be seen climbing down from the gallows on misty evenings.