The Ancient Ram Inn

The Ancient Ram Inn is a rambling timber-and-stone building at Potters Pond, below the parish church of St Mary in the Gloucestershire market town of Wotton-under-Edge. It is a Grade II* listed late-medieval house, remodeled in the 16th century, which served as an inn from at least about 1820 until it closed in the 1960s. In 1968 the brewery that owned it sold it to John Humphries, who saved it from demolition, lived in it for almost fifty years, and turned it into a guesthouse that gradually became a destination for ghost hunters.

Humphries was the source of most of the stories. He said that on his first night a powerful unseen force grabbed him and dragged him across the room, and over the years he described an incubus and a succubus in his bedroom, a witch who had hidden in the house before being burned at the stake, a hanged innkeeper’s daughter in the attic, monks and bishops in the first-floor “Bishop’s Room,” a Roman centurion on horseback seen by two plumbers, and a seven-foot shadowy figure in the barn. He also claimed to have dug up evidence of devil worship, including children’s bones and broken daggers under the stairs — claims for which no archaeological or official report has ever been published.

The inn’s promoters say it dates to 1145, was built to house the masons of St Mary’s church, and stands on a pagan burial ground where ley lines converge. A 2023 article in Triskele Heritage’s “Mediaeval Myth-busting” series checked those claims against the record: tree-ring dating shows the timbers of the present building were felled in the winter of 1495–96; the church’s oldest fabric is younger than the supposed 12th-century lodging for its builders; the property deeds, held by Gloucestershire Archives, point to a clothmaker’s house and later a parish “church house”; and no burial ground appears in any archaeological database for the area.

None of that has dented the inn’s fame. It has appeared on Most Haunted and the American series Ghost Adventures, among others, and a widely shared photograph from June 1999 is said to show a human-sized white mist climbing the stairs. After John Humphries died in December 2017, his daughter Caroline took over, and the building now runs paid overnight ghost hunts, Sunday-afternoon sessions and junior events.

Being pushed, grabbed or dragged from bed, sexual assaults blamed on an incubus and succubus, a baby crying, heavy dragging sounds in the attic, a white mist on the stairs, shadowy figures, orbs, sudden cold and a sense of dread — reported mainly by John Humphries and later by paying ghost hunters.

The Bishop’s Room on the first floor (said to be the most active), the Witch’s Room, the attic, the “Men’s Kitchen” at the entrance, the staircase (the 1999 mist photo) and the barn.

The Ram Inn appears on most lists of Britain’s haunted places, including a 2007 Guardian top ten, and has been featured on Most Haunted, Ghost Adventures and countless YouTube and podcast investigations.