Hauntings

The woman in black of the Castle Inn

The Castle Inn, Olney

Woman's dress dated to the 18th century

The Castle Inn's two named figures, a woman in period-specific eighteenth-century dress and a man walking through a doorway later sealed, give this haunting the kind of layout-sensitive detail recorded at numerous other sites throughout this wider register, his continued use of a now-nonexistent opening being explained, as with several comparable ghosts elsewhere, as evidence that he continues to follow the building's original floor plan regardless of later structural change.

The reported exorcism's own explicit failure, the woman reappearing some years after the ritual was performed, is a notable and honestly recorded detail distinguishing this entry from the smaller number of this register's hauntings where an exorcism is instead described as having successfully resolved the activity, such as Burford Priory's gamekeeper in Oxfordshire, giving the Castle Inn's tradition a more genuinely unresolved, ongoing character.

The separately recorded annual phantom coach, passing through the inn on an unknown date once a year, belongs to the widely recorded phantom-coach tradition found throughout this register, its specifically unknown timing giving it an unusual and unpredictable quality compared with the more fixed anniversary dates, such as Herne the Hunter's own royal-death timing in Berkshire, recorded for several comparable traditions elsewhere.

An operating public house with published opening hours.
Evidence
Long-standing local tradition
Access
Open ground
Location
52.153, -0.699 (Sited to the building or field)

Sources: HauntedPlaces.org, "Haunted Places in olney, Milton Keynes" [other]

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