Shanklin Chine's own well documented history as a smuggling route, entered historically via Fisherman's Cottage where the local fisherman and smuggler William Colenutt is recorded as having charged an entrance fee, and later becoming one of the island's earliest tourist attractions with visitor records dating back to 1817, gives the Chine Inn's reported secret tunnel a genuinely plausible functional origin, smuggling tunnels of this kind being a real and recurring feature of England's south coast chine and cove settlements.
The two ghosts, an older man and a young girl in blue, are recorded without any explicit connection to the smuggling trade itself in the sources consulted for this entry, and no name, date, or specific incident has been traced for either figure, leaving open whether they are connected to the inn's smuggling-era history or to some entirely separate strand of its later life as a public house.
The girl's specifically blue attire gives her a distinct visual identity among this register's many colour-coded female ghosts, most commonly recorded in white or grey, and her pairing with an older male figure, rather than appearing alone, gives the Chine Inn a haunting with an implied, if unexplained, relationship between its two reported ghosts, distinguishing it from the more commonly solitary apparitions recorded at comparable sites throughout this wider register.
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