The George Hotel started as an Elizabethan mansion owned by John Oversale, twice mayor of Hull in the 1500s, and became a coaching inn known as Ye White Frere Hostel. The part that survives is the gatehouse on the narrow Land of Green Ginger, built in the late seventeenth century and refronted about 1870. Its best known feature is a slit window just ten inches by one inch, said to be the smallest in England and used by porters to spot approaching coaches.
The Buildings of Hull and East Yorkshire blog describes folklore of a grey lady, a spectral woman in grey who is said to drift through the corridors, and tales linked to the tiny window about a boy who either fell or was pushed from it. The writer calls these stories often vague or legendary.
Mike Covell, in a 2017 piece debunking Hull myths, takes issue with other stories at the George, such as one about bowmen shooting at customs men through the window, for which he found no record. He accepts, though, that the hotel had its own seance room on the top floor and that the building boasted a male carriage driver and a young phantom boot boy, both seen in the bar. So the haunting reports are vague, secondhand and unnamed, and the more dramatic window stories are doubted by a local historian. It is kept as a traditional pub haunting.
Comments