Ettington Park stands on land the Shirley family held for centuries before the current Victorian Gothic house was actually built in the 1860s, and it is consistently named as one of the most haunted hotels anywhere in the country, a reputation built from an unusually large and varied cast of reported figures rather than any single dominant ghost. Reported figures include a woman in white, sometimes called Lady Emma, seen gliding through the library and corridors before passing directly through solid walls; a grey lady said to have died after a fall on the main staircase; a monk; an army officer; and two boys believed to have drowned in the River Stour that runs directly through the surrounding grounds. Witnesses have also described disembodied voices echoing through the building, and, on at least one occasion around Christmas, a single candle reported floating entirely unsupported in mid-air.
The sheer number of distinct figures attached to one single building is itself genuinely worth pausing on: either Ettington Park has authentically accumulated a whole series of genuinely separate stories across its long and eventful history as a family seat, a wartime convalescent home, and now finally a working hotel, or, as often happens with well-known most-haunted locations gathered throughout this collection, individual stories from entirely different places may simply have drifted onto its already formidable reputation over the decades, attracted by its fame rather than by anything specific to the building itself.
The house was also used as a genuine filming location for the 1963 film The Haunting, a piece of cinema history that has done its own considerable part in cementing Ettington Park's reputation in the public imagination, quite regardless of what, if anything, visitors and staff actually experience there on any given night.
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