The Fountain Inn stands in Tenbury Wells, a small Georgian spa town on the Herefordshire border generally known for its pleasant riverside setting rather than for any particular supernatural reputation, making its one reported haunting stand out a little more clearly against the town's otherwise unremarkable ghost-story record. The pub's haunting is attributed to a former landlord named Thombs, said to have died in a fire at the inn itself, a genuinely dramatic and violent end for a man whose spirit, by contrast, is remembered with real affection rather than dread.
His presence is described consistently as playful rather than threatening, moving objects around the pub as though he continues, even after death, to manage the place from beyond the grave in exactly the hands-on, attentive manner a good landlord might in life, checking that everything remains in its proper place.
No date is given anywhere in the available material for either the fire itself or for Thombs's actual tenure running the inn, and no other independent record of the incident has been traced beyond the single directory listing describing it. It is treated here as a genuine but undated local story, a landlord's fatal fire transformed, in the retelling, into a gentle, almost companionable haunting rather than a tragedy to be feared.
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