The Golden Pheasant on Biggleswade's High Street is a genuinely old building, Grade II listed and dating from the eighteenth century, and has picked up a local reputation over the years as the most haunted pub in town. The most distinctive report is auditory rather than visual: staff and customers describe unexplained singing heard coming from an empty bar, with no source ever found. One theory ties this directly to a real, if grim, historical incident, the death of a man named William Robinson in 1900 following a dispute at the pub that arose over singing, though the exact causal link between his death and the phantom singing is more assumed than demonstrated in any source.
A second, separate strand of the pub's folklore concerns a headless woman, said in local tradition to have worked in a brothel that once operated in rooms above the pub during the nineteenth century, and to have died in a violent accident there. The two stories, the singing and the headless woman, do not obviously connect to each other and appear to be distinct traditions that have simply accumulated at the same building over time, alongside further reported figures including a Victorian-dressed woman and a child, plus a scattering of odder, more tongue-in-cheek local claims about objects moving unexpectedly.
As with many pub hauntings, this is a case of thin, largely undated staff testimony built up into a fuller-sounding reputation through repetition on local podcast and listicle coverage, worth including honestly as a well-known local story rather than a rigorously documented case.
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