The Old Black Lion on Black Lion Hill has stood for the best part of three full centuries and has carried a genuinely haunted reputation for much of that considerable span of time. Reported phenomena follow the standard pub-haunting set found throughout this collection: disembodied footsteps moving between empty rooms, lights turning on and off with no one actually near the switch, and a persistent, unsettling sense of unease concentrated specifically in the cellar.
A considerably darker story attached to the building holds that a nineteenth-century landlord murdered his own mistress and their child on the premises, dismembering the bodies and leaving them concealed in a suitcase left at the railway station, where the case was eventually traced back directly to him and he was hanged for the resulting double murder.
That particular story is repeated on ghost-tourism sites without any named source, firm date, or corroborating newspaper report, so it should genuinely be treated as pub legend rather than as established local history, though it remains the explanation usually given for the building's wider haunted reputation regardless of its unverified status. The pub closed as a going concern and was reported in early 2020 to be heading toward a new life as a working museum, its ghost stories presumably set to continue alongside whatever new exhibits eventually fill the building.
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