The Red Lion has stood on Colchester's High Street since 1465, a timber-framed coaching inn old enough to have watched most of the town's other recorded history happen around it, and its Grade I listing reflects a building of genuine architectural importance quite apart from anything supernatural attached to it. The ghost most consistently reported there is Alice Katherine Miller, said to have worked as a chambermaid and to have been murdered by her partner in 1638, a killing violent and sudden enough, according to the tradition, to have left an impression on the building that has never fully faded.
Alice's reported presence centres on rooms five, six and ten, though sightings are not confined to guest bedrooms alone, and the story has been told and retold for long enough that it now carries its own internal history: accounts of her appearing date back at least to the 1800s, roughly two centuries after her death, suggesting either a genuinely persistent local memory or a haunting reputation that built steadily over generations of guests and staff. At some point in that nineteenth-century period, the story goes, the fright caused by her appearances became serious enough that the hotel's owner had the doorway to her old room bricked up entirely, a physical attempt to seal the haunting away rather than simply tell guests to avoid the room. It did not work. Alice is reported at the Red Lion to this day, undeterred by two centuries of the hotel trying to build her out of its own floor plan.
No contemporary seventeenth-century record of Alice's murder, a name for her killer, or a specific date beyond the year 1638 has been traced for this entry, and the story is recorded here as a long and consistently told hotel tradition rather than a documented historical crime. What is verifiable is the building itself, one of the oldest inns in East Anglia, and a haunting reputation solid enough that the Red Lion is now among the most regularly investigated locations in Colchester's ghost-hunting circuit.
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