The Roebuck Inn on London Road is one of several buildings in Hertfordshire whose ghost story is bound up with a claimed connection to Dick Turpin, the eighteenth century highwayman whose genuine, considerably less romantic criminal career has been substantially reshaped by two centuries of folklore into that of a dashing outlaw hero. Local legend holds that Turpin once stayed at the inn, though no documented evidence supporting this specific claim has been traced, and Turpin's name attaches itself to old coaching inns across the south of England with a frequency that outstrips anything he could plausibly have visited in life.
What keeps the story alive locally is a persistent report of heavy, unseen footsteps on the inn's staircase, encountered by staff and customers over the years, which is generally taken as supporting evidence for the Turpin connection even though footsteps on an old staircase are hardly unique to any one historical explanation. The building's atmosphere is said to shift noticeably after dark, though this is a subjective and difficult to verify claim common to many older pubs regardless of their actual history.
Given both the thinness of the underlying evidence and the well-known tendency of English pub folklore to attach Turpin's name to buildings with no real connection to him, this haunting is recorded here as dubious rather than traditional, an entertaining local story built on genuinely reported footsteps rather than a documented historical case.
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