Royston and the villages around it sit on old coaching routes, and two of its surviving inns carry ghost traditions of the kind common to buildings that once depended on horse traffic for their trade. The Fox and Duck at Therfield is around four hundred years old and exudes, by most accounts, considerably more charm by day than by night. Locals describe a shadowy figure that lingers in the bar after closing time, watching silently rather than interacting, along with chairs that scrape audibly across the floor of otherwise empty rooms and guests who have heard their own names whispered with no one else nearby. One visitor reported seeing an apparition reflected in a mirror standing directly behind them, only to turn and find nothing there.
The Old Bull Inn on Royston High Street, built in the sixteenth century, carries a more specifically historical flavour of haunting, tied to the building's coaching past. Guests have reported hearing the distinct sound of horses in what is now a cobbled courtyard, long after any horses were actually stabled there. A woman in white is said to drift silently through the inn's corridors, pausing briefly outside certain doors before disappearing, and staff describe cold gusts of air, flickering lights and disembodied footsteps through empty hallways. One guest even claimed to have had a suitcase mysteriously unzipped overnight without a sound.
Both hauntings are undated and unattached to any specific named historical figure, and are recorded here as standard, if reasonably detailed, coaching-inn ghost traditions rather than documented cases.
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