The Running Horse's genuine antiquity, a building dating to 1403 and among the oldest licensed premises in Surrey, gives its two reported ghosts an unusually long span of building history to have emerged from, separated from each other by roughly a century, the farmer's mysterious nineteenth-century death and the woman's apparent 1920s domestic service, without any indication in the sources consulted for this entry that either haunting is connected to the other.
The farmer's death is specifically described as mysterious, a word choice that implies an unresolved or suspicious circumstance behind it, though no further detail, no name, no specific date within the 1800s, and no account of what made the death mysterious in the first place, has survived beyond that single characterisation. The woman in the white cap and 1920s domestic uniform, by contrast, is described with enough period-specific costume detail to place her firmly within a defined decade, her uniform marking her clearly as household or pub staff from that era rather than a guest or owner.
The pub's own claimed connection to Elizabeth I, said to have sheltered there for a night when the adjacent River Mole flooded and made crossing impossible, adds a further layer of genuine or at least long-claimed historical prestige to the building, quite separate from either of its two reported ghosts. Between a mysteriously dead nineteenth-century farmer and a 1920s domestic worker, the Running Horse carries two distinctly different eras of haunting within one of Surrey's oldest continuously operating pubs.
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