The Sun Hotel on Sun Street is one of Hitchin's oldest surviving buildings, dating to the sixteenth century, and it has accumulated a correspondingly varied set of ghost stories over the centuries. The most frequently repeated involves Room 10, where the ghost of a woman is said to linger; one guest reported waking in the night to the terrifying sensation of a woman's body lying across his face as though trying to smother him, and fled the hotel, not returning until morning.
A second figure associated with the inn is known locally as Lord Havisham, said to have taken his own life in one of the upstairs rooms, whose encounters are described as considerably more frightening than the hotel's other resident spirits. A ghostly monk has also been reported on a number of occasions by a former barmaid, seen walking through a room and, on one memorable occasion, appearing to step behind the bar as if to pour himself a drink.
The gentlest and oldest of the Sun's traditions has nothing to do with any of this. In the eighteenth century, two clergymen, Mark Hildesley and Edward Young, were in the habit of playing bowls together on the green behind the inn, and evidently enjoyed the game enough to keep it up after death, since the sounds of their play and their voices are said to still occasionally be heard on the green behind the Sun. It is an unusually cheerful haunting for this register, set against the considerably darker reputation the building has acquired in its rooms upstairs, and the two strands, one benign and long-standing, the others more recent and unsettling, sit side by side as part of the Sun's overall reputation as one of Hitchin's most haunted buildings.
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