The Three Swans Hotel dates back to the sixteenth century and is one of two surviving historic coaching inns on Market Harborough's High Street, standing alongside the Angel Hotel as a reminder of the town's long history as a stopping point for travellers along the major coaching routes of the period. Its haunting is attributed to a former landlord, John Fothergill, whose spirit is said to move objects around the building and, in a distinctly odd and specific piece of local lore that sets this haunting apart from most others, to hand unsuspecting guests an invisible sponge.
The hotel's ghost story is also connected to a longer-running local legend involving a portrait said to watch over the building, its painted eyes apparently following visitors around the room in the way such portraits so often are claimed to do in English haunted-house tradition.
As with several of Market Harborough's coaching-inn hauntings, the story rests on repeated local telling rather than on any single documented sighting with a named witness or dated event. But the specific and genuinely unusual detail of the invisible sponge suggests a genuinely long-lived piece of oral tradition rather than a generic invented tale assembled purely for tourist appeal, that kind of oddly specific and unglamorous detail being hard to invent from nothing.
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