The Three Tuns claims one of the more crowded ghost rosters recorded anywhere in this register, with more than twenty separate spirits said to share the building, a number generous enough that it functions more as a general claim to a haunted reputation than a precise count of individually documented figures. Out of that crowd, one name and one story stand apart with real specificity: Lizzie Bowlynge, a maid said to have been caught stealing a quart of beer and punished by being chained to a wall within the pub, where she was left to starve to death.
The punishment, whatever its true historical basis, is strikingly disproportionate even by the harsh standards of servant discipline in earlier centuries, and no date or documented source for Lizzie Bowlynge's death has been traced beyond the pub's own oral tradition. Her haunting, and that of the wider crowd of spirits attributed to the building, manifests in a mixture of mischievous and unsettling behaviour: lights switching off on their own, doors opening and shutting, furniture moved, voices heard with no speaker, trays knocked from people's hands, and shadowy figures glimpsed moving along the corridors.
The combination of one specifically named, tragically punished maid alongside a much larger, unspecified crowd of additional ghosts gives the Three Tuns a haunting that operates on two registers at once, a single sharply remembered injustice sitting inside a much broader, vaguer local reputation for being simply full of spirits. Lizzie's story, with its precise and grim detail of chains and starvation over a quart of stolen beer, is the part most likely to have some real historical kernel behind it, even without a documented date to anchor it.
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