The Vine Hotel dates from 1770 and is regularly described as the oldest secular building still standing anywhere in Skegness, well predating the town's later Victorian growth into the seaside resort it eventually became famous for. Its ghost story is tied directly to Lincolnshire's very real and well-documented history of smuggling along this stretch of coast, where isolated beaches and marshland once made it genuinely easy to land contraband goods under cover of darkness.
A customs officer is said to have disappeared in the early nineteenth century after attempting, entirely alone and evidently against his own better judgement, to arrest a group of smugglers who considerably outnumbered him, and the story holds that a human skeleton was subsequently discovered bricked up within the building's walls during renovation work carried out in 1902.
Whether that 1902 discovery genuinely happened exactly as described has not been independently confirmed here, but the combination of a real smuggling-era backdrop and a specific, checkable-sounding renovation date gives this particular entry rather more texture than most single-report hotel ghost stories collected elsewhere in this record.
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