The Wansdyke & District Forums

The big one, and I am surprised it has not come up yet. The Red Lion at Avebury is the only pub in the world inside a stone circle, and it is reckoned one of the most haunted in Britain, four ghosts at the least. The famous one is Florrie. The story goes she was the landlord's wife during the Civil War, took a lover while he was away fighting, and when he came home he cut her throat and threw her down the well. That well is still there, in the middle of the bar, glass over it now and lit up, so you take your pint over a murdered woman. They say she shows in mirrors, and that she hates men with beards, for the husband had a beard. Then there is a man, a child, and a phantom coach-and-horses that comes through the wall where the old road ran. The telly came and made their circus of it. I want the local version, the one from before Most Haunted, if the Avebury people will give it me.

Oh, the Red Lion. Where to start. The Florrie story is genuinely old, Mick, my mother knew it long before any television, the wife and the soldier and the well, that is the real bones of it. The coach-and-horses I am less sure of; that may have grown. What I will say, and I say it as someone who loves the place, is that the Most Haunted business was a low point. They came and shrieked in the dark for the cameras and half of Avebury would not speak to the landlord for a season for letting them in. The stones and the pub do not need a film crew to tell them they are haunted. They have known it a great deal longer than the telly has.

We do not drink in there often, it is always full of visitors now, but Roy will tell anyone that he set his pint down on the well-cover one evening years ago and it slid, the glass of it, a good six inches across a flat surface with nobody near it, and he is the least fanciful man alive and he went quite quiet. He has never set it down on there since. We sit by the door now. It is a lovely pub, do not mistake me, but Roy sits by the door. (Cause he has a beard and they say she doesn't like men with beards)

old pub, uneven flagstones, draughts, a glass slides. four hundred years of beer and stories does the rest. florrie sells rooms, im not saying she isnt a good tale but a haunted pub is never short of custom is it, theres a reason every old inn in england has a murdered woman in it. that said i wouldnt put MY pint on the well either. no sense tempting it.

Mark, that last line is the most honest thing youve posted on this board. Nobody really puts their pint on the well. Believer or sceptic, everybody moves it. That is the thing about the Red Lion: the argument does not matter once youre standing in the bar, because the room makes believers of sceptics for exactly as long as they are in it. Thanks Janet, Anne, that is the local version and far better than the broadcast one. Florrie, the soldier, the well, and a glass that will not stay where you put it.