The following is an excerpt from Jeff Belanger’s latest book, published September 7, 2026, by New Page Books. Available wherever books, eBooks, and audiobooks (narrated by Jeff Belanger) are sold. 272 pages, $22.95.
ON SALE
Amazon | Books-a-Million | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Amazon Canada |
AUDIOBOOK NARRATED BY JEFF BELANGER
Audible | Spotify | Apple | Libro.fm | Kobo |
Chapter 14: The Skirrid Mountain Inn
Llanvihangel Crucorney, Wales
The Skirrid Mountain Inn lies at the base of Skirrid Mountain—a sixteen-hundred-foot-tall peak that legend says was split in half by a terribly violent storm at the very moment of the crucifixion of Christ. The mountain has seen millennia of Welsh history: wars, the birth of empires, the struggle of religious powers, and the rise of villages and cities. Like the mountain that is the inn’s namesake, the public house at the mount’s base has seen violent storms throughout its more than nine centuries of history. In its stairwell, 182 people were said to be executed by hanging. With such a long and occasionally dark history, the pub is not only one of the oldest, but also one of the most haunted places in the United Kingdom.
The first written record of the building’s existence dates back to 1104 CE, though its owners believe the building is even older, and they hope some currently ongoing research soon proves that. The Skirrid has always been a public house, and because of its remote location, many times the premises doubled as a courtroom and even gallows for local criminals during the period between the 12th and 17th centuries. Inside the , visitors are greeted by brick fireplaces and large oak beams supporting the second story. The beams, made from ship’s timbers, still show the slots and peg holes where they were once fitted into each other.
The central staircase most prominently displays the beam construction. The staircase features a series of rises, landings, and turns, so you can see why the beams are a very convenient place to hang a rope. Halfway up the stairs sits a small room, where the prisoners were held overnight before their hanging in the morning. You can only imagine the torment of sitting in a small room, listening to the sounds of a lively pub below you, knowing that, in the morning, you’d be taking a short walk down a few steps to your death.
Near the bottom of the staircase, visitors can still see where the hangman’s rope wore away a notch in the wooden beam. The feet of the unlucky victims wouldn’t have been more than a foot or so from the bottom step—meaning there were no quick deaths by the snap of the neck. Those found guilty slowly choked and suffocated to death. In 1110, the first man sentenced to hang in the pub was John Crowther, accused of stealing sheep.
The vast majority of hangings at the Skirrid were also some of the earliest instances of ethnic cleansing in the world. In 1685, the Duke of Monmouth led the Monmouth rebellion. He was a Protestant and the illegitimate son of Charles II, and some of his compatriots urged him to take the throne from the Catholic king, James II. The uprising failed, and, in the aftermath, King James II sent his judges to try and condemn all who were involved in the attempted coup. One of these judges, “Hanging” Judge George Jeffreys, was the most feared in all of Britain. He sentenced more than two hundred people throughout Britain to death for crimes as minor as even knowing one of the rebels. This further fueled an anti-Catholic backlash in Abergavenny. Ultra-Protestant Squire John Arnold of Llanvihangel Court was anti-Catholic to his core, and he allegedly sent many Papists to their death on the rope in the Skirrid Mountain Inn. Local legends say Judge Jeffreys came to the Skirrid to put a stop to the backlash. Daryl Hardy, the inn’s co-owner, said, “They think he stayed over at Llanvihangel Court, because there was a tunnel that came from the court to the pub. And he used to come to work that way so that he wouldn’t get bumped off coming across land.” Llanvihangel is a Welsh word meaning “near the church of St. Michael.”
The final hanging at the Skirrid took place near the end of the seventeenth century. Ironically, the crime perpetrated was stealing sheep—the same offense as for its first hanging.
In the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, the Price family owned and operated the Skirrid. The Price family is worth noting here because many attribute the ghosts to this family. Landlady Fanny Price died of consumption in the early 1800s in the inn’s smallest bedroom. She and other members of the Price family have their eternal resting places in the churchyard just a short distance from the pub. “She walks the pub at night,” Hardy said. “Apparently, one of the other major characters in the pub—we can’t tell whether it was her father or her husband—but he’s called Henry Price; he pretends to be soldiers marching up and down outside on the cobbles—you can hear [what sounds like] horses’ hooves outside on the . Or he’ll be up in the loft banging on the chimney breasts, trying to scare the guests.”
The popular UK television show Most Haunted paid a visit to the Skirrid Mountain Inn, and the show’s psychic, Derek Acorah, channeled a resident spirit just outside the front door. “He actually was taken over by Henry Price,” Hardy said, who personally witnessed the event during the filming. “He was running up and down the road outside, screaming and shouting.”
Daryl Hardy and his business partner, Maria Appleton, knew nothing of the inn’s haunted nature when they purchased the business in late 2002. There were news clips that ran in October of 2002 by the BBC, in which former landlady Heather Grant commented on her ghostly wards. In the article she said: “There have been lots of spooky goings-on since I’ve been here. I live on my own, and when I first moved in, I have to confess that I was pretty unnerved by things happening. Despite everything that happens here, you do get used to it, and I don’t mind them anymore.”
Hardy and Appleton didn’t see the articles on the Skirrid; they simply saw the property, made an offer, and, four weeks later, moved into the pub near Abergavenny—a town of maybe sixty houses in all.
Soon after moving in, Hardy noticed that he simply couldn’t keep the pint glasses for the beer intact at the bar. He said, “Glasses are a nightmare for us. We can’t fill our shelves from the back to the front, because the front line of glasses just gets wiped off—they fall, are pushed, whatever. We can lose ten to fifteen glasses a week. It’s a good thing we don’t have to pay for them—the brewers supply them.”
Breaking of glasses is not the only peculiar happening at the inn’s bar. Hardy said there were several witnesses to some money moving by an unseen force on the bar. He said, “I saw a note travel the full length of the bar. The habit over here is that customers put their down to buy the first round. You put a £10 note down and the change on the top, and you just pick at the money as they order more drinks. This £10 note had change on it. I think it had about in change on top of the £10 note. It traveled the full length of the bar and then kept going and went out about two feet past the bar before it dropped to the floor. And that was witnessed by about eight to ten people.”
One of the funnier encounters took place in one of the inn’s three guest rooms. An overnight guest complained that he couldn’t sleep because the toilet paper roll was spinning itself all night. It didn’t unfurl; it just kept spinning and tormenting the poor gentleman who was trying to sleep.
On another occasion, Hardy had gone away for a few days, so his manager stayed overnight in one of the guest rooms with her boyfriend. Hardy said, “Her boyfriend has false teeth. He took his false teeth out and went to bed at night. He woke up in the morning, and they were on the other side of the room in two halves—snapped. He’s not overly keen on staying again.”
MJ Dickson is a medium and paranormal investigator based in the UK. I’ve known her for over a decade now. She’s conducted more than a hundred investigations at the Skirrid Inn at this point. She considers the inn one of the most haunted locations in the UK. While inside, she’s witnessed furniture shifting and even dragging itself across the floor while she stood watching. She said, “I’ve heard knocking from empty corners and ghostly footsteps ominously reverberate down the creaky wooden staircase. I’ve seen full-bodied apparitions fill doorways and fade into the walls.” And then there was the time a spirit followed her home.
She said, “As a paranormal investigator, I’m aware of the risks involved, and know there is a possibility that something may follow me home from a haunted location. I heard stories of it happening, but it never truly sinks in until it happens to you.”
She explained that three nights before she was set to film a paranormal television show called Destinations of the Damned at the Skirrid, she curled up on her sofa to finish some last-minute production details. “It was 2 a.m., and I was struggling to keep my eyes open as I typed up the final email when I heard a sinister male laugh come from my kitchen,” Dickson said. “I looked up at my television but the volume was far too low for it to be the source of the male laughter. Not a moment later, I heard the panic in his voice as my husband shouted my name from our bedroom upstairs. Racing up the steps within seconds, I burst through our bedroom door just in time to see a large black shadow figure lunge across the room from our bed and disappear through our wardrobe. My husband, pale and shaken, recounted the experience in vivid detail as a red mark appeared on the side of his face. He had woken up with ‘something’ punching him in the head. As he opened his eyes, the shadow figure held him down until he managed to call out my name. Understandably unnerved by the incident, I immediately set about cleansing our house, but it wouldn’t be the last time I encountered this entity. During the filming for the Skirrid Inn episode, I witnessed the same black shadow figure standing in the doorway of the upstairs bedroom. Even more unnerving was the EVP I captured saying, “Watch out! He’ll kill you!” The Skirrid Mountain Inn isn’t the only in Abergavenny. There is a seventeenth-century manor house, called Llanvihangel Court, in town that is tied to the Skirrid. Similar construction methods were used on both buildings; for example, the two buildings’ front doors are identical.
Local lore says that, around the year 1700, the lord of the manor house was having a fling with a servant girl from the Skirrid. The lord’s wife came home one evening to discover her husband and his mistress, and she chased the girl out of the house and into the woods, eventually giving up when she lost sight of the young home-wrecking lass. The next day, the locals found the girl frozen and sitting against a tree. She’d never made it back to the pub. Today the woods around Abergavenny are called the “White Lady Woods” because of the frequent sightings of a white lady floating through the woods, whom locals believe to be the specter of the servant girl still making her final dash from the manor house to the Skirrid Inn. “A lot of people see apparitions, especially on sort of misty winter nights,” Hardy said.
The atmosphere of the Skirrid Mountain Inn is reminiscent of another time, sometimes that older time still makes a guest appearance. The inn has been a great pub to hang around in for centuries, but if you stop in for a pint, keep a watchful eye on your money on the bar.