Julianna 
Hauntings inevitably spark a flurry of questions, the foremost being: Is it real? Did more than one person bear witness to the terror, or could it simply be the delusions of an individual? However, this scepticism fades away when you confront the chilling presence of the Ancient Ram Inn, a place steeped in eerie history and countless ghostly encounters.
The Ancient Ram Inn hunches like a predator at the edge of Wotton-under-Edge, like something that refuses to die.
A Very Modern Haunting
Its timber frame sags inward, blackened beams tilting at angles that shouldn’t hold. You’ll hear it was built in 1145 for masons working on St Mary’s Church, a story repeated so often it sounds true. But dendrochronology, the scientific dating of timber through tree-ring analysis, proves otherwise. The main beams were cut from trees felled in the winter of 1495 to 1496.
The house is said to have a dark history where the subculture for horror shares stories of demonic possessions, black magic, and discusses the fact that the house rests on the same ley lines as Stone Hedge. This is interesting in itself; however, there is nothing in archaeology to support these mystical connections or the strange goings-on at the Inn.
This doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
This is a late medieval building, yes. Ancient, certainly. But its actual age makes the rest even more unsettling: the documented phenomena don’t reach back into some misty medieval past, they begin in 1968 and haven’t stopped. Although the house is old, the haunting is very modern.
Not A Good Year For John Humphries
That was the year John Humphries bought the property. Most people would have taken one look at the rotting floors and collapsing ceilings and walked away. He moved in. What happened next is why you’re reading this.
The Men’s Kitchen
The old ground-floor kitchen, now called the Men’s Kitchen, is where it started. You walk in, and the temperature drops so suddenly that your breath fogs it’s as though ice is clutching at your lungs. Then come the knocks. Not the settling of old wood.
Sharp.
Deliberate.
Three heavy blows echoed, like someone hammering a fist against the wall from within. Perhaps a person is there, hammering from another realm or from long ago.
Many people describe a similar feeling: the unsettling certainty that something is watching from the darkest corner, the area that the lamplight never quite reaches. You can sense its gaze on the back of your neck, forbearing and cold like icy, lazy fingers running along your spine.
Freakishly, people have reported feeling nauseous as soon as they enter. Some are overwhelmed with sorrow and leave sobbing. Hair has been pulled, and people have been scratched ferociously. Not by human hands or nails.
Hands Slamming Into Your Back Viciously
The staircase to the first floor is narrow and steep, the kind where you have to watch your footing. Except sometimes your footing doesn’t matter. Multiple people, across different decades, have described the same thing: climbing those stairs and feeling two hands slam into their back.
Not a brush or a nudge. A shove, hard enough to send them pitching forward onto the steps. When they catch themselves and turn around, the staircase behind them is empty.
There’s never anyone there.
The Bishop’s Room
But it’s the first-floor Bishop’s Room that earned the Ram Inn its reputation.
Walk in expecting dust and old furniture. What you get instead is a vapid, overwhelming feeling of wrongness, the kind that bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the animal part of your brain that knows when you’re not alone.
Doors have slammed shut with such force that a gust of wind and an icy coldness are felt.
Others report a shape crossing the room, human-sized, deliberate, with no sound of footsteps.
Then there are the scratches.
Guests have left the Bishop’s room with thin red lines down their forearms, as if drawn by a single fingernail dragged slowly across skin. They appear while people are still in the room. No explanation. No source. Just the marks.
What makes this more than ghost story fodder is the consistency. These aren’t embellished tales traded around a campfire. They come from unrelated people separated by years: overnight guests, tradesmen doing repairs, paranormal investigators, members of the Humphries family. The details align too precisely to dismiss.
The Failures
Electrical equipment dies in the Ram Inn. Not gradually, catastrophically.
John Humphries rewired the building more than once, yet lights continued to flicker and fail, torches died the instant they were switched on, and television crews lost entire audio recordings. One team arrived in the dead of winter with fresh batteries. They watched them drain flat before they could press record. New batteries. Still sealed in packaging minutes before.
This isn’t atmospheric, it’s documented equipment failure with no technical explanation. The kind that makes professionals pack up early.
The Evidence
The photographs are harder to explain away. Pale mist ascending the staircase. A faint figure was visible in an upstairs window when the building was confirmed empty. A dense, man-shaped shadow half-obscured in the barn doorway.
Many of these images date from the 1980s and 1990s, film photography, taken long before digital manipulation became accessible. The mist appears across multiple photographs taken by different people, years apart, all in the exact locations. The staircase. The Bishop’s Room. The upper landing.
When the Police Came
Testimony from neighbours forced the outside world to pay attention.
Multiple times, people living nearby reported screams or violent banging from the property and called the police. Officers responded, expecting a break-in, domestic violence, or something explainable.
They found the house silent. No broken windows. No intruders. No one inside could have made the noise. Everything is in place.
Some officers refused to return after those calls.
Think about that. Police, people trained to walk into violent situations, heard or saw something that made them unwilling to go back.
What Remains
John Humphries lived there until he died, surrounded by whatever moved through those rooms. The house is still in his family’s hands, not as a museum of invented horrors or fabricated medieval sacrifice, but as a fifteenth-century timber building where something has been happening, consistently, documentably, for over fifty years.
This Is Not Folklore
This isn’t the folklore. This is the part that holds up under scrutiny: a real building with confirmed construction dates, a clear chain of ownership, and decades of testimony from people who had no reason to lie and nothing to gain from inventing it. Guests. Workers. Police. Investigators. Family members.
They all describe the same things. The cold spots. The shoves. The scratches. The equipment failures. The sense of being watched by something that doesn’t want you there.
The Ram Inn doesn’t need fabricated stories about pagan burial grounds or tales of murdered children to draw attention. What it has is something far more unsettling: a well-documented history of ordinary visitors who, upon stepping through the crooked medieval doorway, have encountered phenomena that left distinct marks on their skin, drained their devices’ batteries, and filled them with an overwhelming urge to run back to the safety of the road outside.
Some have reported feelings of dread and illness, as if an unseen presence was watching them, while others describe hearing unexplained whispers or footsteps echoing in the empty halls. These firsthand accounts paint a chilling picture of an establishment steeped in mystery and dark energy.
The building is still there. Still crooked. Still waiting.
And whatever shares those rooms with visitors hasn’t gone anywhere.
