The Crown Hotel

The cries of children have been heard here; the landlord's wife gave birth to twins, both of them deformed and he kept them locked in the hayloft for years until he murdered them and hid the bodies (one source says that he buried the bodies beneath the floor). With regard to other phenomena here, a single note was heard from the closed piano, and then everything flew off the top; a fluorescent mist descended the staircase crossing the courtyard and disappeared into the hotel; a woman standing at an upper storey window; and the sounds of horses hooves, and crying and yells have also been reported too. In recent times, flickering lights (especially in the cellar), icy blasts of air in the owner's faces, a young girl in white leaning on the banisters, an eldery man in the toilets who engaged a guest in conversation before vanishing, and a blue ball of light have been added to this building's repertoire of phantoms!

A 2025 newspaper article adds to the stories: on the upper floor, door handles being rattled is followed by the door opening to reveal no-one in the corridor and then a cold chill sweeps through the room. It is at this point when the chill subsides that the blue ball of light "floats out of the room, glides down the hallway, and then visually dissipates by 'melting into the wall'." The article also adds that, "One guest was engaged in a seemingly mundane conversation with a man in the toilet, only for the man to suddenly and dramatically "vanish!" before the guest’s eyes. The shock of the immediate, unexpected disappearance was so intense that the shaken witness had to be calmed by staff with a restorative glass of brandy ... The landlord’s daughter once recounted a striking visual sighting of a young woman in a skirt and shawl, hair tied in a bun, sitting in a chair, enveloped by a “very bright light” despite the room itself being dark ... More disturbing still are the reports of the unsettling noise of a body being dragged across the upper floor of the structure, hinting at an additional, violent history hidden within the walls."

Link: (Bournemouth) Daily Echo

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