With over 600 years of history, it’s no surprise that The Mermaid Inn has more than a few ghostly stories to share and we took our paranormal pen to find out more.
Officially opening its doors back in 1420, The Mermaid Inn has welcomed countless guests into its residence and some of them have failed to check out even to this day.
We caught up with the owner of The Mermaid Inn, Mrs Judith Blincow who has been at the hotel for 38 years, to delve into some of the recorded sightings and spooky goings-on around the building, including the cellar which predates the hotel at over 900 years old.
Judith shared the eerie fact that the earliest recorded stories are from the Hawkhurst gang, who worked from Dover through to Poole. “The smugglers would stay in the bar with their guns on the table and no-one dared saying anything against them because they would have nailed them alive to their front door. Some of our ghosts are supposedly people who might have met their end by saying too much.”
Room 1
“A lady supposedly walks the corridor and appears in a couple rooms, and it’s always been said that she was a barmaid here. I convinced myself I had seen her, I was walking up the staircase and there was this lady with long flowing hair in a dress, and by the time I got to the top she had gone. There were no pass keys out and no rooms let, so where did she go? That was outside room 1 which is one of our most haunted rooms, and a medium once told us the room was home to a poltergeist.”
Room 16
“People always say they see someone in the corner and at the turn of the century, one of our earliest stories, a wife has written about waking up in the middle of the night and spotting a figure walk through the room, she woke the husband up and to his surprise he saw the figure too. We had a guy who decided to run his camera through the night, and at 3.15am you can see a figure appear in the corner, a light go straight down and hear metal on metal. We’ve tried to recreate it but we just can’t. A doctor has also stayed and taken random photos at the night and one photo shows the same figure, and weirdly it’s at 3.15am as well.”
Room 17
“It doesn’t seem to happen as much anymore but, many moons ago the chamber maids would only change the room in pairs because a rocking chair in the room would rock for no reason. The room will suddenly go cold in areas for no reason, with no open windows or cracks, we could just never explain it.”