Paranormal Investigator Reveals Why Pubs Are Popular With Ghosts

Ghosts that go bump in the night also seem to gravitate towards their local pub, according to a paranormal investigator. 

One such example came from The Lansdowne Pub in Cardiff in July this year. As the pub’s manager Hayley Budd sat down for a break, a chair tucked itself in under the table. The boozer’s ghostly resident is known as Lady Lansdowne.

‘I wasn’t looking at the chair, I was looking at my phone but I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I heard it as well so I asked a customer if they had seen anything and they’d also heard the noise,’ Budd said.

‘I always try to find the most logical explanation so in the video you can see me looking to see if it was something in my bag that had moved then I was trying to tell myself that maybe it was the wind. I’ve tried to recreate it so many times but there’s no logical explanation. I checked the CCTV to make sure I hadn’t been imagining it.

‘I wasn’t frightened enough to quit my job and run out of there but I was really shocked. I wasn’t expecting to see that at all. I don’t frighten easily so I still sit at that table on my breaks.’

It’s not the first time spooky reports have emerged from the pub. ‘There’s a long-term rumour among the regulars about a woman haunting the pub and people who live in the flats above the pub say there’s strange goings on up there,’ Budd said.

‘When I close the pub and there’s no customers, I’ll go into the cellar to do paperwork or change a barrel and it sounds like there’s furniture moving upstairs but when I go up, everything is as I left it. It’s just so weird that it was a chair that moved when I always hear furniture moving.’

Lady Lansdowne has never done anything ‘that’s a cause for concern’, Budd said. ‘She clearly just wants to make herself known.’

One staff member said they’d bumped into someone, but when they turned around, he’d seemingly vanished. ‘Nobody has ever physically seen her standing in front of them but a couple of weeks ago, the chalk board started randomly swinging,’ Budd claimed.

‘A lot of the staff have said that if anything like that happens when they’re there then they’ll go home so I hope Lady Lansdowne takes that into consideration because I don’t want to be short staffed.’

‘Pubs, as well as office buildings, castles, hotels, inns and stately homes tend to get a lot of interest, because they’re public areas and monitored, so there’s more chance of capturing something unusual on CCTV, and then those things tend to get sensationalised over the internet,’ he said.

However, he did concede that it’s unusual to receive so many reports of similar things from the one place, much like The Lansdowne Pub. ‘Most public houses have got some story to tell usually, or strange disturbances. Enjoy the atmosphere, do a bit of history on the place and the stories behind it, and talk to people who work there,’ Mera said.

‘And be aware of yourself and your surroundings. We have a natural survival sense that kicks in, makes our skin tingle and the hairs rise on the back of our neck. Just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.’