In the early 1990s a report appeared in an Olney paper regarding the haunting of the Castle Inn. At the time Sylvia, the wife of the publican, said that she had gone to bed one night after switching on a gas fire and leaving her cat asleep in the lounge. During the night she suddenly woke up with the feeling that a cat was crawling all over her face. By the light of the outside street lamp she could see that there was nothing there. Perplexed by what had happened she got up and went into the lounge to discover that the room was filled with gas. She had turned the fire on but hadn’t lit it. Her cat was barely alive, a few minutes more and they would both have been dead. So what had wakened her?

The circumstance by which she woke up could simply have been dismissed as a dream if it wasn’t for the fact that she later experienced a physical manifestation of a ghost. The figure she saw was a woman wearing black clothes in what Sylvia classed as an eighteenth century style. She was not the only one to see the figure as one of her customers did too. When Sylvia’s daughter, Fiona, was eight years old she came down the stairs and told her mother that she had just seen a man walk through a door in the wall where there wasn’t a door. The door had been sealed up some time ago.

Sylvia’s husband, Peter, also experienced a strange occurrence when he heard someone walking down the stairs. Not particularly unusual one might feel but it was when you consider that the stairs had been blocked off a long time ago. One of the barmaids also had an unusual experience. One evening she arrived at the pub early, let herself in, locked the pub back up and went upstairs. When she came down again there was a row of bottles on the bar floor, yet they weren’t there before and there was no one else in the building.

Sylvia tried to get rid of the ghost by having it exorcised, after which all the creaks and strange noises seemed to disappear. But it did not end there. A number of year’s later people were still talking of the ghost which was said to be a woman. Things would get moved around, especially vases of flowers and it seems to have a habit of folding people’s clothes for them.

The Castle Inn is an old building next door to which used to be a blacksmith’s. The blacksmith’s was later demolished and the pub extended over the site to create what is now the games room. It is said that a horrific murder was committed in a blacksmith’s in the town; could it have been the one where the pub stands? A phantom coach is reported to pass through this part of the building once a year but no one seems to know when.

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