Jamaica Inn Ghosts: What the Record Shows

A stranger sits on the wall outside Jamaica Inn and does not move or speak. A man leaves his drink at the bar, walks out onto the moor and is found dead. These are the inn’s best-known ghost stories. The inn itself is real and well documented. The ghosts are folklore, though some of the stories are older than you might expect.

What the record actually shows

The oldest dated story is the man on the wall. Rose Marie Mullins, in her history of the inn, Inn on the Moor, writes that in 1911 there was a good deal of interest and correspondence in the local press about a man who sat on the wall outside. He did not move or speak, and people said he looked like the murdered man. We have not seen the 1911 letters ourselves.

The murdered man is the inn’s central ghost. In the usual telling he was called away from his drink, killed on the moor, and now returns to finish it. Footsteps heard upstairs and on the stairs are often blamed on him. The Higgypop haunted history site, which has looked into the inn’s past, calls the murder unsubstantiated.

Room 5 is said to hold a woman and child who stayed one last night before sailing from Falmouth on a boat that sank. Higgypop found no record of the girl, said to be called Hannah, ever living at the inn. A woman with a crying baby reported in room 3 has been tied to Mary Downing, who in 1834 took landlord Thomas Dunn to court to make him acknowledge their son. The court case is history. The ghost link is a guess.

The Paranormal Database adds a floating cloak, a man seen hanging from a tree outside, and a 2015 report of a see-through dog the size of an Irish Wolfhound running above the ground. Sounds of horses and iron-wheeled carts on gravel are also told, although the courtyard has been cobbled since the 1950s.

The inn’s fame grew with Most Haunted, which filmed there in Series 4, broadcast in April 2004. The medium Derek Acorah said he sensed a smuggler called Jack Trevellis and two former innkeepers. These names came from a medium and have no known documentary basis.

The history behind the legend

Jamaica Inn stands at Bolventor in the parish of Altarnun, on the old road across Bodmin Moor that the A30 now follows. It was built as a coaching inn, a staging post for changing horses. Wikipedia gives 1750 as the building date, while the Historic England listing describes the oldest part as about late eighteenth century, with rooms added in the nineteenth century. It was first listed in 1960 and is now Grade II.

The inn has long been linked with smuggling, and it now houses a museum on the subject. Its fame comes from Daphne du Maurier. She stayed there in 1930 and published her novel Jamaica Inn in 1936. The listing itself notes that the building is closely connected with the novel. Many of the inn’s darker tales echo the book’s world of wreckers and smugglers.

How to read it

Jamaica Inn is a working inn and tourist stop with an interest in its ghosts. That does not make the stories false, but it means most accounts come from staff, owners, writers on the inn and visiting mediums. The 1911 press interest is the strongest hint of an older tradition. It still needs to be found and read in the original.

Old buildings on high moorland creak, settle and carry wind noise. Add a famous novel and a television visit, and expectation does the rest. The ghosts here are folklore with a long history, not documented events. If you hold a copy of the 1911 correspondence, we would like to add it. See also the Beast of Bodmin Moor, first filmed on video near the inn in 1998.

Sources

• British Listed Buildings, Jamaica Inn, Altarnun (Historic England list entry 1142775) — building date, extensions, Grade II, du Maurier link
• Wikipedia, Jamaica Inn — 1750 date, staging post, smuggling, du Maurier 1930 and 1936
• Higgypop, Jamaica Inn’s ghosts and hauntings — the 1911 report via Mullins, Mary Downing 1834, no record of Hannah
• Higgypop, Most Haunted S04E03 Jamaica Inn — the 2004 episode and Acorah’s claims
• The Paranormal Database, Cornwall (entry #2071 Jamaica Inn) — folklore catalogue