Imagine being the last person left inside a haunted building each and every night, entrusted with the duty of going round and turning off all the lights. Such is the responsibility that Mr Elliot Fearne discharges each night at The Eclipse Inn in the centre of Winchester in Hampshire. It is the first hostelry in 2022 to be announced as “Britain’s most haunted pub”.
“Lots of strange things have been happening. Everybody was telling me about all the different ghost activity that goes on. It’s not something I believed in when I first arrived until lots of strange things started happening.” So said Mr Elliott Fearne when interviewed by the Hampshire Chronicle, regarding his short time at this ancient city centre pub where he has served as relief manager since last summer.
Since Mr Fearne took charge, perplexing incidents include a female apparition witnessed by a woman customer, strange object movements and unexplained noises experienced by himself late at night.
This ancient inn already enjoyed a long-standing reputation for being haunted ahead of his arrival. Dating back to the 16th century, the ghost of The Eclipse is popularly identified as Lady or Dame Alice Lisle (1617–1685), executed outside in the marketplace in September 1685. Convicted before the infamous Judge Jeffreys for harbouring two dissenters after the Battle of Sedgemoor, she was imprisoned at the pub after being sentenced to be burnt for treason. Mercifully, her sentence was commuted by James II to beheading (following the example of Henry VIII with Anne (1940), “Tradition says the sound of her silk dress and tapping of her heels were long afterwards heard in the corridors of , and that sometimes she was seen passing down Ellingham Lane in a driverless coach drawn by headless horses.” Since then, the main focus of her return is the pub, with her reputedly walking down the corridor outside the bedroom where she spent her last night on Earth in human form.
