WHEN drinkers at the New Inn, Foulridge, talked about spirits, they didn’t always mean the bottled variety.

For in 1974 the Evening Star reported that the regulars were convinced they shared their pub with a ghost.

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Strange things had been happening at the 300-year-old alehouse ever since it underwent renovation in the mid sixties.

Experts in the supernatural investigated and were sure the weird sights and sounds were the work of a restless spirit.

The belief was so strong that the pub, in Skipton Old Road, had found it’s way into a book titled ‘The Haunted North’ by C T Oxley, ostensibly a guide to the area’s most authentic hauntings.

The earliest record of unholy happenings at the inn date back to the turn of the 1900s, but things really started going bump in the night at an alarming rate, after a clean up and facelift.

Unexplained footsteps were heard in the night and occasionally there was a mysterious knocking at the door of the landlord’s bedroom.

A smaller bedroom at the back of the pub was affected in a different way, A luminous cross began to appear regularly on the ceiling at night, even though the curtains were drawn and the room was completely dark.

And shortly after licensees June and Wilf Compston arrived, back in 1971, a series of pot plants fell from a shelf and smashed in the early hours of the morning.

“We could find no reason for it whatsoever and we are keeping an open mind,” Wilf told us.

Although most customers agreed the ghost was a regular of the pub, his or her identity was a complete mystery.

There were two theories, that the spirit was that of a Cavalier or Roundhead killed in a battle close by in the 1640s, or that a spirit had been disturbed when workmen moved gravestones from a nearby Quaker burial ground in use in pub building work.

Rather than put customers off, the ghost story was good for trade and Wilf said: “The majority of customers’ tales are of the strange happenings in the bedroom where my nine-year-old son sleeps, though he is not at all bothered with them.

“That’s where the cross has appeared and I believe that the last landlord but one had a padlock and bolts fitted to the door.”

He added: “One of the walls in the cellar is also supposed to have changed colour – goodness knows what has caused all these things to happen.”

The New Inn was probably so named when it was built on the site of a previous inn – indeed records show that it was well-established in 1816, when the tenant was John Spencer, an ancestor of Wilfred Spencer, whose wife became entangled with counterfeit coin makers.

It gained a reputation for being a forgers’ den when she began to mix fake coins with customers’ change, and it is the believed the couple were transported.

From the late 1880s to the early 1900s, it was run by Hartley Barritt, who has had boats on the canal, transporting coal and stone.

n Financial instability was caused in Britain due to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The value of precious metals had increased which lead to the scarceness of money. People were melting down copper coinage and making lighter counterfeit coins which caused outrage in the Houses of Parliament.

The Great Re-coinage of 1816 was seen as the solution to help stabilise the currency, stop counterfeiting and bring greater stability to the national economy. The re-coinage saw the reintroduction of silver coinage into the currency and changed the gold coinage which was already in use.

The Guinea which was worth twenty one shillings was replaced with the Sovereign which was worth twenty shillings and the value of a shilling was left the same as before the re-coinage at twelve pence.

The newly commissioned Sovereigns, Crowns and Half Crowns had the now iconic St George and the dragon reverse designed by Benedetto Pistrucci.