The Haunting of the Who’d Have Thought It Inn

Tucked in the tranquil folds of Milton Combe, where West Devon’s hills cradle the River Tavy’s gentle flow, the Who’d Have Thought It Inn stands as a timeless haven, its ancient beams whispering tales of two spectral guardians—Abe Beer, the jovial landlord whose pipe smoke lingers in the taproom, and Captain Edmund Fairchild, a Royalist cavalier whose ghostly bell rings for ale and absolution. Since the 1500s, their benign hauntings have warmed the inn’s hearth, but in 1985, a brash landlord’s disregard for tradition sparked a night of reckoning, when these restless spirits unleashed a tempest of shattered glass and mournful chimes to reclaim their sacred ground. The inn’s flagstones still echo that stormy Halloween, a reminder that some bonds—to place, to memory—endure beyond death, binding the living to the past with a pint and a prayer.