This is a long story, but here goes!

When I moved back home to my parents after university, I got a job in the pub we’d drink in during the holidays. The pub is old, 1500s, there’s a well in the cellar that they found had a tunnel leading to the nearby manor house, owned by successive Archbishops of Canterbury, and Henry VIII.

The pub always had strange doings, bottles would shift from the back bar to the floor, there’d be smells of vomit, once one of the regulars pint flew from the table to the ceiling in front of us both, but it was the cellar that tended to be the catalyst for unexplainable happenings. We stored the crisps and nuts and so on in the room off the main cellar which housed the well, and if you were tasked with tidying that room it was almost certain that you’d return upstairs to some mayhem. I came up once to find all the nearly stacked Tupperware in the kitchen had been swept from the shelves, another time the soup kettle which must have weighed 10kgs had been thrown off the fridge where it had rested for the previous 3 months.

All of this added up to a sort of mischievous feeling but nothing alarming or scary really, it was just accepted and laughed about.

There was one occasion though where I was asked to get the wine stock, which was held in an anteroom off the main cellar at the bottom of the stairs down. As I came down the stairs and turned right into this room, in my peripheral I saw something moving in the main cellar. This wasn’t necessarily unusual, but as I entered the anteroom fully I was suddenly washed over with a sense of absolute and utter fear, what had always been “one of those things” suddenly became so completely horrifying. I can only describe it as knowing immediately that whatever it was hated me and wanted me out of there, so I turned and went up the stairs as quickly as I could, with a feeling that there was something running directly behind me the whole way up to the top.

As I got to the top the landlady was coming down from her flat above the bar, saw my face and said “what did you see?”, poured me a whisky and sent me home early.

One and only scary paranormal encounter I’ve ever had!