Interesting…….
We have a pub down here in Cornwall (The Miners Arms in Mithian) where some bizarre incidents have long been reported, including a photograph published a few years ago which is difficult to explain, to put it mildly. There is also a public house in Bristol called the Louisiana, which stands directly opposite the site previously occupied by Bristol New Gaol on Cumberland Road. The jail has long been demolished and only the gates, at the top of which public executions used to be held, still remain.
The pub’s cellars used to incorporate the condemned cell where those awaiting their appointment with doom would be held until the fateful hour arrived, and it was connected to the prison by an underground passageway leading to the press room (where the prisoner would be pinioned) and the steps to the gallows themselves. The passage is nowadays entirely filled in. The State Executioner would stay the night before the event in lodgings inside the hotel. According to legend, two ghosts have been seen in the pub’s cellars on more than one occasion. One of them is John Horwood, hanged at the age of 18 on April 13th 1821 for the murder of Eliza Balsam, the first execution carried out on this site. The other is Sarah Harriet Thomas, a 17 year old domestic servant who perished on April 20th 1849 for the murder of her employer, Elizabeth Jeffries. Sarah’s ordeal was the last public hanging in Bristol before the practice was abolished in 1868. Both of these unhappy souls may have been the victims of a gross miscarriage of justice. Horwood would certainly not have been convicted of murder in a present day court but would more likely have been found guilty of aggravated assault or, at worst, manslaughter. Thomas did offer a confession to her supposed crime, but this might have been the result of immense mental anguish and stress; she, like Horwood, would not have been convicted in the present day.
Like I say, interesting. And also very tragic.