Dare You Make Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem?
In another Spooky Britain visit, we head to a haunted pub in Nottingham
Let’s face it, a pint of ale tastes better if you know your immediate surroundings are chillingly haunted. You cradle your glass, suspiciously look around the place and savour every drop. There’s much debate about the most haunted pub in Britain, but every list of the ‘most haunted’ will have this pub in it. Beneath the looming shadow of Nottingham Castle sits one of Britain’s most atmospheric drinking holes, a pub carved into the very rock itself. shadows linger a little too long here. Stories refuse to die.
Welcome to Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, a cornerstone of Spooky Britain.
Claiming origins as far back as 1189, the year of the Third Crusade, the Trip has long traded on its status as one of England’s oldest inns. Whether every date stacks up is almost beside the point. Step inside and you feel the centuries-old atmosphere immediately: low ceilings, uneven floors, rooms that disappear into caves hacked out of sandstone.
It doesn’t feel built so much as uncovered. And that matters, because caves somehwo manage to hold memories.
Behind a glass cabinet in the pub sits one of its most famous curiosities. It’s a model ship that is said to be cursed. According to legend, those who dust it end up experiencing something terrible soon after. And so there it sits, out of reach so nobody can clean up the dusty seafarer.
Staff in the past who have dared to clean it reportedly fallen ill - and worse. Some of the cleaners have suffered freak accidents. So now, for the safety of all customers and staff, it sits untouched, complete with years, or maybe decades, of dust. It’s the kind of object that would feel like a gimmick anywhere else. In this pub, it feels like a warning.
Visitors and staff alike have long reported strange happenings in the cave rooms. Glasses sliding. Sudden cold spots. The unmistakable sensation of being watched, especially when you’re alone. There are whispers of a presence that doesn’t take kindly to intrusion. A spirit tied not just to the building, but to the rock itself.
It’s easy to laugh these things off until you’re down there. Because the deeper you go into the Trip, the quieter it gets. This is not peaceful quiet. It’s chillingly quiet.
One of the darker tales tells of a former landlord who took his own life within the pub. Since then, figures have reportedly been seen in the shadows of certain rooms. They are glimpsed briefly, then gone. Whether this is folklore or something more, it’s a story that clings to the place like the smell of ale in the wood.
What makes Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem so effective as a haunted setting isn’t just the stories, it’s the geography. This isn’t a pub with a ghost story bolted on. It’s a pub inside a cave system beneath a medieval castle. That means darkness, depth, isolation and fear. Your imagination won’t need to much help to go wild down here.
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Because in Britain…
the past rarely stays buried.