Jamaica Inn was built in 1750 as a coaching inn on the old turnpike road over Bodmin Moor between Launceston and Bodmin, replacing an earlier inn recorded on the same site from 1547, and was extended in 1778 with a coach house, stables and tack room. Its name has nothing to do with rum-running, despite the assumption most visitors make — it comes from the locally prominent Trelawney family, two of whom served as Governor of Jamaica in the 18th century.

The inn’s isolated moorland position made it a genuine waypoint for 18th-century smugglers moving contraband brandy, tea and tobacco inland from the Cornish coast, a history now told through the on-site Museum of Smuggling. Its wider fame, though, comes from fiction: Daphne du Maurier stayed at the inn in 1930 after getting lost in fog on the moor, and the innkeeper’s smuggling tales and ghost stories inspired her 1936 novel Jamaica Inn — later adapted by Alfred Hitchcock in 1939, though the real building was never used as a filming location. The room where she stayed still displays her writing desk and typewriter.

The haunted reputation predates du Maurier’s novel. The best-known story concerns an unidentified traveller who, sometime in the 19th century, was drinking at the bar when a man called him outside; he never returned, and his murdered body was found on the moor the next morning. Neither his identity nor his killer’s was ever established. In 1911, local newspapers carried reports of a strange, silent man seen sitting motionless on the wall outside the inn, ignoring anyone who spoke to him — widely taken to be the same wayfarer, and a sighting repeated intermittently ever since, including outside room five as recently as 2016.

Reported phenomena now span the whole building, not just its oldest 18th-century core. Guests and staff describe phantom footsteps in the upstairs corridor, the sound of horse-drawn carts crossing gravel in a courtyard that has been cobbled since the 1950s, muffled conversation in unidentifiable languages, and a green-caped or tricorn-hatted figure — sometimes linked to the murdered wayfarer, sometimes to a smuggler named Jack Trevellis — seen in the bar, restaurant and reception. Individual rooms carry their own stories: room 4’s highwayman-like figure watching sleepers by the window; room 3’s crying woman and child, locally associated with an 1834 paternity case; and room 5, where toys and letters left by guests for “Hannah” — a child said to have spent her last night there before being lost at sea — still accumulate in the wardrobe.

Most Haunted (then on Living TV) filmed at the inn in April 2004, with the crew calling it one of the spookiest locations they’d investigated; a set of chains recovered during that visit, which Derek Acorah linked to an “unscrupulous death,” are still displayed in reception with an explanatory plaque. None of this amounts to controlled evidence — it’s a large, sprawling, centuries-extended building whose staff and thousands of overnight guests have simply reported a lot, consistently, for well over a century, which is itself worth weighing against how a location’s reputation compounds over time. Readers curious how that evidence gets assessed may want our guide to the scientific methods used in ghost hunting.

Whether it’s one restless wayfarer, a scattered cast of named and unnamed presences, or simply what happens when a 275-year-old moorland inn never stops adding rooms, Jamaica Inn remains one of the most consistently reported haunted buildings in the West Country — fittingly, for the place that gave Daphne du Maurier her own ghost story to tell.