The Skirrid Mountain Inn sits in the small village of Llanvihangel Crucorney at the foot of the Skirrid — Ysgyryd Fawr — a striking, landslip-scarred mountain a few miles north of Abergavenny. It’s regularly billed as the oldest pub in Wales, though, like several rival claimants elsewhere in the country, that claim is contested rather than settled.

Archaeological survey work by the Glamorgan-Gwent Archaeological Trust dates the present building to the mid-to-late 17th century, while an undocumented local tradition pushes a first inn on the site back as far as 1110, on what may once have been a pilgrim route to Llanthony Priory. A popular but similarly unverified legend holds that Owain Glyndŵr rallied troops here for his rising against Henry IV in the early 15th century, gathering support in the inn’s cobbled courtyard.

The inn’s darker reputation rests on an equally undocumented claim: that its first floor once served as a Court of Law, trying offences up to and including sheep-stealing, with the guilty hanged from an oak beam over the stairwell — a toll local tradition puts as high as 180 or so people. The beam has since been relocated to the foot of the staircase, and marks in the wood, said to be rope-friction scarring, are shown to visitors and ghost-hunt guests today. None of this — the court, the executions, or the specific death toll — is backed by any surviving legal record; it survives purely as inn folklore.

That folklore has produced a well-populated cast of reported ghosts. Most prominent is the 17th-century “hanging judge” George Jeffreys, said to still stalk the inn’s upper floors — though there’s no evidence Jeffreys himself ever presided here, and the association looks like a case of a famous name attaching itself to a generic “hanging judge” legend. Also reported: the inn’s own former executioner, blamed for poltergeist-style disturbances; Fanny Price, said to have worked at the inn in the 18th century and died of consumption around age 35, associated with Room 3 and the smell of lavender perfume; and a local clergyman, Father Henry Vaughan. Staff and visitors also report a White Lady seen in the courtyard, the rustle of a woman’s dress, and — more unusually — the sound of marching soldiers, sometimes tied back to the Glyndŵr legend.

The inn’s reputation went national through television, featured in series one of Extreme Ghost Stories and series two of Living TV’s Most Haunted with Yvette Fielding. It has since become a fixture of independent paranormal investigation, hosting regular ticketed overnight ghost hunts and drawing a steady stream of paranormal YouTube channels and podcasts — guestbook comments and investigator videos repeatedly mention “orb” photography, doors that resist opening accompanied by sudden cold blasts, disembodied footsteps and choking-type sounds on the staircase, and glasses reported to have flown through the building. Evidence throughout is anecdotal — witness accounts, guestbook entries, orb photography and video of a kind widely disputed by skeptics, and TV/YouTube investigations rather than controlled testing. Readers weighing how much stock to put in it may find our guide to how ghost hunting evidence gets evaluated useful context.

Ghost-story reputation aside, the Skirrid earns its place in this database as a genuinely old Welsh coaching inn — a working pub, restaurant and small B&B at the foot of a striking landmark mountain, in a building whose surviving 17th-century fabric and folklore-thick history, real or not, have made it one of the most consistently visited “most haunted” pubs in Britain.