Six Featherbeds and a Bell Tower: Haunted George Hotel Glastonbury

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 25, 2026 · How we verify

Pilgrims walking to Glastonbury Abbey needed beds, and in the late 15th century somebody built them a house for the purpose. That house still stands in Somerset, and the haunted George Hotel Glastonbury is now the local shorthand for a building that has spent more than five centuries taking in strangers. The reputation is real enough as a reputation. The detail behind it, as we will come to, is remarkably thin.

Orientation first. The building was put up in the late 15th century to accommodate visitors to Glastonbury Abbey. It is a Grade I listed building, the highest grade of protection there is. It is claimed to be the oldest purpose built public house in the South West of England. Having once served as the Pilgrims’ Inn of Glastonbury Abbey, by the mid-nineteenth century it was known as the George Hotel, and the current name simply keeps both halves.

From N. Kynge to the Duke of Somerset

The paper trail starts in 1439, when the first record of the building names its tenant as N. Kynge. In 1493 Abbot John Selwood gave a “new” building to the abbey chamberlain, a line that has fed a good deal of argument about exactly which fabric is which. What is not in doubt is what happened next: after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the property passed to the Duke of Somerset. An inn built to serve a monastery outlived the monastery itself.

“Six Featherbeds” and a Building in Great Ruin

By 1562 the place was in trouble. When George Cowdrey took out a 21-year lease that year, the building was described as “in such great ruin that it is likely that in default of repair within a few years the rent will not be answered”. The same document, cheerfully, lists “six featherbeds” among the contents. It is one of those small surviving details that does more for the imagination than any ghost story: a half-collapsed pilgrim house with six good beds still in it.

A Horsemill, Royal Commissioners and Quakers

In 1658 the property was divided and a horsemill installed to grind malt, which is about as clear a sign as you could want that the pilgrim trade was long finished. The building also served as a meeting place for public business. Royal Commissioners used it for meetings and inquiries in 1672, and the Quakers in 1691. For anyone weighing up whether the atmosphere here is earned, that is the useful history: not a single dramatic incident but centuries of continuous, crowded, argumentative use.

Reading the Stone Front of the George and Pilgrims

The three-storey front is worth standing back for. It is divided into three tiers of panels with traceried heads, and above the entrance arch, right of centre, sit three carved panels bearing the coats of arms of the Abbey and of King Edward IV. The building is panelled and stone faced, and the stonework deliberately imitates the sort of work normally done in wood at the time it was built. The stone columns follow the arrangement of halls and chambers inside. In front of the roof gables runs a crenellated parapet with a small bell tower above it. Inside there is a stone newel staircase, and beneath the bar are large cellars.

What Is Actually Said About the Ghosts

Here is where honesty is more useful than atmosphere. The record for this building is generous about leases, arms and horsemills, and almost silent about the supernatural. It is believed to be haunted, and that is the extent of what can be stated without borrowing from somewhere else. No named apparition, no documented death, no dated incident attaches to the claim in the source record.

That gap is worth understanding rather than filling. A building of this age, with a stone newel stair, low panelled rooms and large cellars under the bar, generates noise, draughts and shifting shadows as a matter of physics. Long-lived inns also accumulate stories the way they accumulate paint layers. Anyone who tells you precisely who walks the stairs here should be asked where they got it.

Visiting the George Hotel and Pilgrims’ Inn

This is a working public house rather than a museum, so the building can be seen from the outside at any time and entered as a customer. The front elevation is the main event architecturally, and the arms of the Abbey and Edward IV above the entrance arch are visible from the pavement. Inside, the bar sits above the cellars and the newel staircase survives. Go for the building and the 15th century stonework, and treat the haunting as folklore attached to a genuinely extraordinary survival, not as the reason to come.

Address: Glastonbury, Somerset, England

Sources

• George Hotel and Pilgrims' Inn
• The George and Pilgrim
• The George and Pilgrim
• A Spectrum Of Settlements
• Glastonbury: Town In: A History of the County of Somerset: Volume 9, Glastonbury and Street.
• Wikipedia: George Hotel and Pilgrims' Inn, Glastonbury

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