The Haunted Grenadier Pub

The Grenadier Pub in London is one of London's best kept secrets. Hidden away in a back street in the market area of Belgravia, not too far from Apsley house in Hyde Park, which was the Duke of Wellingtons residence.

And the reason this is important is that the Grenadier pub used to be the officers mess of one of the guards regimens, the Regimens of Foot Guards, who today you can see guarding the Queen of Buckingham Palace.

Before Waterloo, before the campaigns of the Napoleonic era, the officers would drink there and dine there, and play cards and gamble. And one evening, one of the young officers was found to be cheating by his fellow officers at cards, and because they were extremely drunk, they took him outside, beat him to within an inch of his life, some accounts say they actually whipped him. He managed to crawl back inside, and died inside the pub, which is now the Grenadier Pub.

And the Grenadier is well known to be haunted in the fall, well known to be haunted with footsteps, groans, cold spots, all kinds of paranormal activity. And according to the staff who I spoke to, the basement is known for having the light bulbs crash to the ground, with no apparent cause. The activity builds throughout the year, reaches a climax around September, October, November, than dies away, and repeats itself on an annual cycle.

I visited the Grenadier with my wife, and we talked with the landlord, and we talked with the caretaker, and some of the bar staff. Unfortunately, we didn't have any paranormal experiences ourselves; the only spirits we encountered were the the neat whiskeys that we tried.

If you should go to the Grenadier, and go and enjoy a pint of ale, one of the most interesting things is to look up. If you look up, what you will see is a great deal of money from countries throughout the world, that is glued to the ceiling. Many many hundreds of dollars worth of money is glued to the ceiling in the Grenadier, and this is a tradition that visitors have adopted in a kind-hearted way to pay off the murdered officer's debt.