Why is it that haunted inns are so scarce and difficult to find? We have sought for them far and wide. During thirty years of wanderings among the old inns, we have retired for the night full oft into blackened oak-lined chambers with secret sliding panels in the walls, or traps in the ceiling, that offered golden opportunities for any ghost of enterprise; rooms where heavy tie-beams and dark recesses cast eerie shadows in the moonlight; vast churchlike dormitories with springy floors which if one jumped out of bed caused the door incontinently to unlatch and open in a distinctly ghostlike manner. But no supernatural visitor has ever favoured us. In vain we have tried the experiment of sleeping in bedchambers which the great ones of the earth have made memorable, from Queen Elizabeth to Dick Turpin. No cavalier knight has ever tried to unburden his conscience to us, no spectral dame has come to moan and wring her hands with grief, no clanking chains on the stairs, merely the peaceful dreamless sleep of the proverbial top. The learned in occult lore tell us that the astral body must follow the habits of the departed to whom it once belonged. It would therefore prefer private dwellings to the inns which it merely occupied for a night or two. Ghosts with a grievance would find more congenial occupation in annoying surviving relatives rather than the passing traveller who is not interested in their concerns. Well-informed and intelligent spectres, of course (unless they had some private end in view), steer clear of inns altogether. At the baronial hall, the ghost is a cherished petted heirloom; the innkeeper regards him as a nuisance, driving away the more timid class of customers, and in case of trouble might call in the parson to exorcise him with bell, book and candle. Then, again, in the halcyon days for the spooks, say a hundred years ago, the traveller generally drank deeply to the good of the house. The spectral vision fell flat when tested on an individual well inoculated with spirit of a more material nature. In face of all these discouragements, the ghosts, as a rule, left hotels and taverns unmolested. One exception is to be found at the _Ostrich_ at Colnbrook, a beautiful old Elizabethan coaching inn, retaining near the middle of its long half-timbered and gabled front, above the yard gate, the platform by which “the quality” embarked on the coach. It is an ideal place for a ghost to take sanctuary, with many corridors and low-ceilinged chambers, all lined through with carved chestnut panelling and twisted pilasters. There is a Queen’s room, said to have been used by Queen Elizabeth while awaiting the repair of her coach which had lost a wheel crossing the ford. Over the mantelpiece is her coat of arms. But chiefest of all is the Blue Chamber, sacred to the memory of Dick Turpin. This ubiquitous villain, so tradition states, once leaped from the first floor window and escaped into the street when pressed by the authorities.[15]