Jamaica Inn: Ghosts, Smugglers and the Dark Stories of Bodmin Moor

High on Bodmin Moor stands one of Britain’s most famous inns. It inspired a murderous novel, has sheltered travellers for more than two centuries and is said to be haunted by a man who left his drink unfinished before turning up dead on the moor. But at Jamaica Inn, separating history from legend is almost as intriguing as the legends themselves.

There are places that hardly need a ghost story.

Jamaica Inn is one of them.

It sits high on Bodmin Moor, where Cornwall becomes suddenly wilder and emptier, the roads crossing a landscape of granite, heather and exposed moorland that can disappear beneath rain and mist with unnerving speed.

Today, there are road signs pointing towards Jamaica Inn. There is a large car park. The A30 runs close by. Inside, there are hotel bedrooms, roaring fires, food, drink and visitors browsing exhibitions devoted to smugglers and Daphne du Maurier.

But strip away the modern road and electric lights and it is not difficult to understand why this particular building has accumulated stories.

For more than two centuries, travellers have arrived here from the moor.

Some, apparently, never quite left.

Jamaica Inn is not quite as old as everyone thinks

For years, the accepted story began in 1750, when Jamaica Inn was supposedly built as a coaching inn for travellers crossing Bodmin Moor.

You will still find that date repeated almost everywhere, including in some of the inn’s own visitor information.

The latest historical research tells a different story.

Research commissioned from Cornish historian Dr Lesley Trotter and incorporated into a detailed history published by the inn’s present owners found that the traditional 1750 date does not stand up to the surviving records. Historic England itself describes the Grade II-listed building simply as dating from the late 18th century.

The man at the beginning of the real story was Captain John Broad, a former mariner.

By late 1776, Broad had acquired rights over land on Tolborough Down and agreed to enclose and cultivate a 20-acre plot beside a new road being driven across Bodmin Moor. By the spring of 1777, he appears to have begun building a substantial house, stables and agricultural buildings there.

By 1781, the house was probably complete. It was certainly receiving the new public stagecoach service by 1783, and in August 1784 Broad was formally described in surviving records as an innkeeper.

Even the name arrives tantalisingly late.

The earliest surviving reference comes from an expenses claim in April 1789:

“At the Jemecia Inn, beer, four pence.”

And nobody can say for certain why Broad called it Jamaica Inn.

The old explanation connected the name to the prominent Trelawny family, two members of which had served as governors of Jamaica. Recent research found no evidence that the Trelawnys owned the inn or the land beneath it. Broad may have sailed to Jamaica during his maritime career, although there is no proof of that either.

One particularly persuasive theory is rather less romantic: remote farms and fields were sometimes jokingly given the names of faraway places. A lonely patch of Bodmin Moor called “Jamaica” may simply have been the 18th-century equivalent of calling somewhere the back of beyond.

There is another intriguing early name too. An 1818 letter refers to the place as “Bold Venture alias the Jamaica Inn.”

For a house built in the middle of Bodmin Moor, Bold Venture seems unusually appropriate.

But what about the smugglers?

This is where Jamaica Inn’s history becomes murky.

Cornish smuggling itself is certainly no invention. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, enormous quantities of heavily taxed goods including brandy, tea and tobacco were illicitly landed around the South West coast and moved inland.

A lonely inn surrounded by miles of moorland makes an irresistible setting for such activities.

And Jamaica Inn has long described itself as a stopping place and hiding place for smugglers.

But there is an important distinction between what was possible and what can actually be proven.

The inn’s newly researched historical account describes its documented early life principally as a coaching, postal and agricultural inn. It does not establish the existence of the murderous smuggling headquarters that later became inseparable from Jamaica Inn’s identity. Instead, it explicitly describes Daphne du Maurier’s criminal innkeeper and wrecking gang as imaginary.

That does not prove a keg of contraband brandy never passed through the door.

It does mean the image of Jamaica Inn as the sinister nerve centre of Cornish organised crime owes an enormous debt to one woman with a spectacular imagination.

Then Daphne du Maurier arrived

In November 1930, two young women came to stay at Jamaica Inn.

One was 31-year-old Foy Quiller-Couch, daughter of the Cornish writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

The other was her 23-year-old friend, Daphne du Maurier.

She had not yet become one of the most famous novelists of the 20th century.

That afternoon, the women took horses onto Bodmin Moor.

It went badly.

Rain descended. Darkness followed. They lost their way.

With little idea how to find the inn again, they eventually gave up trying to navigate and trusted the animals instead, loosening the reins and allowing the horses to choose their own route.

Eventually, through the darkness, they saw a light.

Jamaica Inn.

Du Maurier later remembered the moor as “desolate” and “sinister”, and the episode was sufficiently vivid that when she returned with Foy the following November, the atmosphere was still working on her imagination. She sat beside a peat fire reading Treasure Island. Something, she later said, began to stir.

Five years later, it emerged as Jamaica Inn.

The Jamaica Inn of the book is much darker

Published in January 1936, Jamaica Inn became du Maurier’s first bestseller.

Its heroine, 23-year-old Mary Yellan, travels across a hostile Bodmin Moor to live with her Aunt Patience and terrifying Uncle Joss Merlyn at Jamaica Inn.

This is no welcoming coaching house.

Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn is a place respectable travellers avoid. Joss is brutal, violent and involved with criminals moving contraband through the night. Mary gradually discovers something even worse: behind the smuggling lies a gang of wreckers, deliberately bringing ships to destruction so their cargo can be plundered.

Murder follows.

The genius of the story is how much du Maurier borrowed from her own experience without pretending that her plot was history. Mary is the same age du Maurier had been when she first arrived. She too encounters the inn in bleak November weather. She too becomes lost on the moor.

But du Maurier was remarkably clear about the rest.

In a note accompanying the novel, she stated that although she used real place names, the characters and events were imaginary.

The fiction proved so powerful that it effectively rewrote the reputation of the real building.

Three years later Alfred Hitchcock directed the first film adaptation. Even that acquired its own little piece of darkness behind the scenes: extensive alterations were made to accommodate Charles Laughton’s starring role, and du Maurier became so angry with the changes that she unsuccessfully asked for her name to be removed from the film. Hitchcock was reportedly unhappy with the finished result too.

Audiences disagreed.

Released in 1939, it became a box-office success.

Jamaica Inn was now famous.

The night four horses arrived without their coach

Yet the real Jamaica Inn did witness drama worthy of du Maurier.

One of the most extraordinary documented incidents happened around midnight one night in August 1839.

Staff were waiting for the Royal Mail coach from Falmouth.

Instead, four horses came galloping into the Jamaica Inn yard alone.

No coach.

No passengers.

The people at the inn formed a search party and headed back down the road into the darkness.

At the bottom of a steep hill they found the mail coach overturned and smashed. Passengers who had been riding inside were trying to help those who had been thrown from the exposed seats above.

The injured were carried to Jamaica Inn.

One had broken ribs. Another had a badly broken arm. A third passenger’s face was described in the contemporary account as “dreadfully disfigured”. The guard had suffered a serious knee injury. A surgeon had to be summoned to the inn.

Then came the explanation.

The coachman had apparently been drunk.

Passengers had already forced him to surrender the reins to the young guard. But the guard was inexperienced, allowed the coach to gather too much speed on the descent and failed to negotiate the bend.

And the drunken coachman?

He reportedly ran away from the wreck.

No ghosts required.

It is one of those wonderful pieces of history in which the truth behaves exactly as gothic fiction says it should.

The man who never finished his ale

Then there is the murder.

Or perhaps there is.

Jamaica Inn’s most enduring ghost story concerns an unidentified stranger who supposedly stopped at the inn many years ago.

According to the story preserved by Jamaica Inn, the man was drinking a tankard of ale at the bar when somebody called him outside.

He left his drink unfinished.

He stepped into the night.

He never came back.

The following morning, his body was supposedly discovered on the moor. His killer was never identified and the circumstances of his death remained a mystery.

And then things become considerably stranger.

In 1911, the inn says there was considerable correspondence and interest in the press concerning sightings of a peculiar man sitting on a wall outside Jamaica Inn.

People spoke to him.

He apparently did not answer.

He did not acknowledge them.

He simply sat there.

Most disturbing of all was the claim that his appearance resembled the murdered stranger.

The obvious conclusion, at least for those inclined towards ghosts, was that the dead man had returned to Jamaica Inn.

Perhaps eternally waiting to finish his abandoned drink.

There is an important caveat.

Unlike the 1839 coach crash, the murder story is extremely difficult to pin to a victim, date, inquest or other surviving primary record. The inn preserves it as part of its folklore, but its recent archive-based history does not establish the murder as historical fact.

So this is best described for what it is:

a very old Jamaica Inn story.

Whether that makes it less frightening is another matter entirely.

And he is apparently not alone

Generations of staff and visitors have reported things they struggle to explain.

Footsteps are said to pace the corridor outside rooms three to six when nobody is there.

People have reported hearing horses, wheels and barrels outside the building.

A man wearing a tricorne hat and cloak has supposedly appeared before guests and then continued walking through doors that were very definitely closed.

Former managers have spoken of hearing conversations in an unfamiliar language, sometimes interpreted as Cornish.

There are stories of a little blonde-haired Victorian girl and a young boy nicknamed Tommy.

And there are reports of an unseen presence, sudden cold spots and figures glimpsed where no figure ought to be.

None of this constitutes proof of the supernatural.

But the stories are older than the modern ghost-hunting industry.

By 1950, Jamaica Inn’s manager Herbert Grose was already using the building’s ghostly reputation to attract visitors. More curiously, when Grose eventually prepared to leave, contemporary history records that his wife wanted to move with their young daughter to a “less-spooky place.”

Today the inn leans happily into that reputation, hosting organised paranormal investigations in parts of the historic building.

Believers can spend the night looking for answers.

Sceptics can spend the night trying not to listen to the corridor.

Jamaica Inn today

The building that frightened du Maurier is now far more hospitable than the Jamaica Inn she put on the page.

It is a Grade II-listed hotel and pub, with 36 bedrooms, a restaurant and bars, alongside exhibitions devoted to smuggling and Daphne du Maurier. Du Maurier memorabilia includes her writing desk, acquired after her death in 1989. The present Coaching Inn Group bought Jamaica Inn in 2022.

The old road has changed too. When the A30 bypass opened in 1991, Jamaica Inn stopped being somewhere every westbound traveller inevitably passed and increasingly became somewhere people deliberately came to see.

Yet every so often it resumes its original purpose.

During severe snow in February 2019, more than 140 stranded motorists made their way to Jamaica Inn after the A30 became impassable. Bedrooms filled, strangers shared rooms, mattresses were laid across restaurant floors and staff kept the kitchen going through the night while people arrived from abandoned cars in the snow.

More than two centuries after Captain John Broad opened his house on the moor, travellers lost in terrible weather were once again following the lights of Jamaica Inn to safety.

Which seems an appropriate place for its story to end.

Because underneath the smugglers, murders, wreckers and ghosts is something much older and rather more real.

A light in an exceptionally dark place.

And, perhaps, one or two former customers who are still trying to find their way back to it.