I Met The Ghost of Clevedon Pier
How my investigation into this sea side spook led to me shaking hands with the ghost...
When the ghost of Clevedon Pier story hit the headlines in late 2011 and early 2012, it felt like a brand new haunting. The reports were dramatic - a figure seen walking through locked gates without triggering the security light, talking to itself near the pavilion, sitting on benches along the pier. The sort of details that sound tailor-made for tabloid copy.
Clevedon isn’t that far from where I live, so I did what I usually do when somewhere nearby is suddenly haunted: I went to have a look. Once I got past the headlines and spoke to the people who actually use the pier, it quickly became clear that things weren’t as mysterious as they first seemed.
The Story That Started It all
One of the first people to report something odd was Clevedon Sea Angling Club member Jack Hulbert. He told the local press:
I had come on the pier early in the morning – it must have been about 4.30am – there wasn’t anyone else I could see. I got towards the end and I saw a figure of a person leaning on the railings looking out to sea. I thought I’ll double check and I walked all around to see if it was shadows or the light playing tricks but I knew what it was. It was definitely the definition of a person wearing dark clothes but I couldn’t see whether it was a man or a woman.
From there, the story snowballed.
People reported seeing a figure in the same spot as Jack’s sighting. The smell of toast was said to drift mysteriously through the pier gift shop. And then a student captured a photo early one morning that showed a lone figure on the apparently locked pier. Once that image made it into the national press, the “ghost of Clevedon Pier” was off and running.
On paper, the case was a neat little package which included a figure reported standing at the end of the pier, the unexplained smell of toast in the shop, and a photo of a person on the pier when, according to the story, nobody should have been there.
Fishing For Answers
My first step was to find the people who spend the most time on Clevedon Pier: the Clevedon Pier Sea Angling Club (CPSAC).
A bit of online digging turned up their members’ forum, where the alleged ghost was being discussed in detail. I signed up, read through their posts, and contacted a few members privately to ask questions. The old forum has since disappeared as the club redesigned their website, but at the time it was a goldmine.
One name came up repeatedly: Vic.
Several anglers suggested that the ghost captured in the headline photo wasn’t a ghost at all, but Vic himself. So I spoke to him.
Vic had been part of the angling club for about a year. Like many members, he usually fished at night. He explained that a lot of the spooky noises reported by visiting ghost hunters were, in his opinion, just the normal sounds of the pier: the rush of water under the structure as the tide runs, and pigeons roosting on the beams being disturbed.
He also mentioned a few features of the pier that, if you were primed to see ghosts, might give you a fright. For example, night anglers wear headlights, which can reflect oddly in the glass of the sheltered seating on the promenade. There’s also a telescope at the end of the pier that can loom at the edge of your vision and make you jump if you’re not expecting it.
In other words, the people who were there all the time already had perfectly ordinary explanations for a lot of the activity.
But the Pier was Locked…
One detail repeated in the media coverage was that the ghostly figure appeared on the pier when it was locked and therefore supposedly empty. During my visit, I spent some time looking at the gates and fences used to keep the public off the pier when it’s closed.
The gaps between the bars in the gates are too small for an adult to squeeze through, but it is possible to climb over. In one spot, a lamppost sits between two segments of fencing; because the post narrows towards the top, it leaves enough space for someone determined to slip through. Vic also told me that, on occasion, teenagers had managed to find their way onto the pier at night.
More importantly, all members of the angling club have a code that gives them access to the pier at any hour. So the idea that a time-lapse camera captured a figure on a locked and therefore empty pier simply doesn’t hold up. “Locked to the general public” is not the same as “no human beings physically present”.
The only way to know for sure that the pier was empty at the time the photo was taken would have been to check it in person. The student who took the photo did not do that because it was only upon reviewing the photos that they saw the figure.
The Photo of the Ghost of Clevedon Pier
The now-famous photo was taken by a student whose camera was set to take an image every 30 seconds. In one frame, a lone figure appears on the pier. In the next, they are gone.
I asked Vic what he thought of the image, and he didn’t hesitate:
When I saw the photo in The Sun of the so-called ghost, I showed my wife and she agreed it looked like me. I own a suit that I wear when fishing and underneath I sometimes wear a red top with a hood (it can get damn chilly early in the morning) and I own a fairly new Mercedes and I’m always a little nervous about leaving it out in the roadway and I’m often looking to see if it’s ok.
Other club members agreed that the figure looked like Vic in his flotation suit, checking on his car, and once you know that, it becomes very hard not to see it.
You also realise how generous that 30-second interval is. In that time, a person could easily step into frame, glance towards the road to check on their car, be captured in one exposure, and then move away before the next one. The pier isn’t wide; you don’t need to be the Flash to appear and disappear between frames.
When you’re told, “This is a ghost on a locked pier,” your brain jumps straight to the spooky explanation. When you’re told, “Actually, the anglers have a code, and this looks a lot like one of them,” it clicks into place with a dull, sensible thud.
A Quick Note on Time-Lapse Ghosts
Time-lapse and interval shooting are brilliant for capturing slow changes – tides, traffic, clouds, night skies – but they’re also perfect factories for accidental ghosts.
When a camera takes a photo every few seconds or minutes, you end up with isolated snapshots of whatever was in front of the lens at that exact moment. People walking through the frame might only appear in one image and then be gone by the next, even though they were there for a completely ordinary amount of time.
When you scroll through the resulting sequence, it’s easy to forget that there were long gaps between each exposure. A person who wandered into frame, paused to look at the shore, and then wandered off again becomes, in hindsight, a mysterious lone figure that appeared and vanished.
Add a locked-gate narrative, a bit of distance from the events, a dash of wishful thinking, and a normal pier user can be upgraded to a ghost with very little effort.
Spilling The Tea…
It wasn’t just the photo that gave Clevedon Pier its haunted reputation. There were stories about muttering voices near the tea room and the unexplained smell of toast drifting through the shop.
During my visit, I’d hoped to speak to the Pier Mistress, Linda Strong, but she was tied up in meetings. When I’d phoned previously, she’d also been unavailable, so I didn’t get to ask her directly about the reports.
I did, however, speak to several staff and volunteers.
At the far end of the pier, near the telescope, a volunteer asked for my help locking a door. While I helped, I asked if she knew anything about the ghost. She said she hadn’t seen anything herself, but once smelt toast burning in the gift shop – only learning later that others had reported the same thing. She suggested I speak to the fishermen if I wanted to know more; they were the ones who spent the most time out there at odd hours.
I then took a break to write up my notes in the Pagoda Tea Room – the very spot where the ghost was said to lurk, muttering to itself. Over a cup of tea, I got chatting to a member of staff who’d worked there for more than six years. She told me she’d never seen anything she’d describe as paranormal and thought people were more likely to notice odd things because the media had primed them to believe the pier was haunted.
This is something I see again and again. A place isn’t haunted in any formal sense; it’s just a place where people occasionally have odd experiences, like they do everywhere. Then a headline or TV segment frames it as the haunted pier or Britain’s most haunted whatever, and suddenly every creak, shadow and smell is interpreted through that lens. That isn’t people being gullible, it’s just how human attention works: once you’ve been told there’s a ghost, your brain starts quietly sorting your experiences into “normal” and “possibly ghost”, and it’s the latter that get remembered and repeated.
The tea-room staffer also gave me a quick tour of the very normal, very physical sources of some of the reported phenomena.
Around 9am, as the tide goes out, the shifting water makes the pier move and groan.
Pigeons roosting on and under the structure can make a racket – there had been so many the previous year that they kept flying into the café.
Bats are known to fly around the tea room at night.
A cardboard “fat lady” posing screen at the end of the pier can create strange silhouettes when the sun shines through it.
You don’t need a ghost to create weird noises, fleeting shapes at the edge of vision, or the occasional whiff of something out of place. You just need an old pier, wildlife, and some suggestible humans.
Catching Up with the Sea Anglers
Out on the pier, I spoke to several fishermen. One group eventually pointed me towards another familiar name: Ken Bovington, webmaster for the Clevedon Pier Sea Angling Club and the person I’d first contacted when I began looking into the story.
Ken was kind enough to chat in person. We talked about the student’s photo and the angling club’s belief that the figure was Vic. Ken pointed out that in the image, you can clearly see the style of flotation suit the anglers wear. He even let me photograph his own red jacket for comparison.
Looking around, it was obvious that these red flotation suits were standard kit for the night fishermen. In other words, the mystery clothing of the ghost matched the very normal clothing of the people who were actually there.
Mixed Reactions in the Gift Shop
On my way back, I stopped in the gift shop to ask about the smell of toast. Two members of staff were working. One refused to speak to me at all and the other was extremely vague and, when pressed, would only say, “I think it’s only smelt every six months on the stairs.”
For a phenomenon that had helped generate national media attention, the reluctance to talk about it was striking. I did feel quite unwelcome, though it’s always possible I was reading more into the interaction than was actually there.
One thing that did stick in my mind, though, was the way the “smell of toast” was treated purely as a ghost clue. In the real world, unexplained burning smells in a building are usually a reason to call an electrician, not a paranormal investigator. If that odour had been frequent and strong, I’d be more worried about wiring or appliances than wandering spirits.
So… is Clevedon Pier Haunted?
Clevedon Pier is a genuinely lovely place to visit. The views are beautiful, the tea room is charming, and if you’re into piers as bits of engineering and history, it’s a treat.
What I’m not convinced of is that it’s haunted.
Most of the people who spend long periods of time on the pier – the anglers and long-term staff – either don’t believe it’s haunted or have perfectly ordinary explanations for the things that have been reported. I don’t doubt that some people have had genuinely odd experiences there, but odd and paranormal are not the same thing.
Clevedon Pier didn’t become interesting when the ghost story appeared; it became legible as a haunting once the press started telling that story on its behalf.
You should absolutely visit Clevedon Pier if you get the chance. Just go for the views, the sea air, and maybe a cup of tea in the Pagoda – not because you expect to bump into a ghost.