Ghost · Ware · Legendary
Open on the map: directions, what's there today and read-aloud →
Sleep in the giant bed and its jealous maker's ghost will pinch you.
Check opening times
The real Great Bed is in the V&A in London. Ware Museum, free to enter and open four days a week, tells the local story and displays a piece of the Bed's old coverlet.
In Ware, just ahead, the inns once housed a giant bed so famous Shakespeare joked about it, and its jealous maker's ghost was said to pinch anyone common who slept in it.
The Great Bed of Ware, a vast carved oak four-poster large enough for several couples, stood for centuries in Ware's coaching inns and drew visitors from far and wide; Shakespeare mentions it in Twelfth Night. It was long believed to be haunted by the ghost of its maker, the carpenter Jonas Fosbrooke, who resented common folk sleeping in a bed he meant for nobility. Guests who tried were said to be pinched, scratched and beaten until they fled. One story tells of a royal Master of the Horse who spent a night in it to win a local girl and was found bruised and exhausted on the floor beside it.