The Rooms They Don’t Rent

Haunted Hotels and Forbidden Stays of the UK & Ireland

Some hotel rooms are avoided for a reason.

Across the United Kingdom and Ireland, certain hotel rooms are quietly kept out of circulation. They are marked “out of order,” constantly rotated, or offered only when nothing else is available. Guests rarely stay twice, and staff rarely discuss them. Yet the stories surrounding these rooms are remarkably consistent.

The Rooms They Don’t Rent takes readers beyond the well-known haunted hotels and into the specific spaces where disturbances refuse to fade. These are not entire buildings steeped in legend, but individual rooms – execution chambers above ancient inns, castle towers tied to violent pasts, former prison residences, and guest rooms built on land shaped by suffering.

Drawing on historical records, eyewitness accounts, and recurring staff reports, this book explores fifteen locations where guests describe unexplained movement, sudden dread, disturbed sleep, and the unmistakable sense of being watched. Some depart in the early hours; others say nothing at all, returning their keys in silence.

This is not a collection of ghost stories, but an examination of patterns – places where history appears to cling to walls, floors, and doorways, and where modern hospitality quietly coexists with something far older.

Whether you are a sceptic, a believer, or a traveller drawn to the unsettling, this book invites you to step into rooms that were never meant to be occupied.

You may never stay in them.
But now you know they exist.