Ettington Park Hotel

Ettington belongs to one of the oldest families in England. The manor of Lower Eatington, as it was long spelled, has been held by the Shirleys since the Domesday survey of 1086 and very probably before, an unbroken descent that few English families can match. There was a medieval manor house here, and the grounds still contain the ruins of the Norman church of the vanished village of Lower Eatington and a later chapel. Two Shirley boys are said to have drowned in the Stour, which winds through the park, in the 1800s; their memory is the seed of one of the hotel's saddest stories.

The house you see today is the work of Evelyn Philip Shirley, who between 1858 and 1862 commissioned the architect John Prichard to remodel the older building into a Gothic mansion in the French and Italian manner. Prichard used bands of contrasting stone – yellow limestone from Gloucestershire, ironstone from Edge Hill, blue lias from Wilmcote and white lias quarried locally – to give the walls their striped, almost Venetian look, and filled the interior with carved friezes, panelling and a library that is still the heart of the house. In 1963 the film-makers of The Haunting used its exterior, shot at unsettling angles, as Hill House.

The twentieth century was less kind. In 1979 a fire caused severe damage and the mansion stood boarded up for three years. In 1983 the house and forty acres were leased to the Isis Hotel Company, which spent millions restoring it and opened Ettington Park as a luxury hotel. It is now part of the Hand Picked Hotels group, and the Shirley name survives in its best suite. The family's long tenure, the drownings, the fire and the restoration together explain why so many of its ghost stories are about people who seem reluctant to leave.

What sets Ettington apart from most haunted hotels is paperwork. The management keeps an official log of paranormal encounters reported by guests, a practice said to have recorded dozens of separate incidents over the decades, and the hotel is candid about them rather than coy. Guests have asked to change rooms in the night because of noises and a general feeling of unease; the night staff speak of Lady Emma as a colleague. The Coventry Telegraph, reporting on the hotel's fright nights, described Ettington as Britain's most haunted hotel and quoted the army officer and elderly lady by the fireplace as its most usual sightings.

The library accounts are the most specific: the Walter Scott novel found open at its curse, books off the shelves, the priest, the voices and the billiard balls. The Lady in Grey at the foot of the stairs and Lady Emma walking into walls are the sightings most often repeated by guests who arrive knowing nothing. The monk, the man and dog, and the drowned boys complete a cast that paranormal websites from Haunted Rooms to Mysterious Britain and Spooky Isles have catalogued, and the hotel is a fixture on lists of England's most haunted places to sleep.

Then there is the film. Robert Wise shot the exteriors of Hill House at Ettington in 1963, and The Haunting is still regarded as one of the most frightening films ever made without showing a ghost. Sceptics point out that the film gave the house a reputation it then had to live up to, that a hotel benefits from a good ghost, and that a Victorian Gothic pile with a large old library is a machine for creaks and draughts. The hotel does not argue; it hosts fright nights and lets the log speak for itself.

Ettington Park is a hotel, so the way to visit is to stay. It sits in forty acres of parkland at Alderminster, off the A3400 about six miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, with free parking and easy access to Shakespeare's town, Warwick and the northern Cotswolds. The hotel is the only AA four-red-star hotel in the Stratford area, with individually decorated rooms and suites – several with four-poster beds and views over the gardens or the nineteenth-century chapel – a two-rosette restaurant, and a spa with an indoor pool, sauna, steam room and spa pool. The Shirley Suite is the room to ask for.

Non-residents can book afternoon tea or dinner, which gets you into the library and the ground-floor rooms where most sightings are reported. Fright nights and ghost-themed evenings are staged on selected dates, particularly around Halloween; check the hotel's website for the current programme. The grounds include the ruined Norman church and riverside walks along the Stour. As a listed Victorian building it has stairs and steps in places, so ask about accessible rooms when booking. If you would rather sleep somewhere less eventful, Stratford-upon-Avon has hundreds of rooms fifteen minutes away.