‘I visited horror film ‘haunted’ Wetherspoons where "food disappears"’

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A seaside Weatherspoons has a horror movie connection where gutted punters say their food “disappears”, but is it really haunted?

I’d read about the spooky-sounding The Peter Cushing on Tripadvisor and so, when I found myself in Whitstable, Kent, with a couple of mates, I thought I’d better check it out.

The boozer gets its name from a bit of local Hollywood royalty, the late English actor Peter Wilton Cushing OBE.

READ MORE: 'I tried Wetherspoons food for first time – I feared I'd get scurvy but liked one item'

Cushing reached astonishing heights in the world of film and made a name for himself through Hammer Production horror films and as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars.

He became known for playing the likes of Baron Frankenstein, Doctor Van Helsing in five Dracula films and also featured in thrillers such as The Abominable Snowman, The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Cushing, who regularly played Sherlock Holmes, and his wife Helen moved to the Kent town of Whitstable in 1958 and ended up staying there until his death in 1994.

His adoption of the town led to the ‘Spoons, which opened in 2011 in an old art deco cinema, to be named after its famous film resident.

The Peter Cushing does pretty well on Tripadvisor, a strong four out of five stars after nearly 750 reviews – but one review caught my eye given the abandoned theatre’s connection with the world of horror.

In April 2023, one miffed punter wrote: “I visited with my wife and halfway through my meal I nipped to the loo, when I returned my meal was gone, it had been collected and thrown in the bin.

“I mentioned to the staff who said my cutlery was in a finished position and because of this they wouldn’t accept any responsibility for the fact that I only ate half of my meal.”

In a pub named after a man famous for Dracula and Frankenstein, the phenomena of “disappearing food” seemed too strange – surely this couldn't be a coincidence?

The mission then, was to get to the bottom of whether The Cushing might, in fact, be haunted.

Between the three of us in Whitstable that day we ordered a bowl of chips and half chicken in a bid to lure out any spooky forces that might be at play.

The ceiling of the pub is incredibly high and the main drinking hall, a former screen room in its theatre days, is cavernous.

The walls are adorned with enormous black and white prints relating to the world of film and much of the 1930s vibe still remains despite its transformation into a boozer.

Sitting waiting for my food I noticed no one seemed like they were concerned about zombies pouring through the staff doors or vampire bats cascading down from those tall ceilings.

Instead, the good people of Whitstable seemed to be enjoying a Monday night cold one and the odd chilli chicken wrap without fear of being on tomorrow’s front pages as the first victims of an outbreak of a flesh-eating disease.

Still not buying that there was nothing sinister going on here, I decided to test the review that had caught my eye.

A trip to the toilet, up the stairs to what would once have been boxes for the upper crust of northern Kent society, was used as a tester.

Would my unattended chips be gone by the time I got back? Would some ghoulish spirit have tucked into them and left nothing but a crumb? Or some evil wizard tricked the staff into stealing away my munch in some cruel, twisted game.

You can imagine my disappointment then when I returned to find the chips just as I left them and, truth be told, I didn’t really feel like I was in a horror film worthy of Mr Cushing at all.

After a lovely conversation with a member of staff on their smoke break about the best things to do in Whitstable, I felt confident to give my verdict: The Peter Cushing is not a haunted pub.

This was, in the end, a rather pleasant and fairly priced Weatherspoons in a building that had been preserved beautifully both physically and spiritually.

Out the back, a net covers the entirety of the large and mildly ocean-windswept beer garden in a bid to protect it from overly aggressive and hungry seagulls which, it turns out, are the only real culprits of vanishing chips in this pleasingly competent seaside boozer.

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