The road from York to Whitby always seemed to change somewhere after Pickering.
The landscape opened out. Trees thinned. The sky felt larger somehow. The roads became quieter and darker, especially in winter, when the North Yorkshire Moors seemed to swallow sound whole. Long before I understood anything deeply about folklore, ghost stories, or atmosphere, I remember noticing the feeling that came with driving that road.
And then there was Saltersgate.
The old inn stood quietly near the edge of the Hole of Horcum, weathered into the landscape as though it had always been there. Built sometime around the middle of the seventeenth century before becoming a public house later on, it became one of those places that gathered stories around itself naturally. The kind of building people pointed toward as they passed. The kind of place that looked different at dusk.
As a child, it always seemed slightly unreal to me.
Most journeys to Whitby involved passing it somewhere between tiredness and anticipation. Rain on windows. Flasks of tea. The faint smell of damp coats in the car. Sometimes fog rolling low across the moors. Sometimes bikers gathered outside in dark clusters beside the road.
We only ever went inside once.
Like most people in Yorkshire, I already knew the stories before I crossed the threshold.
Smugglers had supposedly murdered an excise man there centuries earlier after he discovered their operation moving salt across the moors. According to local folklore, his body had been buried beneath the fireplace itself, and the fire was kept permanently burning to stop his spirit from escaping. There were other stories too. A Grey Lady seen in corridors and near the rooms upstairs. Cigarettes and lighters moving between tables. Doors opening on their own. Cold spots drifting through otherwise warm rooms.
But the stories that stayed with me longest were always the ones about the road itself.
Travellers leaving the inn too late after drinking. Darkness consuming the moors around them. People becoming lost in bad weather, wandering into the night with no sense of direction beneath black skies and mist. The idea that some never truly left the place behind at all.
As a teenager, those stories became tangled together with music.
I remember sitting in the back seat with a Walkman on, listening to Iron Maiden tapes while staring out across the moors as we passed the inn. In my head, Saltersgate became larger than the building itself. It became part ghost story, part imagination, part landscape. One of those places that seemed to exist slightly outside ordinary life. No flimsy empty pages but a chapter of defining moments like taking a photograph to anchor the memory.
Years later, the pub closed.
Eventually the building disappeared too, demolished after standing for centuries against the weather and the road. But even now, driving that route toward Whitby, there is still a strange instinct to look toward the place where it once stood.
The road remains.
The moors remain.
The feeling remains.
Some places outlive their walls.
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Garrow Hill: The Blacklist of Heavy Metal 