This building was once a public house called the Red Lion, where an executioner almost met an untimely death. A man named John Connor was executed in Ruthin for highway robbery on 15th April 1822. The executioner was Samuel Burrows, the hangman for Chester. The evening before the execution he was staying in the Red Lion where his fellow patrons convinced him to demonstrate the process of hanging a person. Attaching his rope to the ceiling, he showed them how to tie the noose and put it around his own neck. A man named Henry Caddock kicked the stool from underneath the hangman and he would have strangled had Thomas Humphreys not swiftly cut the rope.