The Alum Ale House takes its name from an industry that once defined this stretch of South Shields waterfront: the production of alum, a mineral compound essential to Victorian dyeing and tanning, which the town processed on an industrial scale. A pub built into that working history has had a long time to accumulate stories, and unlike many haunted buildings that settle on a single figure, the Alum has kept three going at once, each distinct enough that staff know them apart by name.
There is a grey lady, seen moving silently through the building in the way that grey ladies in old English pubs so often are. There is a Victorian gentleman, dressed for his own era rather than any other, glimpsed in period clothing that marks him as belonging to the pub's own working history rather than to some borrowed general haunting. And there is a third presence, altogether more playful, nicknamed Giggly Meg by the staff who have heard her: a mischievous giggle with no visible source, cutting through the ordinary noise of a working pub with nothing behind it.
None of the three has ever been matched to a specific, named historical individual, and what survives is staff testimony and atmosphere rather than any single documented incident with a date attached. What keeps the Alum's three ghosts in fairly steady circulation, though, is the pub's own willingness to talk about them. Rather than downplaying odd stories the way some venues do, staff here name all three figures readily to visitors and to the paranormal investigators who have taken an interest, which has kept Giggly Meg and her two companions a living, retold part of the pub's identity rather than a story that has quietly faded.
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