The Beeswing traded as an ordinary public house in Felling, on the eastern edge of Gateshead, until it closed in the years following a 2008 investigation by paranormal researchers that first documented the activity now associated with the building. What they found, and what staff and regulars had apparently been experiencing before them, was a specific and oddly sociable figure: a middle-aged man, smartly dressed in an old-fashioned waistcoat and spats and holding what witnesses describe as a period glass of ale, who would appear at the bar and strike up easy conversation with anyone who had not been in the pub before.
It was only afterwards, when these new visitors mentioned the friendly stranger to an actual regular, that they learned the truth: no one matching his description worked behind the bar or drank at the Beeswing at all. He had, by every account, simply been making conversation with strangers as naturally as any real customer might, indistinguishable from the living until someone checked.
The pub's location, close to the site of the Felling pit disasters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tragedies that killed many local miners over the decades, has led some to connect the phantom publican to that wider mining history, though no individual victim has ever been matched specifically to the man in the waistcoat. With the Beeswing no longer trading, the haunting now survives purely as a secondhand story rather than an ongoing phenomenon anyone can go and check for themselves, a friendly ghost's last conversation partners already years in the past.
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