Beverley Guildhall, standing on Register Square, has served the town's administrative and ceremonial functions for centuries, the kind of working civic building that sees generations of officials, clerks and tradespeople pass through its rooms long after any individual mayor or councillor is forgotten. It is precisely the tradespeople working there in more recent years, carrying out maintenance and restoration work rather than any formal civic business, who have supplied the building's most consistently reported paranormal experience.
Tools have reportedly switched themselves off without warning during this work, with no electrical fault ever found to explain the interruption, and in several separate accounts that same experience has come paired with a sudden, unexplained smell of cigar smoke filling rooms where nobody present had been smoking at all. The pairing of the two, a dead tool and a phantom cigar, has repeated often enough across different tradespeople to become a settled part of the building's own working reputation rather than a single, isolated anecdote.
Local tradition attributes the disturbance to the lingering presence of a former mayor of the town, the reasoning being, more or less explicitly, that cigar smoke fits the popular image of a Victorian or Edwardian civic dignitary more naturally than any other likely candidate for the role. No specific mayor is ever named in the surviving accounts, and the link between the smell and any actual historical individual is inference rather than documented record, but the story has held its place firmly in local tallies of Beverley's haunted buildings regardless, repeated by tradespeople who have no obvious reason to embellish an ordinary day's maintenance work.
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