The Black Swan on Chapel Street in Rugby is said to be haunted by a red-headed man, seen by those who report him walking calmly through the pub after closing time, once the doors have been locked for the night and no living customer should still be inside. Local tradition does not leave his presence unexplained; it attaches a specific, dramatic motive to the haunting, that he was killed after being discovered in bed with another man's wife, the kind of scandal-driven death that recurs again and again across English pub ghost lore as a ready-made explanation for a restless spirit.
That story is, honestly, impossible to verify against any surviving record specifically tied to this pub. No name, no date, and no documented incident of a killing under these circumstances has been traced for the Black Swan, which leaves the red-headed man's entire biography resting on oral tradition passed down through Rugby's own local storytelling rather than anything that could be checked against a parish register or a newspaper archive.
What keeps the story worth recording, despite that thinness, is its consistency. It is recounted the same way often enough locally, the same man, the same red hair, the same scandalous cause of death, that it clearly functions as a settled piece of the pub's own identity rather than a story invented on the spot for visiting ghost-hunters. It is included here honestly as exactly that: a single, thin, but genuinely persistent local account.
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