Blackfriars was founded around 1239 as a friary for Dominican monks, known from the colour of their habits as the Black Friars, and its surviving cloister ranges rank among the very oldest buildings in Newcastle to have come through the dissolution of the monasteries more or less intact, a genuinely rare survival for a medieval religious complex of this scale. The site went on to serve for centuries as headquarters for the town's craft guilds before its more recent life as a restaurant, but local folklore insists the building's earlier religious life never fully departed along with the monks who once lived there.
Diners and staff have reported glasses and cutlery rattling with no one standing nearby to explain it, a disturbance attributed by local tradition to nuns said still to walk the cloisters, even though the site's own documented history belonged specifically to Dominican monks rather than any order of nuns. Shadowy monks have separately been seen in the restaurant's Cellar 9, where staff describe an oppressive sense of being watched that persists even when they know for certain they are alone in the space.
The more colourful strand of the legend claims that underground passages once connected Blackfriars to the neighbouring Greyfriars monastery and to the nunnery of St Bartholomew's, and that a monk and a nun used these hidden tunnels for a secret affair which was eventually discovered when the nun became pregnant, a scandal severe enough, in the story's telling, to explain why both orders' spirits are still said to wander the site together. No documentary evidence supports the tunnel story, which follows a shape found repeatedly in monastic ghost lore across England, wherever a friary and a nunnery happen to have stood within reasonable walking distance of each other, but it has stuck specifically to Blackfriars for long enough now to count as genuine local tradition rather than a passing invention.
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