The Blue Ball in Oldbury carries a haunting built around one strikingly simple, memorable detail rather than any developed backstory: a figure distinguished mainly by an old, battered hat, reported walking straight through a solid wall in the bar area rather than pausing to use the door like anyone living would. The image is vivid precisely because of how little else accompanies it, no name, no period costume beyond the hat itself, no explanation for why this particular spot in the pub is where he chooses to walk.
Nothing in the surviving accounts attaches a backstory to the figure at all. There is no suggestion of who he might have been, what era he belonged to, or why a wall that presumably was not there in his own lifetime now stands directly in the path he still seems to follow. The story exists as a short, self-contained piece of pub lore rather than anything resembling a documented investigation, passed on more or less exactly as briefly as it is told here.
As with a number of other Black Country pub ghosts recorded in this collection, the Blue Ball's staying power seems to owe far more to the sheer vividness of its single central image, a hatted man passing through brick as though the wall itself were the intrusion rather than him, than to any accumulated body of repeated sightings or corroborating detail built up over years of retelling.
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