The Court Oak on Court Oak Road, Harborne, keeps its most active haunting confined almost entirely to its cellar, where staff have given the disturbance a genuinely affectionate nickname, Corky, drawn directly from its favourite trick: smashing wine bottles apparently on their own, with nobody standing anywhere nearby who could plausibly have knocked them over.
Separately from Corky's cellar activity, a male apparition has been reported standing behind the bar itself, a figure with no name and no backstory attached to explain who he might have been or why he chooses to occupy exactly that spot in the pub. It is genuinely unclear from the surviving accounts whether staff consider this bar figure connected to Corky in some way, perhaps the same presence simply moving between different parts of the building, or whether the two represent entirely separate, unrelated hauntings that happen to share the same pub.
As with several of Harborne's old coaching-road pubs, this story is told mainly among bar staff and regulars rather than documented anywhere in any real detail, and no date or named witness survives for either the bottle-smashing in the cellar or the silent figure reported behind the bar above it, leaving Corky and his possible companion as genuine, if thinly recorded, pieces of the pub's own working folklore.
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