The Low Lights Tavern stands on North Shields Fish Quay and is generally reckoned the oldest pub found anywhere in the immediate area, with the current building dating from the seventeenth century on a site that actually held an earlier structure reaching as far back as the eleventh century, a genuinely deep continuity of use on this same quayside spot. Its attic, reached by a narrow, awkward stair, sits dimly lit and built from what appear to be reclaimed ship's timbers, giving the space an atmosphere distinctive enough that it has drawn dedicated paranormal investigation groups to the building over the years specifically to examine it.
Staff and visiting ghost hunters describe the attic specifically as the real focus of the pub's own haunted reputation, though published accounts remain genuinely thin on named ghosts, specific incidents, or firm dates, and mostly amount to little more than a general, shared sense that the space simply feels wrong to be standing in alone.
Given the building's genuine age and its long documented history as a working quayside pub across centuries of fishing, shipbuilding and, inevitably, drownings and generally hard working lives lived along the Tyne, it would honestly be more surprising if a story like this had never attached itself to the place than that one eventually did, the attic's reused ship's timbers themselves serving as a quiet, physical reminder of exactly the kind of maritime hardship this whole quayside community once knew so well.
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