The Old Queen's Head on Pond Hill dates back to around 1475, making it the oldest surviving secular timber-framed building found anywhere in Sheffield, older by some considerable margin than most of what actually remains of the medieval town elsewhere. It stands close to where Sheffield Castle itself once stood, in an area that has seen continuous use and repeated rebuilding across many centuries of the city's own history.
The ghost story attached to it is a genuinely quiet one by the standards of pub-haunting stories found throughout this collection: a little old man, seen sitting contentedly in the bar area drinking his own pint, who simply vanishes if anyone actually approaches him too directly or tries to get a closer look. Other reports from the building mention the sound of laughing children and footsteps echoing on the upper floors with no one actually there to have made them.
None of it is especially dramatic, which if anything fits the building's own long, genuinely unremarkable survival better than a more sensational story ever could. It remains a well-established stop on Sheffield's own ghost-walk circuit precisely because the sheer age of the building itself does most of the actual narrative work, needing very little embellishment beyond its own genuine antiquity.
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