Northgate Street has carried an inn on or near this spot since at least the sixteenth century, and the building that stands today is largely a 1533 rebuild raised on ground with Roman-period origins, making the Pied Bull one of the oldest continuously licensed premises in Chester. Centuries as a coaching inn, serving travellers on the road north out of the city, have left it with the kind of layered, half-remembered history that generates ghost stories almost by default, and the Pied Bull's is unusually specific for a case this old.
The core tradition names a man called John Davies, said to have fallen down the steep cellar stairs in 1609 and broken his neck in the fall. His death is the anchor for reports, gathered informally over the years from staff and guests, of a presence felt in and around the cellar area, sometimes described as an oppressive atmosphere rather than a visible figure. Running alongside the Davies story is a separate, less specific strand concerning the ghosts of former chambermaids, said to be still going about their work in the inn's older rooms. As with much pub ghostlore, the Davies date and detail cannot be checked against a contemporary written record, and the story survives mainly through local retelling and the modern ghost-tourism trade that has grown up around Chester's historic inns.
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