The Queens Head on Queen Street has a documented history stretching back to at least 1860, when its first recorded landlord was a needle manufacturer and grocer named Simeon Shrimpton, needle manufacture having been Redditch's defining trade throughout the entire nineteenth century. That genuinely documented pedigree is unusually solid for a Worcestershire pub haunting compared to most of the county's thinner, more vaguely dated stories.
A young man who lived and worked at the pub between 1997 and 1998 reported seeing a man in the cellar who always carried the distinct smell of cigar smoke with him, and noticed that the gas supply to the beer lines would reliably cut out whenever this figure was said to be present, a genuinely specific and repeatable pattern rather than a single isolated sighting. In one of the upstairs bedrooms, witnesses have separately described seeing three children playing together in a corner, watched carefully over by an old woman in a long black dress who checks on them before disappearing quietly into the corridor.
Other reports collected by local ghost-history sites add self-opening doors, shadow figures, and phantom sounds resembling a riot at street level, though these appear to be looser, considerably less detailed additions to the core cellar and bedroom stories that actually anchor the pub's own wider haunted reputation, the Queens Head's genuinely documented Victorian origins giving even its thinnest reported details more historical weight than most comparable pub ghost stories can claim.
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