The Trocadero on Temple Street is a long-standing Birmingham city-centre pub whose staff attribute a persistent run of small, irritating disturbances, coins appearing to flick off surfaces unprompted, beer mats scattering across the bar, chairs shifting position when no one is nearby, to a poltergeist nicknamed after Henry Skinner, said locally to have been a nineteenth-century landlord of the pub who met a violent end during his own tenure.
The story is told mostly through staff anecdote passed down informally behind the bar from one generation of employees to the next, rather than through any documented investigation with named sources or contemporary records, and no primary evidence of a real Henry Skinner meeting a bad end on the premises has surfaced despite the story's persistence.
It sits alongside a wider and separate claim that two young girls once fell to their deaths on the pub's staircase, another detail repeated in local listings without any traceable source behind it, adding a further layer of unverified tragedy to a pub already carrying a considerable reputation for small-scale but persistent poltergeist activity.
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