Norman Dunbar, writing for Spooky Newcastle, recalls being a police officer on night shift in the Walker area in summer 1992, patrolling the Walker Road and Pottery Bank area with an experienced colleague. At about 3.20am they were sent to an auto alarm at the Birds Nest Social Club. The keyholder, a man he knew only as Tommy, let them in and put the lights on, and pointed to the gents toilet as the place to check.
As the three stood in the foyer, the gents door swung open towards them and a man walked out. He was short, about 5 foot 4, with short black hair slicked back in a 1940s style, and wore a black tuxedo with satin lapels, a white shirt and a dickie bow tie. Dunbar writes that his face was the waxy yellow of a corpse, with open, fixed, unblinking eyes. He walked slowly and silently across the foyer towards the steps of the concert room. When Dunbar moved to grab his shoulder, he writes, the figure disappeared into thin air in front of all three men. The keyholder, who was also a barman, said he would never go back into the place, and Dunbar and his colleague agreed to tell nobody on the shift. Dunbar later interpreted it as a residual haunting, a man replaying a walk through the place he was happiest in life.
The piece is a first-person account written years later by a former police officer, and there is no corroboration beyond his statement that all three men saw the same thing. Spooky Newcastle added a note that the photograph on the page shows the Birds Nest pub rather than the social club itself, so the pin here is placed on the Walker Road and Pottery Bank patrol area and not on a building. Dunbar says the club has since been demolished.
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