The Victoria Inn is a small, largely unaltered Victorian pub near Durham city centre, popular with visitors precisely because it still looks much as it would have done when it first opened its doors, its unchanged interior a genuine rarity among pubs that have so often been modernised beyond recognition elsewhere.
Alongside its considerable reputation for well-kept beer, it has picked up a modest ghost story of its own: staff and regulars have described a shadowy figure seen lingering near the bar out of the corner of the eye, gone the moment anyone looks directly toward it, along with footsteps heard on the stairs when the upper floor is known to be completely empty.
There is no named ghost attached to the pub and no historical incident on record anywhere to explain the reports. It is a genuinely thin story by the standards of Durham's better-documented hauntings, repeated mainly in passing on local haunted-pub round-ups rather than investigated in any real depth, and it is included here on exactly that honest basis rather than dressed up as anything more substantial.
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