Wallsend takes its own name directly from its position at the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall, where the Roman fort of Segedunum once stood guard over the exact point where the great wall met the River Tyne. The fort has since been excavated and is now a visitor attraction with a reconstructed bathhouse and viewing tower, but the ghost story associated with the wider town is stranger and considerably more fragmentary than anything attached to the museum site itself.
According to Richard McKenzie's book They Still Serve: A Complete Guide to the Military Ghosts of Britain, local tradition holds that the naked ghost of a Roman soldier has been seen running through the centre of Wallsend, an oddly specific and genuinely startling image for a piece of local folklore to have preserved intact over the years.
No further detail survives about when this particular tradition began, who first reported it, or why the soldier should appear without clothing rather than in the uniform and equipment one might expect of a Roman legionary, which leaves the story genuinely thin even by the standards of a relaxed research bar. It is included here because it is a genuine documented piece of local tradition tied to a real and historically significant Roman site, rather than an invented modern addition with no traceable written source behind it.
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