Ye Olde Black Boy on High Street has held a licence since 1729, making it the oldest such licensed premises anywhere in Hull, and it sits close to the old riverside quays that once made this stretch of the city a genuinely working smuggling route during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Local tradition holds that the alehouse was linked to the docks by tunnels used specifically to move contraband under cover of darkness, and that on one stormy night the tunnels flooded suddenly with seawater and drowned several of the men working them.
No documentary record of the drowning has surfaced despite the story's persistence, but the tale is old enough and specific enough in its detail to have become a genuine part of the pub's own identity over the generations since.
Staff and regulars describe bottles moving or falling from the shelves with nobody near them, and a few have spoken of ghostly hands seen through gaps in the wall panelling, a distinctly unsettling detail for anyone working alone in the building after closing. A separate, looser story concerns a bare-knuckle fighter known only as George, said to have won a bout at the pub and later been murdered, though there is no evidence beyond the tale itself to support it. Taken together it is a pub with considerably more atmosphere than paper trail, which is honestly how most drowned-smuggler stories in old English ports tend to survive down to the present day.
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