Ye Olde Talbot is one of the older timber-framed buildings on Friar Street, a street that has kept much of its historic character despite Worcester's considerable wartime and postwar redevelopment elsewhere in the city. Two separate stories are attached to it: a young woman in plain Quaker-style clothing seen on the stairs or in an upstairs room, and, entirely unrelated to her, a black cat that appears and disappears without ever being caught or properly identified by anyone who has spotted it.
Neither figure has a name or a documented date attached in the sources describing them, and the two stories appear to be told entirely independently of one another rather than as parts of a single unified narrative connecting the woman and the cat in any way.
Friar Street's genuine history as a merchant and dissenting religious community during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gives the Quaker-dress detail some plausible local colour worth noting, though it is not itself evidence of any specific event or individual behind the recurring sighting.
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