The pub will turn 300 in April next year
A bar manager told the ECHO how “customers” creep into the bar and glasses “fly off shelves” – but it’s not quite how you’d usually expect. Ye Hole in Ye Wall turns 300 next April, making it Liverpool’s oldest pub and as you might expect oozes in history.
But none more interesting that its very own “resident ghost” that haunts the bar every day. Bar manager Lisa Kelly, 46, told the ECHO how she’s often hearing glasses fly off the shelves as well as the figure of a person wearing a red jumper residing in one of the pub’s rooms.
She said: “We’re the oldest pub in Liverpool so of course we’re going to get things happen. We have a resident ghost, we call him Pedro, but he doesn’t like change.
“When we have people in that we don’t really know, like groups of young lads, glasses seem to fly off the shelves. I’ve been pushed before, and it’s not just me some of the staff have too. Nothing bad has happened but you feel it.”
Built on top of a historic Quaker burial site and founded in 1726, the pub’s cellar is unusually located upstairs rather than in the basement. Lisa added: “The cellar door you have to rag shut because of the carpet, but sometimes it just slams on you.”
A most common ghoulish sighting by Lisa and boss Stephen Hoy, who took over the pub in 2000 is a “young lad” donning a red jumper. She said: “Sometimes I see him go into the big room and think it’s a customer going in, I’ll go in and nobody is there.
“Not so long ago we had mediums come into the pub and they said there is a lad with a red jumper on in here, which is weird because we have never told anyone about the lad in the red jumper.”
She added: “When the ghost hunters came we were just sat in the bar and they asked me if I was OK and I said yes but I’ve just gone really close. They said we think he’s [the ghost] is behind you, then a wine glass moved to the front of the shelf.”
Lisa believes Pedro is warning the pub staff about something. She said: “I’m not sure what about but I just think he’s trying to warn us. Whenever anything happens we all laugh and just say ‘oh it’s Pedro again’ when he knocks things off.
“It’s so interesting, I’ve never experienced anything like until I started working here. It’s been seven years now and little things happen all the time. We’ve got the ghost hunters coming back to spend the night here on Halloween.”
Stephen’s wife, Hayley, previously told the ECHO in 2017 how spooky occurrences at the pub include elastic bands flying across the bar, lights fusing while Stephen was working in the cellar and a glowing orb caught levitating over the bar on CCTV.
Once Stephen’s brother even felt himself being pushed over while he was changing the mixers. Other ghoulish regulars spotted at the pub include a man in a long wax jacket, believed to be a sailor who was killed in the alehouse in the 1720s and a ghost dog who wanders in and out.
Stephen said: “In my wallet I used to carry pictures of my kids slotted into the side. I used to fold over the money in my wallet, I still do.
“One night I was working here and the money and the pictures went missing. I said to the girls who worked here – there’s three of us on the bar and money’s gone out my wallet. Two years later in a brand new wallet the pictures were back in there.”
