The Hancock Mummy

A museum full of the very old and the very dead tends to gather stories, and the Great North Museum: Hancock, by the Haymarket, is no exception. After hours, tradition holds, the galleries are not quite still: a figure is said to move among the cases at night, and the tale ties her to the museum's Egyptian mummy.

The museum genuinely holds a significant collection of Egyptian antiquities, including a mummy, at its Barras Bridge home. The night-time apparition, however, is a modern reported tradition of the ghost-walk variety rather than any documented event.

The recurring motif is a figure — usually described as a woman — seen moving through the galleries after closing, associated by tradition with the mummy. Reports are anecdotal and modern.

Newcastle civic-quarter ghost tradition. Status: reported/weird lore; modern, anecdotal.