The phantom of the nightclub

“Nightlife never has been one of Sheffield’s strongest points,” said BBC reporter Jack Pizzey in January 1970, sounding for all the world like Eric Idle from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He’s reporting for Nationwide (think a 60s version of The One Show) and not trying particularly hard to hide his disdain for the Steel City. Standing outside a fish and chip shop, the condescension goes on. “But now there really is rather more to Sheffield after hours than just six pennorth of chips,” he continues. “There’s a real-life, full-blooded nightclub.”

As the black and white film cuts to shots of young women gyrating on a dance floor, Pizzey goes on to list the club’s attractions as a “go-go room” (“the perfect place to shake off the Sheffield blues,” he adds, just to twist the knife even further), a full-service restaurant for long meals and a steak bar for short ones, and a casino. But that isn’t all Sheffield’s new club has to offer. “It’s also got a ghost,” says Pizzey with a perfectly pronounced flourish.

It seems like most of the staff of the nightclub have witnessed this ghost at one time or another. “Big Derek”, a 6ft 4in, 20-stone bouncer, looks terrified as he tells Pizzey a “foggy, grey shape”, 7ft tall, appeared in front of him. “I was very, very frightened,” he says. Reenie says she was in the restaurant when it came up behind and pushed her, while chef Vittorio says it sneaked into his changing room and threw his clothes around. Pizzey doesn’t identify the nightclub by name, but online sleuths in Sheffield have revealed it as The Cavendish Club on Bank Street, which later became Cairo Jax, Romeo and Juliet’s and Corporation. For the last 20 years, it’s been a Job Centre.

Looking for answers about the nightclub ghost, I meet Adrian Finney at Leah’s Yard. Over the last three years, Finney has become the go-to guy when it comes to the supernatural in Sheffield. Dressed in a black jacket with bright orange pumpkins all over it, he certainly looks the part. He’s here to do one of his regular Friday night ghost tours of the city centre but has agreed to talk to me about the ghost before he starts.

Before Covid, Adrian, 43, was working as a primary school teacher. He’s always had an interest in folklore and the supernatural, but assumed it would remain just that: a hobby. However, during the longueurs of the lockdowns, he started researching local ghost stories and, in May 2022, put on his first tour. Three and a half years later he’s now a full-time tour guide working across multiple cities, and the author of seven books. 

“No, I’ve never heard of dinosaur ghosts,” says Finney as he sits down, answering a question that someone shouted at him as he walked through the pub. Now speaking to me, he says there are lots of stories about animal ghosts, so maybe dino ghosts exist too? Reports of a huge black dog at Bunting Nook near Graves Park (thought to be one of the most haunted roads in Sheffield) are said by some to be a “Black Shuck”, a ghostly hound which roams the countryside and coastline of East Anglia. But Sheffield is obviously nowhere near East Anglia, so he actually believes it’s probably a “Church Grim”, the ghost of a dog that was buried in the churchyard to guard it against the Devil. “As you can tell, I really like folklore,” he says.

The Cavendish Club was Sheffield’s first proper nightclub. Opened in 1966, the club was highly exclusive and there was a long waiting list to become a member. However, right from it opening, people started reporting seeing strange things. Multiple staff members described seeing the really tall, gaunt figure Big Derek saw. This spirit would apparently make mischief after hours in the club by spinning the roulette wheels in an otherwise deserted casino. Other staff working in the morning reported seeing the figure of a man in a flat cap “walking around looking really angry”.

The Cavendish management were reportedly so worried that they got a local medium in to investigate. The medium said he had communed with the angry man and found out he was called Mr Fox from Attercliffe, who had died six months previously. He said the apparition had told he was “looking for the shop with the three bullseye windows”, concluding that Mr Fox was trying to get one last pint in his favourite pub and getting increasingly annoyed that he wasn’t able to find it. At the end of his report, Jack Pizzey suggests that Mr Fox could in fact be the “elderly, unswinging, flat-hatted, disapproving spirit of Sheffield’s past.”

After the medium, the club went a step further and organised a full exorcism. The 8 January 1970 edition of The Stage reports that after initial reports were treated as the product of “over-vivid imaginations”, the nightclub began to take the issue more seriously when it started causing staffing issues. A waitress who asked whether she should serve “the man in the grey suit sitting by himself at the corner table”, only to be told there was no one sat there, became frightened and ran away, never to return. According to The Stage, after the exorcism was completed, the priest who had conducted it said he would be “surprised if there was any further trouble experienced at the club”.

Last Halloween, Finney actually visited the Job Centre for one of their work social events. They told him that people still see things from time to time, including figures both tall and short, and a spectral purple minidress in an upstairs room which would have been the dance floor when it was Cairo Jax. As to whether he believes the stories he hears, he’s agnostic. “I’m a storyteller and a folklorist,” he says. “I’m not here to tell people ghosts are real or not. That’s for them to decide.”

Finney runs several tours a week with his company Strange Britain, as well as special true crime events on Valentine’s Day, Ghost Train tours on the Penistone Line, and, most recently, a “Voyage for the Damned” tour on a narrowboat on the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal. When I ask him why his tours are so popular, he says he thinks ghost stories tell us something about ourselves. “Places, as much as they are built on historic facts and figures, are built on stories,” he says. “As a species we have gathered in the dark to hear stories like these for thousands of years. I think there must be something deep inside us which yearns for them in some way. There is power in a story.”

Sheffield Hallam University’s Centre for Contemporary Legend is one of the only academic groups researching folklore in the UK. Earlier this year they set up a National Folklore Survey to capture an accurate snapshot of the folklore of multicultural England. The first results, which were publicised this week, reveal that one in three adults believe in ghosts. However, of those who say they have had an experience they couldn’t explain, almost a fifth have never told anyone about it, even family and close friends.

Dr David Clarke, the leader of the survey team, said when he began researching folklore in the 80s, the only local book on the subject was the Ghost Hunters' Guide to Sheffield by Valerie Salim. However, in that book the Cavendish Club story was nowhere to be seen, suggesting there are many more of these stories out there, just waiting to be found again. “Occasionally somebody will dig something like this out of the archive,” he says. “The local memory of it had faded but the BBC film has given it new life.”

Clarke added that the story of Mr Fox looking for his last pint is a fairly classic example of a common folkloric motif known as the “restless dead”. These poor souls may be people who have "died a bad death", done wrong or left buried treasure somewhere, and are condemned to linger in the mortal world. However, like Finney, Clarke says he isn’t particularly interested in trying to find out if the claims people make are true or false, preferring to concentrate on collecting and documenting the stories and asking what they mean to people. “We like to be scared and tell stories,” he says. “That is the essence of folklore.”

Feeling like I need to take a look at The Cavendish Club myself, I take a walk down to Bank Street on my lunch break. The Cavendish Court Job Centre Plus is now a large open plan office about as far removed from the hedonistic scenes of the past as you can imagine. But when I tell the staff why I’m here their eyes light up. “There’s definitely still spirits in this building,” says one of the Mitie security guards.

The receptionist agrees. She tells me “Big Kev”, another security guard who isn’t working today, says there is an “angry man” who still haunts the bowels of the building. Maybe Phantasmic Mr Fox is still here after all.

To find out more about Adrian Finney's Strange Britain ghost tours, click here. To find out more about the Centre for Contemporary Legend, click here.

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