Endeavour Pub

At the end of Grape Lane (see story elsewhere), opposite the old Infirmary building is The Endeavour, a red bricked pub, that in times gone by was the meeting place for Whitby's Royal Ancient Order of Buffaloes. Originally named the Imperial Inn, a change of name was decided after the First World War. The story connected to the pub links the golden haired beauty whose ghost haunts Grape Lane and whose tragic life ended in the Infirmary in the lane, barely an hour after her hair had caught fire in the local bakery. The Infirmary building can be seen from the front window of the pub. The 'Burning Girl' strayed from her usual haunts over to the Endeavour public house. In the 1930s, a fire started one night while the pub was closed, it is rumoured an ember from the fire fell onto a rug and smouldered away while the family lay sleeping upstairs. However, the ghost of Mary Clarke, the 'Burning Girl' apparently awoke the mother of the family; the mother dreamed or had a premonition that a 'beautiful blonde-haired girl' was shaking her, and somehow warning her to wake up and leave her bedroom to save herself and her children. The pub has been rebuilt twice since, although there are stories that when a fire is built up in the fireplace, logs will become displaced and some claim to have heard a ghostly sigh of relief that there was no fire this time. In January 1991, the Whitby Gazette claimed that The Endeavour Inn on Church Street is haunted by a former landlady who carries on her old habit of turning off switches. The landlord at the time, Trevor Pearson, hasn’t seen her although several others have. “I didn’t believe it at first when the former owner told me but it does happen, you can get up on a morning and find things turned off that you knew you had left on, like the the bar switches or the cooling system. But apart from that she is a very friendly ghost."