Some years ago, a barman in what was then known as Shefflins, was standing behind the counter chatting casually with a man who appeared to be an ordinary customer at the bar. Their conversation was unremarkable – the sort of brief exchange that happens dozens of times in a working night.

Partway through, another member of staff approached and quietly asked who he was talking to.

“The man at the bar,” the barman replied.

But when his colleague looked over, there was no one there.

Puzzled, the barman insisted someone had been standing in front of him only moments before. No other staff member, and no customer in the pub, had noticed anyone approach or leave the bar.

Roughly an hour later, while moving about the premises, the barman happened to glance at a framed photograph hanging on the wall. To his shock, he recognised the face immediately – it was the man he had been speaking to earlier that night.

On asking about the photograph, he was told it depicted a former regular of the pub who had died three years previously.

Only then did the implication sink in: the person he believed he had been serving and chatting with had not been a living customer at all, but the image of someone long dead — a man whose memory, at least, still lingered in his old place at the bar.