Haunted York E-Book

Rupert Matthews

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 162

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

This is a terrifying collection of true-life tales of ghosts, poltergeists and spirits of all kinds in the streets, buildings and graveyards of York. Drawing on historical and contemporary sources, Haunted York contains a chilling range of ghostly phenomena. From the medieval stonemason who haunts York Minster to a re-incarnation mystery at St Mary's Church, the spectres of King's Manor, Micklegate Bar and Exhibition Square and the many spirits to be found in the city's public houses, this phenomenal gathering of ghostly goings-on is bound to captivate anyone interested in the supernatural history of York.

Leseprobe

HAUNTED

YORK

The author, Rupert Matthews.

HAUNTED

YORK

RUPERT MATTHEWS

First published 2009

Reprinted 2011, 2012

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2014

All rights reserved

© Rupert Matthews, 2009, 2014

The right of Rupert Matthews to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5985 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Introduction

Tour of Haunted York

INTRODUCTION

The ancient city of York is one of the most magnificent cities in England. It is also one of the most haunted.

Nobody is entirely certain how many ghosts lurk among the ancient walls of York; there are certainly dozens of them, maybe over a hundred. Some ghosts stalk the streets and chambers of the city with alarming frequency, others appear only once or twice a year and a few appear so infrequently that some researchers believe they may have left this mortal world for good. The ghosts come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. There are ancient ghosts, modern ghosts, male ghosts, female ghosts and ghosts so elusive that nobody knows anything very much about them at all.

But be they Roman soldiers, a Tudor gentleman, Grey Lady or enigmatic footsteps in empty rooms, these ghosts all have one thing in common: the city of York itself. It is a city with a character all of its own, moulded and shaped over more than 2,000 years of history.

There was some sort of a settlement here in Celtic times, but York enters history in AD 71 when the Romans built a fortress here and named it Eboracum. Over the years the name has shifted and altered, but it remains rooted in that first designation. The modern name of York is derived from the ‘orac’ element of the Roman name, coming to us by way of the Viking Jorvik.

Amazingly there are still remnants of Roman Eboracum to be seen. The western corner of the fortress was protected by a massive, multi-angular buttress which still stands in Museum Street, while the museum itself contains fine statues, coins and other remains. There are even Roman ghosts still tramping through the city as their human counterparts once did in life – we shall come to their haunts almost as soon as we enter the city.

On the whole, however, York is a medieval city. It is dominated by the vast York Minster at one end of the city and the powerful Clifford’s Tower at the other. When the Norman conqueror, King William I, came here in 1069 he casually burned down the Anglo-Viking city that had defied his right to rule. Then he ordered the construction of a circuit of walls that surrounded 263 acres of land. The walls seen today date mostly from later centuries, but they stand on the foundations laid by William.

The Normans also built a minster, but it was torn down in 1220 and the construction of the present church begun. Work went on for 250 years to produce the magnificent mass of masonry that today dominates the city centre, and which contains one of Europe’s finest collections of medieval stained glass. We shall meet that glass again for it is linked to one of York’s phantoms. While the cathedral was being constructed, other teams of workmen were erecting the forbidding fortress of Clifford’s Tower at the southern end of the medieval city. That too has its spectres that we shall meet in this book.

The most pervasive remnant of the Middle Ages to survive in York is less tangible, but far more influential. The street layout of the city took its present form during this period, picking up names from Viking, English and Norman eras as well as more recent periods. The streets are usually thronged with tourists, and always with locals, but there remains space among them for the ghosts and phantoms who like to wander their old haunts.

Though the street layout remains from medieval times, most of the old houses and shops vanished long ago, to be replaced by imposing Georgian residences. When Victoria came to the throne, she brought with her railways and a booming industrialisation that both left their mark on the city. So important was the rail industry to York, and vice versa, that the National Rail Museum is now located here, while old factories and workshops in various stages of decay and renovation abound.

Through all these ages, the city of York has endured. It has been burned to the ground more than once, ravaged by invading armies and yet always it has managed to rise again to greater glories. No less enduring are the ghosts that throng its walls and streets.

It is perhaps best to start a tour of ghostly York with the oldest and most famous of all the ghosts that lurk in this ancient city.

Rupert Matthews, 2009

TOUROF HAUNTED YORK

A Roman in the Cellar of the Treasurer’s House

The Treasurer’s House takes its name from its earlier use as the home and office complex belonging to the Treasurer of York Minster. It is appropriate, therefore, that it lies in the shadow of the Minster. The house stands in Minster Yard at the northern end of College Street, just east of the Minster. It is now owned by the National Trust and is open most days of the year.

In the thirteenth century, when the house was first built, the Minster was a monastery owning vast estates as well as being the mother church for all of northern England. Vast sums of money poured in from the farms, mills and weirs that the Minster owned, then flowed out again to give relief to the poor, educate churchmen and as tribute to Rome. The Treasurer’s House was a hive of activity as teams of monks, clerks and support staff pored over the accounts, counted the money and kept meticulous records. The house has been much altered since those days, and today almost nothing of the medieval structure can be seen above ground. Below ground level, however, the thirteenth-century house is almost intact. The foundations and cellars are pretty much as they were when the monks worked there. And it is in the cellars that the ghosts lurk.

Among those who lived or worked in the Treasurer’s House, the cellars had always had something of an odd reputation. Nobody was ever willing to talk to outsiders about what went on down there, but many people knew that it was not a place to linger alone. One person who did not know this was a young apprentice plumber by the name of Harry Martindale. It was 1953 and the Treasurer’s House was having modern central heating installed. Harry was tasked with checking over the joints of pipes installed by his more experienced colleagues, which was why he went down into the cellar – alone.

Harry was intent on his work when the incident began. He was up a short ladder so that he could check piping that was running along just below the cellar ceiling. He heard a muffled trumpet blast, but took no notice. He thought perhaps a band was practising nearby. The trumpet came again, nearer this time. Again Harry ignored it. Then a horse stepped out of the solid wall right in front of Harry’s eyes. Thunderstruck and terrified in equal measure, Harry fell off his ladder and tumbled to the floor. As he scrambled to get away from the figure of the horse, Harry could not tear his eyes from the apparition.

The Treasurer’s House is open to the public and was the scene of one of the classic and best documented ghost sightings in York.

The horse continued to emerge from the wall into the cellar. On its back was a man in a long cloak and a helmet with a feather crest on it. Behind the horseman came a dozen or more men on foot. As Harry gradually recovered from his shock, he was deeply relieved to see that the ghosts paid him not the slightest bit of attention but marched on as if he were not there. The men on foot carried large, round shields with long spears slung over their shoulders and short swords hanging from their belts. They had what looked like kilts, dyed a dark green colour, and mail shirts. One of them carried a trumpet that was long, straight and battered as if from long years of hard use.

As the men marched across the cellar, Harry realised that he could not see them from the knees downward. Then the horsemen came to a spot where a hole had been dug into the floor. Harry could now see the horse’s legs almost down to the hooves. They carried shaggy hair around the fetlocks, similar to those on a modern shire horse. As the men on foot passed the hole, Harry could see their legs down to the ankles. They were wearing leather sandals attached by straps that ran criss-cross fashion up to the knees. The men marched on, giving out an aura of dejection and despondency, until they vanished into the wall opposite.

As soon as they were gone, Harry leaped to his feet and bolted up the stairs to the ground floor. Running desperately to find his foreman, Harry bumped into the curator of the museum that occupies the house. The curator took one look at Harry’s pale face and said, ‘Oh. You’ve seen the Romans then.’ He took Harry aside, calmed him down and then asked him to dictate a detailed description of what he had seen. The curator then showed Harry other accounts of the ghosts in the cellar.

The descriptions given of the ghostly soldiers seen in the cellar of the Treasurer’s House match those of the later Roman Imperial Army of about AD 350. The figure shown here is typical of the period.

Most of these other reports match the experience of young Harry Martindale almost precisely. One that is slightly different was recounted by a young lady attending a fancy dress party back in the days when the house was a private residence. During the party the guests were given time to explore the house. The lady chose to venture down the stairs to the cellar. She went to enter one of the various rooms, but suddenly a man stepped out from the shadows to bar the open doorway. He was dressed in a mail shirt and had on his head a plumed helmet, just like those seen by Harry and others. The figure said nothing, but glared at the girl and held his spear out to make it clear that she was not welcome. After hesitating for a few seconds, the woman retreated back up the stairs. She asked her host who the curmudgeonly guest in Roman armour might be, but there was no guest wearing Roman armour. The incident is usually put down as a sighting of the ghosts, though on this occasion the spectre did not behave as usual.

The description of the figures given by Harry was rather more detailed than those recounted by other witnesses and has led to some detailed investigations. Excavations have shown that a Roman road runs underneath the Treasurer’s House, leading from what had been a gate in the fortress walls to the east toward the headquarters building that stood where the Minster nave is now. The ghosts follow the route of this former road precisely. Even more interestingly, the surface of the road is about eighteen inches below the cellar floor, and some three inches lower than the bottom of the hole that was there in Harry’s day. The ghosts are, of course, seen only from the knees up so it would seem that they are marching along the surface of the old road that existed when they were alive.

The description given by Harry of men in mail shirts with round shields does not match that of Roman soldiers shown in most books. However, the armour thought of as typical for Romans, with large oblong shields and armour made up of strips of metal, was used only by the legionaries who formed the backbone of the Roman army. Rather more numerous were the auxiliaries recruited from tribes within the Empire and, in later times, the mercenaries recruited from tribes outside the Empire.

The description given by Harry matches most closely auxiliaries of the later third or fourth centuries. This was a time when the Roman Empire was in decline with a collapsing economy and decreasing population. The climate had been rather warmer than it is today for around 300 years. However, it was now cooling, making it more difficult to grow crops, especially in Britain. And the barbarians were becoming bolder and more aggressive. The collapse of Roman power in Britain was not far off. No wonder the ghosts seem so dejected.

The Romans are not the only ghosts to lurk in the Treasurer’s House. In January 1674 it was the town house of the Aislaby family of Fountains Hall. Staying with them was a Miss Mary Maillorie, a relative who was engaged to marry Mr Jonathan Jennings of York. On 10 January the Aislabys and the young Mary went to attend a ball given by the Duke of Buckingham – we shall be meeting him again later – at which Jonathan was also present. Unsurprisingly, Mary spent most of the evening with Jonathan. When the Aislabys decided to go home, they could find young Mary nowhere. They left a burly servant with a lantern to search for her and escort her home through the dark streets, then went home to bed.

According to Mary’s account given when she turned up at the Treasurer’s House next morning, she had missed the servant and been escorted home by Jonathan and his manservant. When they had arrived, the house was dark and silent. Nobody answered their knocks. Jonathan and his man had then led Mary to the home of his female relative where she spent the night. George Aislaby, the head of the family, suspected the worst and despite the fact that the servant and relative backed up Mary’s account, he challenged Jonathan Jennings to a duel to restore the young woman’s honour.

The fight took place on the fields that then stretched out from Bootham Bar. It was a brief affair that ended with George Aislaby being wounded. The injury did not seem serious, and the man was helped home by his second while Jennings likewise went home. Unfortunately the wound got infected and George Aislaby died. Realising that he might be in danger of prosecution for murder, Aislaby hurried to see the Duke of Buckingham. The nobleman lent Jennings a coach and wrote him a letter of introduction and explanation to King Charles II. Jennings hurried off to court where he explained the affair and received a royal pardon for the death.

Meanwhile, George Aislaby was laid out in the room where he died, then carried to the Minster for burial. His ghost remains in the house, being seen from time to time standing quietly in a downstairs room. He is generally not seen for very long, fading from view almost as soon as he is noticed.

The Ghost Child at No. 5 College Street

After visiting the Treasurer’s House, leave by way of the main entrance, bear right through Minster Yard and then bear left into College Street. Look for house No. 5. This house is a private residence and is not open to the public. But the ghost is well known because the family that lived there in the 1930s were not only happy to talk about it in public, but called in a medium to investigate.

The haunting began when the parents thought that they heard one of their children calling out from their upstairs bedrooms, but when they went up, they found the children all peacefully asleep. This happened several times and much puzzled the parents. Then one of the children mentioned hearing the sounds of another child crying, while a second child said that she had sometimes seen a little girl skipping about upstairs.

Convinced that they were dealing with a ghostly child, the parents called in a medium to investigate. The psychic claimed to make contact with the little girl, who was aged seven at the time of her death. The medium passed on a heart-rending story from the spirit of the girl. Back in the seventeenth century, plague had hit York. One of the adults at No. 5 College Street, had contracted the disease and the house was put into quarantine. Over the next few days the awful disease worked its way through the family, killing all but the little girl. Alone and afraid in the house of the dead, she had retreated to her bedroom upstairs where she had herself died, though whether from the plague or starvation was unclear.

Investigators tried to check out the story. York had certainly suffered visitations of the plague more than once in the seventeenth century. It was certainly the practice of the City Council to impose quarantine on any house where a person fell sick with the plague. The usual routine was for a red cross and the words ‘Lord have mercy on our souls’ to be painted on the front door, which was then locked and barricaded from the outside. Guards were posted both to stop persons from entering or leaving the affected house and to pass in food and water to those incarcerated within. Sadly records have not survived detailing who lived at No. 5 College Street during the plague years, so it is impossible to show whether or not the story passed on by the medium was true.

Murder, Betrayal and Suicide at St William’s College

Also in College Street is St William’s College after which the road is named. The first ghost here is a gentle, friendly soul. She takes the form of an elderly lady wearing a long dress with apron and shawl who sits on the front step as if waiting for a friend to come by. She smiles and nods at passers-by. Unfortunately nobody knows who she is, when she lived nor for whom she has been waiting all these decades.

St William’s College was built to be a residence for priests serving the various chantry chapels in the Minster. One of the ghosts dates back to this early period.

The other ghost here has a history almost as tragic – albeit entirely self-inflicted – as that of the little girl at No. 5. In the days of Henry VIII in the early sixteenth century, before the Reformation swept away the Minster monastery, the college provided rooms to clergy and clerks working at the nearby religious house. For some reason that has never been properly explained, one of these clerks incurred the wrath of two local brothers. The men decided to murder the clerk.