York is a serious contender for most haunted city in England If not the world. Certainly every pub seems to have a ghost, legend or piece of folklore associated with it. And during the busy tourist season, there are no end of ghost tours across the city – easily identified by the histrionic gents in Victorian dress herding unsuspecting groups of visitors down lonely back-streets…
Yet the stories tell us much about York – and England’s – troubled history. The restless dead are often plague victims, Catholics, traitors, deviants, madmen and outlaws or their victims; men and women at the boundaries of society who represented ‘otherness’.
The ghosts stretch back as far as York’s history: the spectres of Roman legionnaires have been seen across a number of sites. Modern York has its own folk-tradition in the form of black cats – 23 little statues on walls and rooftops across the city. No-one has ever seen all of them however, and it’s rumoured that if anyone did, they’d become cursed for the rest of their days…
In one of the most extremely haunted cities in the world York is The Black Swan it’s no surprise that one of its oldest pubs, built early 1500’s, is haunted. There are thought to be many spectres in residence at the hotel, but the most noted of which and the most talked about is tormented soul of a man and many guests have reported seeing a young girl wandering the corridors of the hotel, moving furniture around and walking up and down staircases in the small hours of the night.
What will we find there…