Apparitions & Hauntings

http://www.theparanormalguide.com/blog/the-roman-ghosts-of-york

In 1953, a young plumber's apprentice was working in the Treasurer's House, York, England, when he had the scare of a lifetime. As he worked in the cellar, almost two dozen Roman Soldiers appeared from one wall, crossed the cellar and disappeared into the opposite wall.

Treasurer's House
Up until 1547, the 'Treasurer's House' was the home for the Treasurer's of York Minster, an incredibly important job, essentially looking after the finances of the Churches in the area . . .



. . . in 1893, into came the hands of Frank Green, who restored the house (it was slowly becoming dilapidated) into what was believed the original condition. Green used the house as a display for his collection of antiques and other valuables, and turned each room into a host for his collections of different eras, and different periods in history. In 1930 Green handed the Treasurer's House and its contents to the National Trust, who continue to hold it to this day.

In 1953 the Treasurer's House was up for a bit of a re-haul, the old heating system was getting a bit long in the tooth, so a new one was being installed. Eight or nine engineers, technicians and labourers were in the house, working on setting in the new system, but it was up to young, 18 year old plumbing apprentice Harry Martindale, to go into the cellar and cut a hole for a pipe to pass through.

Harry entered the dark and rather gloomy cellar, and found a nice level excavated trench in which to set the feet of his ladder, to provide a solid platform from which to work. He placed his light on the ground, and climbed the ladder in order to reach the ceiling above, and started on his work.



After a short while he heard an odd sound pass through the cellar. Harry at first took this to be music being played by the workers upstairs, but as the music grew louder he began to have his doubts. Soon he could tell it was not music, but rather just one or two notes being played over and over again, and as they grew louder he could pinpoint the source as the wall he was propped up against. The sound became deafening, but that was the least of his worries. As Harry looked down to his side, in order to better ascertain what was happening, he was startled to see a plumed helmet come into view. Getting a slightly better look, well as good as he could in his startled state, he made out a full Roman soldier dressed in military uniform pass by him and continue across the room.

What was most odd about the situation was that the soldier appeared to be walking on his knees, his legs disappearing into the floor of the cellar. However, as the soldier came to the excavated trench, his full legs came into view. The soldier was, in fact, walking at the level of the old Roman Road that had been excavated in the cellar of the house! Soon the Roman had passed through the opposite wall, but Harry could hear more sounds. A horse came into view next, and sitting atop it was another soldier, in full military uniform, but this time holding a round shield on his left arm. The horse made its way across the room and also disappeared into the opposite wall.

Next up came more soldiers on foot, walking in pairs. By this time Harry was absolutely terrified and did not count exactly how many there were, but he knows there were at least twenty, and probably a lot more. The first soldier on the left of this lot was the one playing the trumpet or horn – the sound Harry had originally heard. The soldiers were heard talking to each other in whispers, and their faces seemed to be sad or tired. The uniforms, from what he could tell, seemed to be covered in mud. All were armed either with spears or swords. They all looked as solid as any other person.

As you can imagine, Harry was in fear of his life. Here were a large number of armed soldiers, walking close by him, but he had nothing to fear. The soldiers did not take notice of Harry, they went on by as if he didn't exist to them.

Once all the soldiers had passed through the opposite wall, and Harry was certain he could hear no more approach, he made a run for it out of the cellar. When he was finally clear of the stairs leading out of the cellar he came to a stop to catch his breath. Those who saw him say he was completely white and was shaking. The elderly gentleman who was in charge of the house took one look at Harry and knew what had happened. He walked up to Harry and said 'You have seen the soldiers, haven't you?' The caretaker had seen the soldiers the previous year, but had not told anyone for fear of ridicule.

Harry left the house and did not return for at least 25 years.

Four years later another person, a new caretaker of the house, had witnessed the soldiers on the first instance, in exactly the same manor as Harry had – all walking in pairs except for one astride his horse. However, on another occasion, she saw them all a top horses, and a feeling came across her that said the horses were taking the soldiers home one last time. That was the last time the soldiers were ever seen.

Initially the description made no sense. The uniforms as Harry described them seemed completely wrong. The shields were wrong, the skirts/tunics were wrong and even the side the swords were carried on was wrong . . .

However, in the 1990's and into the 2000's, archaeological diggings of old Roman forts in the area and along Hadrians Wall (at one time the most heavily fortified border in the Roman Empire that cut across the northern point of Roman Britain) have uncovered many physical remains of the Romans time in the area. Amongst them, parts of uniforms belonging to Roman auxiliary soldiers, that exactly match the descriptions given by Harry Martindale, nearly half a century earlier, down to the colour of the leathers and the size and shape of the shields.

Harry could not have had this knowledge as no one had this knowledge. Harry Martindale was no longer known as a fraud or a liar.

This little story is from a larger article by the man who looks after the ravens at the Tower of London:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6228673/If-Tower-Londons-raven-master-loses-birds-legend-Britain-turn-dust.html

". . . One evening, I was shepherding the ravens to bed when I noticed a small girl sitting on the bench by their enclosure, watching me closely. Aged about ten, she had mousey brown hair and was wearing modern clothes. Since the Tower had shut, she wasn’t likely to be some stranded visitor and I didn’t recognise her as one of the residents’ children.

I’ve often felt a bit uncomfortable in this part of the Tower, but I try not to dwell on that fact.

Unsure what to say, I asked politely if she could move, because the ravens would be unwilling to enter the enclosure if she didn’t. She looked up at me and smiled slightly, but said nothing. I wondered if perhaps there was something wrong with her. Anyway, I thought I’d deal with the ravens first, so I unlocked Munin and Jubilee’s enclosure, which takes just a moment. When I turned back, the girl had disappeared. It would have been impossible for her to have walked past me without my noticing, but she was gone. Vanished.

I was so unnerved I went to look for her, searching the entire Inner Ward, an area enclosed by a massive wall and thirteen towers. I found nothing, and to this day, no one knows anything about that little girl."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6422933/These-children-invisible-friends-really-existed.html  Quoting:

My three-year-old daughter, Rosalyn, is happily chatting away as we walk through countryside near our home. She is telling me about her morning at pre-school, the games she played and how she wants pasta for dinner, flitting from one subject to another in her usual excitable babble. ‘I’ve got a new best friend,’ she announces. ‘How lovely,’ I say. ‘What’s her name?’ ‘Tilly. She lives in our house,’ comes the reply. ‘She’s my friend, and she’s dead. Alex is my friend, too. He lives here. He died. His mummy and grandad died, too. We play babies together,’ she announces, before moving on to the merits of strawberry ice cream over chocolate.

There is something about the matter-of-fact way she tells me this, with that earnest naivety of a toddler, that makes my blood run cold. We don’t know anyone called Tilly or Alex, nor have I ever talked to Rosalyn about death or the afterlife. The most she knows about this subject is when her grandparents’ cat was put to sleep, so I have no idea where this is coming from.

. . . But this isn’t the first time Rosalyn has spooked me. When she was 18 months old, I remember how she pointed to an outside cellar door and was adamant she could see sheep. I dismissed it at the time, but she kept shouting: ‘Look, Mummy, sheep, sheep!’ A few weeks later, we walked past again and she announced with a sad face: ‘Sheep gone now, Mummy.’ Although aware our house is built on the site of old sheep farming cottages, I put it to the back of my mind. After all, Rosalyn was just grappling with the rudiments of speech; she could have meant anything. But now she’s three, and much more articulate and focused. And she continues to tell me about Tilly and Alex.

. . . I decided to do some digging, in an effort to convince myself that there is nothing to Rosalyn’s imaginings. I wish I hadn’t. Census records for 1861 show there was a ten-year-old boy called Alexander Turner living here. And records for 30 years later, in 1891, list a Matilda Oke, aged 20. Records are patchy from this time, so it’s very likely that Matilda was living here when she was much younger.

Although I am struggling to convince myself that Alex, Tilly and the visiting flock of sheep are nothing more than the creation of a toddler’s vivid imagination, a recent study reveals that one in five Britons claims to have experienced the presence of a ghost. I did some research and discovered that there are many rational parents in the same position as me — with children like the little boy, played by Haley Joel Osment, in the film The Sixth Sense — who say they ‘see dead people’ . . .

Ghosts in Ancient History

Daily Mail, 26th December 2019:

What is the first known depiction of a ghost?

The concept of a ghost has existed since ancient times. It’s based on the idea that a person’s spirit exists separately from his or her body, and may continue to exist after they die. Ancient societies adopted funeral rituals as a way of ensuring the dead person’s spirit would not return.

In Mesopotamia, it was believed that after death, a spiritual entity known as a Gidim was created, which maintained the identity of the deceased and travelled on to the land of the dead. A Gidim would return to haunt the living if proper attention had not been paid to funeral rites or an unlawful act resulted in the person’s death. This concept is comparable to the shades of the deceased in the Underworld in Greek and Roman mythology.

The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh of 2100 BC, the first great story cycle, tells of the death of King Gilgamesh’s companion, Enkidu. It describes the underworld adventures of his ghost, and its return to the world when Gilgamesh breaks a hole in the earth.

In Egyptian mythology, dead spirits visited the Hall of Truth where they were judged by the god Osiris. If the burial rites had not been observed, or some great wrong had been committed in life, the akh (spirit of the dead) was allowed to return to Earth to redress the wrong.

Greek writers such as Homer, Horace, Livy and Plutarch made reference to ghostly phenomena.

In the first century AD, the great Roman statesman Pliny the Younger related the first haunted house story. He told of how Athenodorus, a Greek philosopher of the 1st century BC, rented a large house at a reasonable price. This was because the house was haunted by the spectre of an old, bearded man. The ghost, bound with chains, led Athenodorus to a courtyard, where it vanished. Athenodorus marked the spot, and the next day dug up the skeleton of an old man, bound with chains. After the skeleton was given a proper burial, the ghost was said to have never haunted that house again.

In the 3rd century AD, the Greek platonic scholar Porphyry wrote to the Egyptian sage Anebo outlining all the ghostly phenomena he was investigating, including prophecy, fire-walking, levitation and poltergeist phenomena.

Martha Reed, Hay-on-Wye, Brecknockshire.

Eastern State Penitentiary is a place that is said to be haunted by the ghosts of prisoners that perished because of the horrible inhumane conditions.
ESP was based on the Quaker's idea of prison reform and punishment through solitude and reflection. The outside of the building looks like a castle, when you enter through the front gate it is truely a house of horrors.
It is scariest, saddest place that I ever visited.
Solitary confinement, even for short periods of time, will eventually drive even the strongest of men insane.



https://mysteriousfacts.com/prisoners-haunting-eastern-state-penitentiary/#Stories-Of-The-Haunted-Eastern-State-Penitentiary

Several paranormal investigators and researchers visit the location to find evidence of the haunting with most stating that there is a lot of paranormal activity on the prison grounds.

There are many stories about eerie sounds that have been heard by staff, guards, and prisoners as well as visitors which date back to the 1940s, making this one of the most haunted locations in the world.

One of the biggest paranormal incidences that occurred in the Eastern State Penitentiary was to a locksmith called Gary Johnson. He was working to restore Cell Block 4 by removing a 140-year-old lock from a locked cell door.
As he tried to open the cell door, he describes there being a powerful force that paralyzed him. He also stated that he felt an out-of-body moment when he was drawn towards the cell which was bursting with negative energy with hundreds of anguished faces and distorted forms appearing on the cell walls.

There are those who believe that Johnson opened up a gateway for the ghosts and spirits who were locked in the cell. When interviewed years later, the man would still shudder in fear at the thought of the cell room in Cell Block 4.

A place like that ^ could probably play scary tricks on the mind. But if it really is haunted, are souls somehow trapped there or is the explanation that it is some kind of psychic recording that plays back in certain circumstances?

I am not sure what you mean by a psychic recording that plays back under certain circumstances.
Like the recording only “plays” to the people that have some sort of gift of clairvoyancy or rather the phenomenon is triggered by the mood/emotion of what is going on at the time.
As you said, the mind can certainly play tricks
As to what is real and what is an illusion.
In a scary place like that.

Sary wrote:I am not sure what you mean by a psychic recording that plays back under certain circumstances.
Like the recording only “plays” to the people that have some sort of gift of clairvoyancy or rather the phenomenon is triggered by the mood/emotion of what is going on at the time.

Yeah, it could be a combination of circumstances and the sensitivity of the witness that triggers a psychic recording. If the ghost seems to be ignoring the witness and going through some kind of routine then that's a possibilty. It's a paranormal theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Tape

Daily Mail, 21st September 2020:

Was an exorcism once conducted at Sandringham, the Queen’s country house in Norfolk?

According to royal biographer Kenneth Rose, a service was held in a room at Sandringham to quell an unquiet spirit, though it was not an exorcism.

It has long been claimed that Sandringham is haunted. In 1982, Prince Charles and an aide had an uncanny experience when looking for some old prints in the library. They became extremely cold and felt someone was standing behind them. They turned round to find no one there. The hands of a clock have been reported to move independently of the mechanism and books have been witnessed flying off shelves.

In his diary entry of January 2nd, 2001, Rose recorded that Prue Penn, the Queen Mother’s lady-in-waiting, told him that the previous summer the Queen had invited her to attend a small service conducted by the local parson in one of Sandringham’s rooms. The other person present was the Queen Mother. Some of the servants had complained that the room was haunted and did not want to work in it. The parson walked around the ground floor and did, indeed, feel a ‘restlessness’ in this room. The Queen Mother identified it as George VI’s bedroom during his final months. The parson held Holy Communion and special prayers, not to drive out an evil spirit, but to bring tranquillity.

According to Rose, the parson felt the violent death of Princess Diana, who had been born on the Sandringham estate, may have stimulated the unrest.

Michelle Bradford, Lincoln.

http://rockandrollgarage.com/what-is-black-sabbaths-tony-iommi-opinion-about-ghosts-and-god/  Quoting:

Legendary Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi is considered the creator of Heavy Metal and the band was often connected with the occult due to their heavy sound and dark lyrics. That even atraccted occultists and witches to their audience at the beginning. In an interview with Classic Rock magazine back in 2019, the musician gave his opinion about ghosts and God . . .

“Ghosts exist. I know because I’ve seen several. It wasn’t just me, all of us saw the one at Clearwell Castle [in Gloucestershire, England]. Sabbath had hired the place out, so there was nobody else there. We were rehearsing in the dungeons. Coming up the stairs we saw this figure go into the armoury. Ozzy and I asked: 'Who’s that?' We went into the armoury and nobody was there. But the room had just one door and no windows. We looked everywhere, including under the table in case someone was winding us up, but there was nobody. It was all very peculiar.”

“I believe in God – of sorts. That statement may be a shock, given the subject matter of so many of Black Sabbath’s songs, but I believe in a god – whatever god it is. I definitely believe in angels, because three of them saved my life when I was in my late teens. I’d just passed my driving test and was in my sports car driving on a dual carriageway. I had just overtaken another car when two tyres blew out, I went off the road, the MG flipped over and I hit a tree. I passed out, and when I awoke I smelled petrol but I managed to get out, and as I did so I saw those angels. To this day I really believe they were there; I wasn’t stoned. It’s been said that they saved me for a purpose, because I went on to invent heavy metal. And you know what? I quite like that idea.”

“The body is just a vessel. When I was much, much younger I used to astrally project. I got really into it. The first time I left my body it was quite frightening. I jumped straight back in again. The best time to do it was just before you go off to sleep. I used to do it a lot – hover about my body, looking down at myself. I tried it again some years later and was quite disappointed to find that I was no longer able.”

http://pmterrell.com/wp/2017/09/18/the-most-haunted-castle-in-ireland/ Quoting:


Leap Castle is located in County Offaly in the Midlands Region of Ireland, almost exactly midway between Dublin to the east and Galway to the west. The main castle—a simple square—was built around 1250 by the O’Bannon Clan, who was a secondary clan under the O’Carroll Clan. It is rumored to have been built on an ancient pagan ceremonial site and the land had been occupied continuously since Neolithic times. The castle was added onto in subsequent generations, adding wings, a gatehouse and other structures until the castle became a labyrinth . . .

In 1659, the castle passed from Irish hands to the English, who had colonized the island. Several generations of the Darby family lived there, including an arrogant, humorless man by the name of Jonathan Charles Darby. He married Mildred Dill (1867-1932) and fathered five children. Mildred was a writer and was very much interested in the occult and what better place for the imagination to run wild than a castle haunted by dozens murdered within its cold stone walls. She often conducted séances in attempts to reach the other side of the veil and it is believed her journey across that dark, thin line awakened the most frightening ghost of all: The Elemental.

In 1909, she reported to the Occult Review, “I was standing in the Gallery looking down at the main floor, when I felt somebody put a hand on my shoulder. The thing was about the size of a sheep. Thin, gaunt, shadowy… its face was human, to be more accurate, inhuman. Its lust in its eyes, which seemed half decomposed in black cavities, stared into mine. The horrible smell one hundred times intensified came up into my face, giving me a deadly nausea. It was the smell of a decomposing corpse.” They called this creature The Elemental and she and a number of her guests saw it several times during the decades she lived there . . .

In 1991, musician Sean Ryan and his wife purchased the castle and since then, they have lived there while they have worked on restoring the castle to its former glory. They often hear voices, doors closing and footsteps when no one else is about, and many a guest has reported the presence of a woman that touches them on the shoulder as if to get their attention. Sean prefers to call them spirits instead of ghosts, and he and his wife continue to offer private tours of the castle by appointment.

Have you ever heard of Jane Roberts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Material

The Seth Material is a collection of writing dictated by Jane Roberts to her husband from late 1963 until her death in 1984. Roberts claimed the words were spoken by a discarnate entity named Seth. The material is regarded as one of the cornerstones of New Age philosophy, and the most influential channelled text of the post-World War II "New Age" movement, other than the Edgar Cayce books and A Course in Miracles. Jon Klimo writes that the Seth books were instrumental in bringing the idea of channeling to a broad public audience.

I’ve listened to/read some of the Seth material and am not sure if Jane Roberts was truly gifted with psychic powers, possessed by a demon, or a very convincing charlatan.

I've heard of Edgar Cayce but not Jane Roberts. She and her husband seem to believe what they talk about.

I'm not sure the idea that we each create our own reality makes sense. Is the interviewer in the video subconsciously creating everything and does that mean Jane and her husband are figments of his imagination? And is the video then a figment of our imaginations? How many real people are there? You could say that every person's realities are telepathically linked with every other, but then it would be a constant competition between everyone to shape the reality.

I think Jane is probably one of those insane geniuses, influenced by the occult teachings of Madame Blavatsky.
Here she is speaking as Seth about creating our own reality.


It is remarkable the way her whole demeanor has changed. . . the accent and body language.
Her message is loud and clear. It is almost as though she is possessed.

From paranormal writer Tom Slemen on Twitter:

Friday, 1st April 2011, 4:20pm
A security guard on his way to work was walking through Liverpool Uni campus saw a girl coming towards him dressed as what looked like a Victorian maid or milk-maid, and he assumed she was into cosplay. "Very nice," he complimented the girl, "Where you off to and can I join you?" he added, and the young lady smiled coyly and he saw her eyes were of a very dark brown - almost black. She bowed her head and walked on, and the guard glanced back. There was no one there, yet the path ran straight for quite some distance and there was nowhere the young lady could have hidden.

When the guard got to his workplace, a younger colleague said, "You alright? You look dead worried over something." The older guard said, "I think I just saw a ghost," and he described the lady and her blue dress. The two guards later learned that there was indeed a ghost of a lady in blue that walked down Chatham Street, Abercromby Square, and the surrounding streets, always in the spring. The fact the guard had talked to 'something dead' (as he put it) and was not aware of it at the time, really unnerved him, and he recalled her dark eyes and the way she smiled so shyly. The identity of the ghost is a mystery.


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Liverpool again: