THIS GHOSTLY ROMAN ARMY SPOTTED IN THE CELLAR OF AN OLD HOUSE, COULD BE AN EXAMPLE OF A "CYCLICAL" HAUNTING. CYCLICAL GHOSTS BLINDLY REPEAT ACTIONS FROM THEIR OWN LIFETIMES, HARDLY NOTICING THOSE WHO WITNESS THEM.
The Treasurer's House is a large, grand building near the middle of the ancient city of York, England. There have been several ghostly reports about the house, but they weren't all gathered together until 1974, when a plumber named Harry Martindale made public what he had seen while he was working there in 1953.
ALONE IN THE CELLAR
Harry was fitting central heating in the house's cellar when he noticed an odd noise. It seemed to come from inside the walls, but he assumed it must be a radio upstairs, and went on working. The sound grew louder, and suddenly a man's head, wearing a helmet and blowing a trumpet, emerged from the wall right next to Harry. He was so shocked he fell off the small ladder he was standing on. Then he hurried into a corner and hid there, watching in amazement.
ROMAN REGIMENT
The trumpeter's whole body appeared, and was followed by a large carthorse. Then more men, all dressed in Roman military uniform, marched out of the wall and across the cellar. Harry realized that the sound the trumpet made was the sound he had heard coming from the walls earlier.
NO FEET
Harry noticed that the Romans' legs seemed to disappear into the floor - he could only see them from the knees up. As they marched across the room and disolved into the opposite wall, they went past a hole in the floor, and Harry saw their feet for a moment.
The soldiers didn't notice Harry, and he watched them for some time. They all carried round shields, spears, swords, and daggers. They looked tired, as if they were on a long march or returning from a battle. Harry also thought they looked amazingly solid and real, thought the way they walked through the walls told him that they must be ghosts.
NO SUPRISE
When the last soldier had disappeared and the sound of the trumpet had died away, Harry ran upstairs to tell someone what he had seen. He found the curator of the museum that was housed in the Treasurer's House. But before he even had time to begin, the curator guessed from Harry's face what had happened. "You've seen the Romans, haven't you?" he said.
It turned out that Harry wasn't the first witness to see the spooky soldiers. The curator suggested he should write down what he had seen. When he had finished, the curator showed him two other acounts, written by other visitors who had seen the ghosts. Their descriptions all matched.
But, strangely, the curator had never spread the word about the ghosts in the cellar. Perhaps he didn't want the Treasurer's House to be disturbed by news reporters and investigators. It wasn't until much later, when the story of Harry's experience came out, that other witnesses revealed in public that they had seen the Romans too.
"I SAW THEM TOO"
Joan Mawson was the next witness to come forward. She was a caretake who had worked at the Treasurer's House many years before. One Sunday evening in 1957, she had gone down into the cellar the check the boiler. She took her bull terrior dog with her, but as they approached the cellar the dog started to howl and ran back upstairs.
In the narrow corridor, Joan thought she could hear the sound of horses' hooves. She turned around - and was terrified to see a group of Roman soldiers on horseback looming over her. She was afraid the horses would trample her, and she flattened herself against the wall. But neither the soldiers nor their horses seemed to see her at all.
Joan saw the Romans twice more. On one occasion, they were filthy and splattered with mud. The last time she saw them, they looked very tired and were slumped over the necks of their horses.
PARTY PUZZLE
Another story tells of a party held at Treasurer's House in the 1920s by a man named Frank Green. One of the guests went into the cellar, perhaps in a game of hide-and-seek. As she tried to go through a doorway, the guest suddenly found her way was barred by a strange figure, dressed as a Roman soldier. But there was no one at the party dressed as a soldier.
MATCHING REPORTS
It seemed that the witnesses had all seen the same figures, but in different situations - on horseback, on foot, and worn out from fighting or marching. It was as if the soldiers had passed that way many times, and their different activities had somehow been "recorded" into their surroundings.
WHO WERE THEY?
York was an important city in Roman times, when it was called Eboracum. Soldiers would have gathered there, marching up and down the Roman roads. It seemed that the Treasurer's House was built on the site of one of these early roads. In 1954 an archaeologist, Peter Wenham, excavated the cellar to look for ruins. He found a Roman road, the Via Ducumana, beneath the cellar floor. The hole where Harry had seen the soldiers' feet reached down just as far as the original road surface.
SHIELD MYSTERY
One puzzle remained - the round shields which Harry had seen the soldiers carrying. The ROman solders at York, called legionaries, had square shields, not round ones. This made some people think that Harry had made up this story.
However, it turned out that for part of the second century AD, the Roman army was split into two sections. Legionaries used square shields, but another regiment, called the auxiliaries, carried round ones. Were they the ghostly soldiers Harry saw?