York: Haunted or Hoax?

When scouring the internet about the topic of ghosts, there was one UK city which came up more than any other when it comes to hauntings. York has attained a fearsome reputation as the most haunted city in the world, according to a litany of tourist sites (Visit York, 2025).

But I wasn't satisfied. Stories about ghosts have peppered my social interactions since I was a child, and even then I never found that I put much stock in the ravings of my peers when they heard something go bump in the night. It seemed to me that there was more to this infamy than meets the eye.

Preconception

I have had one (Extremely questionable) experience in my life that made me question the existence of the undead. As a teenager, I was returning home from a meal with some friends when we passed by a local woodland area. It was beginning to get dark and as teenagers do, my friends and I were attempting to scare each other by making scary noises, talking about experiences with the supernatural, and playing youtube videos on our phones of creepypastas that had captured our imaginations that day. We were being particularly loud and obnoxious when all of a sudden, we heard a noise from the gloom of the woods that made all of us freeze without hesitation.

"Shhh." Was all the only thing I heard, and regardless of how insipid that might sound, I felt my blood turn frigid in a single instant. My friends and I all ran before we even collected our thoughts on the sound.

Nothing particularly bone-chilling on the surface of it. There's every likelihood that a nearby resident decided to shut the local teens up by spooking them in the dark of the forest. It could even have been the noise of some wild animal shunting around the treeline. Nonetheless, something about the way my hairs stood on end when hearing that noise has always left the door just ever so slightly ajar on my belief that some spirits might be waiting just on the cusp of the sweet hereafter, and no amount of skepticism on my part has ever been able to close that door all the way.

Research

Much of the buzz around York's reputation stems from one specific claim from a group known as the Ghost Research Foundation International (GRFI) who are purported to have conducted a study in which it was found to have a whopping total of 504 hauntings.

Only there was one problem. This 'GFRI' does not appear to exist.

When researching the name of this foundation, the only references I could find to its existence pertained specifically to its relationship to York, and none of the articles provided any source information for this amorphous organisation. It would appear that reporters have been playing 'pass the parcel' with this sliver of misinformation, which I have managed to trace back to a 2014 article by the BBC's Lisa Crawford (Crawford, 2008). Though the editorial guidelines of the BBC requires that its reporters strive to report truthfully and clearly attribute sources, this instance is a prime example of the importance of checking one's sources even when reading from reputable news sites.

The GFRI has no website, no wikipedia page, nor any academic or organisational records. The closest match I could find was a group known as the "Ghost Research Society", but given that this group operates out of Chicago and a seemingly contemporary BBC article cites that the organisation operates out of "major cities around the world including Los Angeles, Paris and Brisbane" (BBC North Yorkshire, no date) we can assume that these are two different entities.

So, is York really the world's most haunted city? Probably not. Nonetheless, I was determined to speak to people about their own experiences of ghost sightings. I spoke to a local resident named Judy who has lived in York since 1985, who had some very interesting insights. Judy was working a night shift at a nursing home in York and described to me how she had seen "a lady in Victorian dress walking down the staircase" (Sutherland, 2026). Judy went on to describe "The house had been lived in before and things had been happening… stupid things like lights would go on and off and you knew you'd left the lights on when you came downstairs but you'd go up again and they'd be off. All the patients were immobile in bed or asleep."

Phenomena like this isn't unheard of in any city. Judy's account is one of many similar stories I heard from friends and family growing up, and when I pressed further Judy conceded that she often attributed her sightings to being tired.

But modern tales of apparitions are far from the only accounts we have on the subject. In 1953, an 18 year old apprentice named Harry Martindale was carrying out some restoration work on the Treasurer's House when he described a procession of roman soldiers in the cellar of the treasurers house.

If you're anything like me, you just rolled your eyes a little upon hearing that description. An overworked 18 year old seeing visions in a dusky cellar seemed an implausible source to me, but there was more to this account than met the eye.

In multiple interviews, Martindale has described the rounded shields that these roman soldiers wore as they marched through the basement (Brown, 2008).

Roman shields were thought for a long time to have been exclusively in the 'Scutum' shape, which is a rectangular, semi-cylindrical version of roman shields that was used with great success during the height of the roman empire. Thus, when Martindale gave his account of these shields as having been rounded, his perception of these spiritual sightings was widely discounted. Only in more recent years, discoveries at Hadrian's Wall uncovered that auxiliary soldiers (Like the kind that would've been stationed in York during it's occupation by the Roman Empire) would have worn rounded shields.

Here's the issue.

The earliest account we have of Martindale's story is from an interview with John Mitchell over 50 years ago, in which he makes no mention of a description of the soldiers' uniforms from the snippets of the interview shown. In fact, this was in fact the only interview that Martindale gave until decades later in the 1970s when he began recounting the story to visitors of the Treasurer's House.

Furthermore, the supposed dig upon Hadrian's Wall that elevated Harry's credibility doesn't appear to exist by any retrievable account. In fact, rounded shields had been found in excavations of Dura Europos long before Harry ever set foot in the Treasurer's House.

Thus, I was led to the conclusion: The stories of York's haunted history was being largely fabricated.

But all of this information still left me with questions. Why was so much effort being put into maintaining this spooky repute?

Tourism in York contributed £2.01 billion to the UK economy in 2024, an increase of 5.4% from the year before (Make it York, no date). 34% of this was spent on the retail sector, and taking a short walk around York, it becomes apparent who benefits from all of the hype.

I submitted a freedom of information request to the City of York council to look at the figures on tourism in York, and the discoveries I made raised my brow. The document sent to me by the council was long and wordy, and thus I've organised my figures into these handy tables for you, my beloved readership.

Despite the mildly suspicious omission of figures from 2008-2010, the trend is apparent. Since the propagation of these claims, York's economy has more than doubled and tripled its economic output in the UK.

The York Ghost Merchants are a prime example of how the mythology around York's history has contributed to a cult following on social media, with a whopping 145k followers on instagram as of 2026. Tourists from all over the country and beyond have been enamoured with the mystique that these attention-grabbing misreports have stirred up.

And it's not just retail spending, tourist spots naturally attract a generous income for the hospitality industry. Yorks housing market has long been marred by the short-term let industry, with York Central's MP Rachel Maskell having even raised the issue in Parliament during a speech in 2023. Maskell has proposed allowing local councils to impose a licence for anyone wishing to turn domestic residences into short-term accommodation — a proposition that would purportedly make a significant improvement on the shortage of available homes without entirely tanking the income that these industries undoubtedly bring.

So while an offhand comment about phony ghost stories might appear innocuous, this misreporting has had significant effects on the York economy.