Treasurer's House, York

The story

Treasurer's House stands in Minster Yard, immediately north of York Minster, in the historic heart of York. It is a Grade I listed building owned by the National Trust, which also looks after its garden.

The house takes its name from an office created in 1091, when Archbishop Thomas of Bayeux appointed the first Treasurer of York Minster. The Treasurer managed the cathedral's money and was expected to receive important visitors, so he needed an impressive home. Almost nothing of that first residence survives: one outer wall now part of the neighboring Grays Court, and some 12th-century stonework in the present house that may or may not still sit where it was first laid.

The post disappeared with the Reformation. On 26 May 1547 the last Treasurer handed the house to the Crown. It went to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, who sold it to Archbishop Robert Holgate. The building we see now owes most to Thomas Young, Archbishop of York from 1561 to 1568, and his descendants, who in the early 17th century rebuilt it almost completely and gave it its balanced front. In 1617 Sir George Young entertained King James I here. Later owners included Lord Fairfax, and over time the house was carved up into separate dwellings.

Its revival came from Frank Green, a rich local industrialist, who bought the various parts between 1897 and 1898 and hired the architect Temple Moore to strip away later additions. The work was largely done by June 1900, when the future King Edward VII, Princess Alexandra and Princess Victoria visited. When Green retired and left York in 1930, he gave the house and its contents to the National Trust, the first time the Trust had been handed a private house together with the furniture that belonged in it.

Underneath it all lies Roman York. The house sits on top of one of the main roads leading north out of the Roman fortress, and during Green's works four Roman column bases came to light; one is still in place in the cellar.

The legend

Treasurer's House is home to what is often called York's most famous ghost story: a column of Roman soldiers marching through the cellar.

The first account dates from Frank Green's time, before 1930. According to the National Trust, a female guest heading down to fetch wine found her way into the cellar barred by a man in Roman uniform, although no one dressed like that was in the house. Only one source records this.

The story everyone knows came in 1953 (the Trust says February). Harry Martindale, an apprentice heating engineer of about 18 (he was born in 1935 and died in 2014), was cutting through the vaulted cellar ceiling for the new heating system, standing on a ladder. Wikipedia calls him a plumber; the Trust and the Society for Psychical Research describe him as a heating engineer. He heard a trumpet-like call, growing louder, and then saw a soldier in a helmet step out of the wall, followed by a horse and a line of other soldiers. Wikipedia counts nine or ten pairs; the National Trust says about twenty, one of them mounted. Martindale fell from his ladder and crouched in a corner, but the figures paid no attention to him.

His description was oddly specific. The soldiers were small and looked shabby rather than splendid; they wore green tunics and helmets, carried short swords or daggers and round shields, and they were cut off at the knees, as though walking on a lower surface. Where the old ground had been dug away, he could see their sandals, strapped up the leg. When he climbed out, the curator reportedly asked him, before he had said a word, whether it was the Roman soldiers he had seen, which suggests the tale was already circulating.

Martindale kept quiet for years, partly because he went on to become a police officer. Interest grew after archaeologists excavated the headquarters of the Roman fortress nearby in 1969. Supporters point out that a Roman road, the Via Decumana, does run beneath the building, roughly a foot and a half under the cellar floor, and that the round shields, at first criticized as wrong, fit late-Roman garrison troops of the 4th and 5th centuries. He told the story many times without changing it and never accepted money for it. Parapsychologist Melvyn Willin recorded him in the cellar around 1976, and in 1998 he and the author John Mitchell discussed the case at a Society for Psychical Research conference.

A second witness came forward later: Joan Mawson, a housekeeper, said that in February 1957 soldiers and horses passed her in the cellar; she too kept silent for years. This account comes from a single source.

The house has other reported presences. Frank Green supposedly vowed to haunt the place if his furniture was moved, and staff connect him with the smell of cigar smoke, a figure that appears and vanishes, clocks found all stopped at once and chairs pulled into the middle of rooms after closing. A gray lady is said to be seen seated, mostly by children and teenagers; youngsters in the tapestry room have clambered onto an antique chair, explaining that "the lady told me to", and a housekeeper whose vacuum cleaner cut out saw a gray lady with a finger raised to her lips. Staff also mention a male servant at the old kitchen range, two children in the Great Hall (accounts differ, which the Trust itself points out), a cat in the basement and dogs, including a black terrier, seen by visitors in 2016. Cold blasts, mist, moving curtains and a seated woman being pushed in the back complete the list. Wikipedia also names George Aislaby, a 17th-century owner, but the National Trust's ghost page does not mention him.

Not everyone is convinced. Skeptic Gordon Bonnet has noted that the case rests largely on one man's testimony, that the curator's question shows the legend predated it and may have primed him, that Roman roads run under much of England, and that cameras in the cellar have recorded nothing, while conceding that the detail of the hidden road is not what you would expect from a made-up story. According to Wikipedia, the Discovery Channel's Ghosthunters filmed here for its opening episode; this could not be confirmed elsewhere.

What remains today

The house displays the furniture and contents Frank Green gave with it, in rooms including the Great Hall, Blue Drawing Room, Court Room and tapestry room. The cellar keeps a Roman column base in its original position, a physical link to the road beneath. The basement now houses a café, and the garden lies beside the Minster.

Visiting

Treasurer's House is open to the public as a National Trust property; check the Trust's website for current dates and hours. Its ghost stories are told on themed history tours offered from April to October and at Christmas, and booking is advised. The Trust does not allow paranormal groups to hold investigations or use equipment in the house.

Commercial ghost walks in York go past the house, and the Minster next door makes it an easy stop on any visit to the old city.

Sources

1. Historic England list entry (List entry 1257251) — Historic England · Open Government Licence
2. Wikimedia Commons category : Treasurer's House, York — Wikimedia Commons
3. "Ghosts of Treasurer's House" — National Trust — National Trust
4. "Haunted York" — Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research — Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research
5. Official website
6. "The legion of ghosts" (18 Jan 2022) — Skeptophilia (Gordon Bonnet) — Skeptophilia (Gordon Bonnet
7. "The Treasurer's House" — VoiceMap (not read directly) — VoiceMap (not fetched
8. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.