Haunting times in the old house

11:32am Saturday 25th October 2008

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The house on Stonegate is tall, and dark, and narrow. We stand outside as the rain lashes down from a dark, autumnal sky and is whipped into our faces. We lift the brass knocker and rap it once, twice against the heavy wooden door. Slowly, it creaks open. We are expected.

We are ushered along a dark corridor to another door. On it is written: “You are entering at your own risk.”

“Go through,” our guide says, “and everything will become apparent.”

We pass into a large room and find ourselves alone. This room is dim, cold, musty. Blood-coloured light spills through a stained glass window. There are sounds, almost too quiet to hear, then growing louder: rustles and trickles and faint, eerie laughter. Then a disembodied voice speaks. “35 Stonegate has had lives flowing through it for a very long time,” it says. “And now you are one of them…”

So begins our journey into the haunted heart of this house. We push open a door at the end of the room. Beyond is a hallway, silent and shadowed. A suit of armour looms in one corner, an ancient staircase winds up from another.

Voices whisper and hiss. “I saw her dashing past me!” cries a young girl’s voice. The darkness gathers around us. Shadows seem to flit. Voices gather in the air. “Can you hear them?” asks one.

All is darkness and silence again. We climb the creaking stairs and push through a series of rooms. One is a bed chamber, the floor and walls dark with age. We hear a young girl’s voice – a servant, perhaps. She is mourning her dead baby. “Put it down, there’s no breath in it,” snaps an older voice.

More darkness, more shadows. We climb more stairs, into another bedroom. A young girl’s voice, disembodied, speaks from nowhere. “I had this feeling,” she says. “I looked up, and a man was standing looking at me, hands on either side of the door.”

I look back at the door we’ve just come through. Nothing there. Or is there? A thickening of the inky air, perhaps? We shiver.

Up, up, still higher. A room of masks – ferocious African faces hanging on oak-panelled walls. A room of mirrors, endlessly reflecting, our images stretching to infinity. Another hall, more stairs, another door. It creaks open. Daylight at last, spilling through thick drapes. It is a long, narrow dining room, looking out over Stonegate. We feel drawn to the light, conscious of the fearful darkness of the house behind us. A voice again, whispering out of the air around us.

“Look at the people on Stonegate,” it says, with a hint of mockery. “Do they look up?” They don’t. “To them, you might as well be a ghost.”

So it is up one last time, to the final and most dreadful room. It is a large, square, panelled room and black as pitch. In the centre, a round table. It is a room that has been used for speaking to the dead. Voices whisper and mock. An old woman cries out in her sleep. “He looks at me!” she wails. Then: “He drags me down to the cellar. The cellar.”

You can go down to the cellar, if you dare. You can confront the ancient horror waiting there: a horror distilled from centuries of guilt and fear and loneliness.

Not us, though. After descending those endless, creaking stairways, we are relieved to enter the joyous light of day again.

There astrologer Jonathan Cainer waits for us, delighted with the effect his haunted house has had.

It is all done with sound effects, he says. There is no gimmickry such as fake cobwebs or animatronic skeletons. Just sounds, voices, and shadows. It’s all you need, because this house in Stonegate is ancient, and huge. It seems never to end, room opening off room, stairway off winding stairway.

Parts are more than 700 years old, Jonathan thinks, and there were Roman buildings here long before that. It really is haunted, he insists. “There’s no proof. The only proof is from the people who have come here, and reported similar sensations in similar rooms.”

The touch of icy fingers, the sense of restless spirits wandering the rooms – that sort of thing.

Jonathan called in experts to investigate, including Uri Geller, paranormal expert The Rev Lionel Fanthorpe and psychic artist Paul Johnson. Together, they held a séance in that topmost room of the house. “No Ouija board,” Jonathan says. “We sat in meditative silence and invited the story of the house to reveal itself.”

A terrible story it is, too, of a servant girl in the 1600s raped by her master, before giving birth to a baby which dies. The girl is imprisoned in the cellar by her master’s vengeful wife, who strangles her. The wife locks herself in the house while guilt and horror stalk her nightmares and eat away at her soul.

“We have no proof that this is what happened,” Jonathan says. “But it all fits.” That cellar. Am I glad I didn’t go in that cellar.

• Haunted, Jonathan Cainer’s haunted house at 35 Stonegate, is open seven days a week, late morning to early evening. Tours take about half an hour, but be warned: if you don’t want to be scared out of your wits, go with a friend or small group. Not suitable for young children.

Tours cost £9 per person, £6 children, £5 if you have a York Card. To find out more visit hauntedhouseyork.co.uk or call 01904 541779.

Hallowe’en facts

Hallowe’en, October 31, is the eve of All Hallows’ Day, also known as All Saints’ Day. The festival dates back before Christianity and is said to have its origins in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain.

In Gaelic culture it is said to be a celebration of the end of the harvest season.

Historically, the festival was a time to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Celts and Gaels also believed that on October 31, the boundary between the living and the dead dissolved.

“It is a time when the veil between the realms is lifted, or at least grows thin,” said York astrologer Jonathan Cainer. “Normally there is a thick curtain between us and the world beyond. At Hallowe’en it becomes a flimsy veil.”

Jonathan is hoping to organise the world’s biggest ghost vigil in York this Hallowe’en. It will be co-ordinated, hopefully by means of a live radio broadcast from his haunted house in Stonegate. But Jonathan wants people across the city to stage their own vigils.

The World’s Biggest Ghost Vigil will run from 11pm to 1am on Hallowe’en, October 31. For details of how to take part, phone the organisers on 01904 652517 or visit worldsbiggestghostvigil.com Registration costs £1.