Tucked into Minster Yard immediately north of York Minster, Treasurer’s House has occupied this spot since 1091, when Archbishop Thomas of Bayeux created the office of Treasurer of York and built a residence to match it. The role itself was abolished in 1547 during the Reformation, and the house passed through a string of private owners over the centuries, including a branch of the Fairfax family.

Its present character owes almost everything to one man: Frank Green, a wealthy Wakefield industrialist who bought the house in 1897 and spent years remodelling it into a showpiece for entertaining. Green gave the house to the National Trust in 1930 — the first property the Trust ever received complete with its full collection — on the strict condition that nothing in the rooms be changed, reportedly warning he’d come back and haunt the place if anyone disobeyed.

The building’s most famous story belongs to the cellar rather than the staterooms. In February 1953, eighteen-year-old apprentice plumber Harry Martindale was up a ladder fitting central heating pipework when he heard a single repeated trumpet note. A Roman soldier’s helmet then appeared to come straight through the solid cellar wall, followed by a horse and around twenty more soldiers marching two abreast — all visible only from the knees up.

Martindale kept the story largely to himself for years, certain nobody would believe soldiers marching through a cellar wall. That changed in 1969, when excavations elsewhere in York uncovered the line of a genuine Roman road — the via decumana of the fortress of Eboracum — running directly beneath the cellar at a level that lines up with where the soldiers seemed to be walking, which is exactly why only their upper bodies were visible above what would once have been Roman ground level.

Martindale wasn’t the only witness. Housekeeper Joan Mawson reported hearing hoofbeats and seeing the same column in the cellar in 1957, and an earlier account describes a party guest of Frank Green’s being stopped by a man dressed as a Roman soldier in the same spot — suggesting the story predates Martindale’s famous sighting. It’s a case regularly cited in discussions of whether time slips can really happen, moments where witnesses seem to glimpse an earlier period rather than encounter a conventional ghost, though it’s just as often filed as a residual haunting — an ambient replay rather than an interactive spirit.

The Roman soldiers aren’t the only presence reported here. A “Grey Lady” is associated with a particular chair in the Tapestry Room, where visiting children have reportedly climbed up only to say “the lady told me to” when asked to get down, while Frank Green himself is said to still check in on his old house, a phantom smell of cigar smoke taken as his calling card. Staff and visitors have also reported two children playing marbles in the Great Hall, a small dog moving through several rooms in 2016, and a cat spotted among the basement café tables despite the National Trust keeping no cat on site — a detail that fits neatly with wider stories about whether animals can see ghosts.

Being upfront about the evidence: the Martindale sighting is one of the most detailed and frequently retold ghost accounts in Britain, and the 1969 Roman road discovery is a genuinely striking piece of corroborating context, but neither constitutes proof — it remains one very vivid piece of witness testimony plus decades of secondary reports. The National Trust doesn’t permit paranormal investigation equipment on site, so there’s no modern EVP or thermal-imaging case file here the way there is for other entries in this database. Our guide to how ghost hunting evidence gets evaluated is worth a look for readers weighing up how much that matters.

Whether Martindale saw a genuine echo of Eboracum’s garrison or simply told a very good story exceptionally well for seventy years, a column of tired, unpolished Roman soldiers marching silently through a cellar wall remains one of the most vivid haunting accounts England has to offer.