Treasurer's House — the Roman soldiers

OVERVIEW

A seventeenth-century house on the site of the medieval treasurer's residence beside York Minster, restored between 1897 and 1930 by the industrialist Frank Green and given to the National Trust with its contents. The Roman Via Decumana runs under its cellar. The Trust tells the story of Harry Martindale on its own tours and the case is the best-known apparition report in Britain to be tied to an archaeological fact.

HISTORY

In 1953 Martindale, eighteen, was fitting pipes in the cellar when he heard a trumpet-like note and saw a helmeted soldier come through the wall below his ladder, followed by a horse and about twenty men in pairs, in green tunics with round shields, visible from the knees up until they reached the excavated Roman road, where he saw their sandals. He fell from the ladder and hid; he told the story the same way for sixty years and became a policeman. The level of the road was later confirmed. A guest of Frank Green's had reported the same soldiers decades earlier.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Martindale's account is the tradition; the house also names George Aislaby, a seventeenth-century owner killed in a duel. Round shields and the marching order were argued to fit auxiliaries of the fourth century rather than legionaries, which Martindale could not have known. The Trust records it; the entry does not decide it.

VISITING

National Trust opening; cellar tours are run on set days and book out.