The three things you learn when you come to York is that it is old, it is cold, and it is haunted.
Like most old places, York consists of layers. On Stonebow there is a block of Brutalist concrete across from a row of timber-framed Tudor buildings. Redbrick, Georgian terraces with neat, symmetrical windows line High Petergate, leading to the Minster(1), a Gothic fortress of stone and stained glass. ‘Jorvik’, the Viking name for the city, is featured in in the name of a museum, a doctor’s surgery, and a business that sells tricycles.
These layers are visible all at once, like on an archaeological dig. In places this is literally true: Roman walls that have been buried by time and then excavated are visible. My father was one of the archaeologists who worked on that excavation. Locals would look down at him from the city walls(2) and shout “Have you found anything yet?” When he was done for the day, he’d walk down Gillygate and watch the crowd part for the bearded, mud-caked man who just climbed out of a hole in the ground.
From November 2012 to February 2013, my first winter in York, the lake at the university froze solid. There were rocks all over it where students had thrown them, thinking they’d break the ice. The university lake is home to a great variety of waterfowl(3), and I had read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ the previous summer, so I was able to learn the answer to Holden Caufield’s question about what ducks do when the pond freezes over. It turns out they try to land, skid about for a bit, and then stand on the ice looking peeved. I have a photo of myself from that winter, stood in a frost-carpeted field after a day of running around pretending to be a wizard. I’m huddled with a group of similar weirdos, sharing our body heat like penguins.
The cold is a reminder that you are in The North, even if it’s the prettier, more tourist-friendly side of The North. Walk to the top of the Minster and you can look past the city limits at misty, grey-green countryside, blurring to blueish at the horizon, punctuated by the tall silhouettes of factory chimneys and squat, trumpet-like cooling towers of power plants. At ground level you can’t see the industry, but you can smell it. Not smoke, but chocolate. On certain days, the smell of the chocolate factory wafts across the city. It is as unironically enchanting as it sounds.
The Golden Fleece has a sign out front bragging that it’s ‘the most haunted pub in York’. This shows that are enough haunted buildings that even if you narrow the field to haunted pubs specifically, there’s still competition. Clifford’s Tower has walls that supposedly bleed, which is unsurprising; I once blanked on the name and referred to it as “that big tower where all those Jews were killed”(4). There’s a small window overlooking the Minster green, where the ghost of a young girl quarantined and left to die during the Black Death has been seen, looking out.(5)
The other thing York is haunted by is ex-students. They finish their courses (or drop out, as in my case), but don’t leave. They become something more than students and less than locals, working in souvenir shops or pubs or as tour guides. The romantic say the city gets into their bones and becomes too much part of them to leave. A more cynical friend of mine once called it “a black hole where ambition dies”. In my experience, it’s a little of both.
(1) It’s called the Minster, by the way, not the Cathedral. The other shibboleth for distinguishing locals from tourists is the pronunciation of the River Ouse. As a hint, the university newspaper is called ‘The Nouse’.
(2) Confusingly called the ‘Roman’ walls, though they are in fact Medieval walls, restored by Victorians. See what I mean about layers?
(3) And an even greater variety of microorganisms. As a fresher I heard a rumour that if you fall in the lake, you go to the hospital for a series of injections. I never found out if that was true, but I know first-hand there was enough genetic material in a random sample of lake water to base a microbiology research project on it.(6)
(4) I’m Jewish, so I get to say that.
(5) I wrote this piece during the early 2021 UK lockdown, feeling something like a ghost myself.
(6) I was a biologist at the time. I got better.
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