Roman legion ghosts: Ruickbie excerpt #4

The Treasurer's House

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: Eighteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice, Harry Martindale, was in the cellars of the Treasurer’s House, an historic house in York, UK, working on the central-heating system, when he heard the distant “blaring of a note,” in his words. Perched on a ladder, Martindale continued his work as the sound grew louder. Looking down, he saw a figure wearing a plumed helmet and holding a trumpet-like instrument come through the wall followed by a horse and rider, and a column of Roman soldiers. Martindale fell off his ladder with fright and watched as about twenty soldiers marched across the cellar.

Martindale’s description [see Ruickbie excerpt #3] seemed in complete contrast to his Hollywood-level understanding of the Roman military. In particular, he described the use of a round shield. We think of the legions equipped with the large rectangular scutum; however, the original infantry shield was the round clipeus, later being replaced by the defensively superior scutum, only to come back into use during the crisis of the third century. It had a distinctive projection in the centre. After the Roman conquest of Britain in the first century AD, Roman auxiliaries (usually locally raised troops) continued to use the clipeus. In the second century AD, there were over 25,000 auxiliaries deployed in the Roman province of Britannia. According to the National Trust, which now owns the property, later research showed that the Sixth Legion was withdrawn from York during the fourth century AD and replaced by soldiers armed with round shields (presumably auxiliaries).

The cellar where Martindale was working had been built over an old Roman road, the Via Decumana. Over the centuries, this had resulted in a height difference of some 15 to 18 inches. As Martindale had observed during the experience, the soldiers appeared to march through the newer floor until reaching an excavated portion where he could see their feet touching the ground. The old Via Decumana had no obstructing walls, so it was again instructive that Martindale witnessed the troops enter through one stone wall and exit out another, exactly as if the walls had not been there. In addition to their appearance, their behaviour also strongly suggested that Martindale had indeed witnessed a body of Roman soldiers marching along the Via Decumana, almost 2,000 years after they had physically done so.

Given the witness’s age, it might be thought that here was a youth having a lark, but, after finding his story met with ridicule and disbelief, including being pressured by a local church to stay silent, Martindale kept quiet about it until interviewed for television in the 1970s. Described in the press as a “modest man,” Martindale went on to become a policeman and was remembered by the Lord Mayor of York, Ian Gillies, as a dedicated officer. Property manager for Treasurer’s House, Jane Whitehead, said of Martindale’s experience, “Unless he had done a lot of detailed research into the soldiers that belonged to that section of the Roman army he could not have known the level of detail he used to describe the soldiers he saw.”

Not only is Martindale’s account detailed and corroborated by other sources, but he is not alone in having had this experience. In addition to the then curator’s admission about the ghosts, there have been at least three other sightings of Roman soldiers in the cellar. Around 1900 a party guest of the industrialist Frank Green, then the owner of the Treasurer’s House, complained about finding her way barred by someone she took to be in fancy dress, wearing the uniform of a Roman soldier – Green knew nothing about it. 

A visiting American professor in the 1930s is also reputed to have seen the ghosts in the cellar. In February 1956, the then housekeeper for the National Trust, Joan Morsen, went down to the cellar to check on the central heating and saw the Roman soldiers. Living in the house at the time with her seven-year-old daughter, Morsen kept quiet about what she had seen to avoid frightening the girl. It was only when Martindale’s story became more widely known in the 1970s that she told her story. Her daughter then confessed to having heard the horn on several occasions and being woken up in the night by it.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.