The Roman Soldiers Beneath the Floor of Treasurer’s House

Harry Martindale was working alone in a cellar in York, England, when he heard what sounded like a trumpet. He assumed someone had a radio playing nearby and carried on with his work.

The sound came again, louder this time. When he heard it a third time, it seemed to be coming from inside the wall.

Harry turned to look and saw a helmet with a plume emerging straight through the brickwork. Beneath it was the head of a man dressed as a Roman soldier.

A Strange Day at Work

It was February 1953, and eighteen-year-old Harry was an apprentice heating engineer working at Treasurer’s House, a historic property near York Minster. He was helping install a heating system and had been assigned to work in the old cellar.

The first soldier walked out of the wall and began crossing the room. Behind him came another man riding a horse, followed by a column of roughly twenty soldiers marching in pairs.

Harry was terrified. These weren’t pale, transparent shapes floating around the cellar. According to his account, they looked solid, with clothing, weapons and equipment he could see clearly.

The soldiers appeared tired and dirty. They wore green tunics, carried round shields and had short plumes on their helmets. Harry could hear their footsteps and what sounded like voices as they marched past. But something about their appearance was especially strange.

Their Legs Were Missing

Harry could see the soldiers clearly from about the knees upward. Below that, their legs appeared to be buried beneath the cellar floor.

They weren’t floating, and they didn’t seem to be struggling to move. They walked normally, as though they were following a road that Harry couldn’t see.

The procession continued across the cellar and disappeared into the opposite wall. None of the soldiers stopped or appeared to notice the frightened young apprentice watching them.

Once they were gone, Harry hurried out of the cellar. He was badly shaken and needed time to recover from what he had just witnessed.

The Warden Already Knew

When Harry emerged, the house warden noticed how frightened he looked. Before Harry could explain what had happened, the warden reportedly told him that he looked as though he’d seen the Roman soldiers.

Harry was stunned. He hadn’t mentioned soldiers, horses or anything else about the encounter, yet the warden seemed to know exactly what had frightened him. As it turned out, there had been stories about Roman soldiers in the house before Harry arrived.

Years earlier, a female guest of former owner Frank Green had reportedly gone down to the cellar looking for wine. She encountered a man dressed as a Roman soldier who wouldn’t let her pass. When she complained to her host, she was told there was nobody dressed like that working in the house.

Harry’s experience was far more elaborate, and he remained reluctant to discuss it for years. He worried people would think he’d been drinking or had imagined the whole thing.

An Unexpected Discovery Underground

In 1969, archaeological excavations at the property uncovered remains connected with the headquarters of the Roman fortress of Eboracum, the ancient city that eventually became York. Treasurer’s House stood beside one of the fortress’s major roads, the via Decumana. Parts of the Roman buildings and road lay beneath the later floors and foundations.

That made one detail of Harry’s experience especially interesting. The soldiers he described had appeared to be walking at a lower level than the cellar floor, exactly where older Roman ground levels could be found.

For Harry, who had watched the soldiers march straight through the walls, the discovery was remarkable. The route they appeared to follow had once been part of Roman York.

These Weren’t the Soldiers People Expected

Another curious detail was the way Harry described the men themselves. They didn’t resemble the Roman soldiers most people were familiar with from films and illustrations.

Harry remembered older men, some apparently in their thirties and forties, wearing worn green tunics and carrying equipment that looked as though it had seen plenty of use. Their appearance led some historians and researchers to wonder whether they could have resembled troops who had spent years stationed in Britain rather than newly arrived soldiers from Rome.

The idea was intriguing because Harry hadn’t described a grand military parade. What he remembered was a group of weary men making their way along what appeared to be an ordinary road.

Another Encounter in the Cellar

Four years after Harry’s experience, housekeeper Joan Mawson had an encounter of her own. In February 1957, Joan went toward the cellar to check the boiler. As she approached, she heard what sounded like horses’ hooves and assumed the noise was coming from the street outside.

When she reached the cellar, something extraordinary happened. Joan later recalled that the walls seemed to melt away, revealing Roman soldiers and horses moving past her.

Like Harry, she was terrified by what she saw. She kept the experience to herself, worrying that nobody would believe her.

The Girl Who Remembered the Noise

At the time, Joan was living at Treasurer’s House with a young girl named Caroline, whom she was looking after. She didn’t want to frighten the child, so she kept quiet about her experience in the cellar.

Years passed, and both eventually moved away from the property. One day, while they were remembering their time at Treasurer’s House, Caroline unexpectedly brought up something from those years.

She remembered hearing a loud trumpet.

Joan had never told her about the soldiers.