The Everyday Hauntings of English Heritage
Staff ghost stories show how the most interesting hauntings are also the most ordinary
I don’t know about you, but every October I anticipate the same bouquet of ghost tales from the media and this year was no different. One particular highlight though came from The Guardian who treated us to a series of real-life ghost experiences gathered from English Heritage staff; A faceless figure on CCTV at Chester Castle, disembodied music at Bolsover, the odd shove in the back, footsteps where no one’s walking.
English Heritage doesn’t say they’re ghosts (or say they aren’t), and the stories nestle neatly into a centuries-old tradition of haunted ruins and keepers who know the buildings better than anyone else. Now, if you’ve spent any time researching the paranormal, you’ll recognise the pattern. These are bread-and-butter accounts from people whose everyday lives run alongside the ghostly heritage that time eventually grants to all places. They’re the ticket office anecdotes, the night guard’s shrug, the “yeah, that corridor’s weird after closing.”
In The Guardian piece, curator, Michael Carter, frames the accounts within a long historical lineage - from Reformation sacrilege tales to the Gothic vogue - reminding us these stories are a living cultural practice as much as they are reports of odd sensations. And here lies the temptation for non-believers and believers alike: it’s easy to speculate. To share this piece from The Guardian as proof of the paranormal, or as proof of how ridiculous ghost believers are.
We can sketch mechanisms for each vignette from our sofas (infrasound, expectation, misidentification, peripheral vision plus adrenaline, the acoustic quirks of old stone). But doing so, case by case, often produces very little of value. We aren’t measuring anything - we’re narrativising. We’re swapping one untested story (“a ghost”) for another (“a draft and a creaky hinge”). That can be clever, even educational, but it’s not necessarily data. It’s commentary.
And yet, the bit I keep returning to isn’t the mystery - it’s the ordinariness. The security guard who feels “a hundred eyes,” the dog that won’t budge, the piano that seems to play through a wall… and then everyone carries on: log it, lock up, lunch break. The Bolsover Castle team literally keeps a ghost book - because of course they do; it’s a workplace with a paper trail, and the uncanny becomes another entry to file before the next school group arrives.
Years ago, a property owner walked me through their Victorian manor house and, mid-tour, paused and looked back at me to say, “You’re not here to get rid of it, are you? It’s… basically part of the furniture.” They looked genuinely worried. I had to reassure them: don’t worry, I don’t do spirit clearings; I’m not that kind of ghost investigator. I’ll leave your ghost - that I don’t believe in- exactly where it is.
I think about that exchange whenever October rolls around and the urge to commentate the usual Halloween media deluge rises. To many people, hauntings aren’t emergencies, they’re décor. Not in a trivial sense, but in the literal sense of living with a thing - folding it into the fabric of a place, a family story, a routine.
These are the ghost accounts that I treat as folklore-in-the-present tense - living cultural artefacts produced by specific people in specific places in specific contexts (and yes, sometimes by a comms department near Halloween, I see you…). The antiquarian-to-Gothic thread isn’t a gotcha; it’s… sort of the point.
This is where paranormal media gets it wrong (and, sometimes, where skeptics do, too). Television, Podcasts, YouTube, TikTok - so much of the genre is built for spectacle. Screaming in the dark, head-cams, “Dude, did you hear that?” But the typical eyewitness experience looks nothing like that.
It’s someone doing their job in a drafty building, feeling spooked, then finishing the shift. Even English Heritage’s Halloween timing reads as pragmatic: these are cultural stories that draw visitors because they’re part of how we relate to the past. The stories are content and context. Their continuity with past forms isn’t a flaw to debunk, but the point of the genre.
And those of us on the skeptical side of the fence need to avoid a parallel form of sensationalism to our “friends” over on TikTok - the reflex to treat every eyewitness as either a dupe or a closet thrill-seeker. Most aren’t chasing adrenaline, they’re logging an odd Tuesday. Av evening shift that went weird. When we confabulate the ordinary witness with the influencer night-vision genre, we flatten a very human landscape into caricature.
We also miss the richer question: what do these stories do for people and places? Carter, the English Heritage curator quoted by The Guardian hints at it - they help us negotiate time, death, and change; they’re one way old stones keep talking. There’s a lot that can be learned from these everyday ghost stories beyond what they might actually have been.
For ghost investigators, the goal should never be to just strip meaning from a place but to add context without condescension. To resist the urge to explain each story through speculation just for the sake of the debunk. Over the years I’ve learned that sometimes, when it comes to the spooky experiences that people report, the best thing I can do is help them work out the cause of their ghostly encounters for themselves. Sometimes they realise the ghost is a metaphor for their worries about death and it’s around about then that I go put the kettle on.
Ironically, one of the first bits of advice I give to people who think they have ghostly goings on is to “keep a diary”, which Bolsover are already doing, which is fantastic! Still, there’s also value in accepting that some people don’t want the workings shown. The weirdly mundane (or is it mundanely weird?) is part of the fabric of their lives, and that’s fine too.
Anyway - anyone fancy a day trip to a spooky old castle? I’ve suddenly got the urge…