Paranormal Activity on Yorkshire Ghost Tours

Ghost and paranormal sightings across our Otley, Leeds and Skipton ghost tours…

With our Skipton Ghost Tour coming up to one year of running this month, our Otley ghost tour reaching its 2 year anniversary and our Leeds Ghost Tour reaching 6 months, we thought it would be fun to look back on all the times we’ve been haunted at Yorkshire Ghost Tours!

If you’ve joined any of our tours, you’ll know they’re rooted in theatre and storytelling rather than ghost hunting itself (although we have dabbled!) 

Having said this, when you’re constantly ‘bringing up the dead’ so to speak, for a living, it seems only reasonable for our ghosts to make themselves apparent every once in a while…

Here are 3 instances (hand-picked from quite a few!) that our guests have been haunted on our tours.

Otley

The Otley Ghost Tour has been running for two years now, and there have been a number of sightings and weird goings on on the tour itself, as well as guests frequently reporting having had experiences just before or after the tours end.

Our most frequently spotted ghost happens to be one of the scariest ones mentioned on the tour. Who she was, we cannot say, but she has only ever been seen around the Parish Churchyard.

This ghost in particular is most often spotted by children. She manifests herself as a lady with long, white hair, a floaty white dress, and no eyes.

We’ve had witness reports from a little boy and a lady staying nearby as well as two mediums who joined the tour (seperately - about a year apart) and saw her apparition in the Parish churchyard! Funnily enough though, the mediums described this lady’s behaviours as being rather different:

Medium 1: described the lady as wearing white rags, with frizzy, unkempt white hair. She was scrambling around the grave stones and singing to herself, frantically. She was scary! So scary that the medium had to quickly look away.

Medium 2: described this ghost completely differently. She stood upright, with a serious expression and was wearing a floaty white dress, she had some kind of cloak or veil to cover her eyes. Her long white hair was straight and tidy and her hands clasped in front of her. She gave an air of seriousness and (freakily enough) stood right next to the tour guide - to Spindleshanks McScrew’s delight - at the entrance gate to the church yard.

We have questions that need to be answered: why does this ghost not have any eyes? Is she searching for something, or someone, in the graveyard? Why does she manifest herself differently to different people?

Keep your eyes peeled for a blog next week to unpack who this ghost might’ve been…

“This ghost in particular is most often spotted by children. She manifests herself as a lady with long, white hair, a floaty white dress, and no eyes.”

Artwork by Freya Gustafson

Skipton

A lot of hauntings have happened on the Skipton Ghost Tour within its first year. It’s an old medieval town, and it’s said there’s “a ghost in every building”, so it’s no surprise that ghosts have bobbed in a few times on the tour itself.

One of the saddest stories on the Skipton Ghost Tour is about a pair of young children who were left to live in a nearby house and work in the cotton mill across from the canal. They came from a canal boat family and leaving younger children behind to work in towns en-route, to be collected later, was fairly common practice back then.

Sadly though, this family never made a return, and the boat children were forced to work to pay their rent for the rest of their very short lives in the mill.

As the Butcher was regaling this horrible story to her audience, she was baffled to find two of her guests shriek in fright as they looked up and pointed, with shaky fingers, at one of the second floor windows at The Royal Shepherd pub. Two young children, a boy and a girl, appeared to be glaring from the window and staring at the canal, as if waiting for someone to make a return.

As soon as The Butcher turned around, the children disappeared completely.

From this day on, The Butcher has been checking the windows on her tour, and is determined that she will spot them one day soon! Why they choose to hide from her, she’s not so sure…

The Butcher on The Skipton Ghost Tour

Working canal families would often leave their small children behind to work in mill towns like Skipton…

Leeds

Our Leeds ghost tour is only 6 months young, and there has only been one instance of paranormal activity so far as experienced by the entire group (that we know of…)

This one’s really weird. It’ll scare you legless!

Funnily enough, the paranormal activity in question did not occur on one of the tour’s haunted locations. The place in question was the ‘Hair and Beauty’ shop which is located on New York street as the tour walks towards Kirkgate Markets.

Lord Bartholomew Catch often casually tells his tour while passing the Hair and Beauty store about the case of the demi-ghost who has been witnessed haunting the cellar: back in the 1990s, a couple of lads were closing up, and they reported seeing the apparition of two floating legs walking through the wall above their heads, across the room, then down as if walking down some steps. They walked all the way down and then through the floor!

The boys in question were horrified, as you can imagine, and quit their jobs the next morning! It’s been assumed that the legs may have belonged to the old lady with the blue shawl, who is frequently seen in the cellars in and around Leeds, especially at the Corn Exchange. Perhaps she was lost.

Lord Catch normally tells his group in passing about this; it’s a half-ghost so it only gets a half-stop, after all.

Anyway, Lord Bartholomew Catch was leading his tour to the crossing over the road one Saturday evening while telling this tale, and as he did so, a pair of disembodied legs walked themselves past the window from the inside of the Hair and Beauty store!

Lord Catch was so stunned that he had to stop the tour. Drip white, he stared at the window. He turned around to face his audience and apologise for having to pause, only to find that they were all open-mouthed and staring at the window, having seen the exact same thing! This shared experience was the first instance of paranormal activity on the Leeds Ghost Tour and one that Lord Bartholomew Catch certainly won’t forget! Watch this space for any more weird happenings…

If you were a guest on this tour, please do reach out to us - we’d love to hear your side of the story!

Drip white, Lord Bartholomew Catch turned to his audience to apologise for having to pause the tour…

We want to hear your stories!

We love hearing ghost stories from our customers, please, if you do have a tale to tell us about something spooky that has happened to you personally do reach out to us and let us know.

Whether you’re hoping to see a ghost in your lifetime, or if you absolutely do NOT want to experience paranormal activity in any way but are still interested in hearing tales about ghosts, our tours could be just the ticket!

Book today for Otley, Leeds or Skipton.

See you on the other side, ghoulfriends! 👻