There are many perfectly reasonable things to do after watching a ghost story stage show in York at half past ten on a dark evening. Going home, for instance. Having a cup of tea. Perhaps reflecting quietly on the existential fragility of human consciousness. What you absolutely should not do, if you have any interest in sleeping soundly ever again, is wander over to a 900-year-old medieval tower with a famously grim history, climb all the stairs alone in the dark, and then take a photograph. And yet, here we are. One brave — or arguably unhinged — gentleman did exactly that, and the resulting Clifford’s Tower ghost photo has since been keeping him up at night for entirely different reasons.
A Perfectly Normal Evening Out in York
Our protagonist had been to see Danny Robins’ Uncanny Fear of the Dark, a stage show about the paranormal. So he was already thoroughly primed for terror. On his way back to the car park — conveniently located right next to Clifford’s Tower, because York has an extraordinary gift for placing car parks next to monuments where hundreds of people have died — he noticed the tower all lit up against the night sky. Naturally, he thought: I should go up there alone. Immediately. Right now.
Up he went. All the stairs. At 10:30pm. With no one else around. The doors at the top were locked, obviously, because English Heritage does not operate a late-night tower access policy for spontaneous lone visitors with smartphones. He came back down, took a single photograph of the illuminated staircase, and went home. Completely normal behaviour. Nothing to see here. Except, as it turned out, there very possibly was.
The Clifford’s Tower Ghost Photo Nobody Asked For
It wasn’t until the next morning that he actually looked at the photo. And there, lurking near the top of the stairs, was what can only be described as a misty figure — head, torso, hovering somewhere between steps two and three from the top, like a medieval commuter who has missed the last bus home by approximately seven centuries. Furthermore, when he compared his image against dozens of other night-time photographs of the tower taken from the internet, nothing similar appeared in any of them. The mist, it seems, had turned up exclusively for him. How flattering.
He also notes, with admirable understatement, that he thought he had taken several photos but had in fact only taken one. Spooky? Possibly. More likely the standard outcome of fumbling with a phone in the dark after climbing a lot of stairs while slightly terrified. However, we shall give him the benefit of the doubt.
Why Clifford’s Tower Is Basically the Worst Place to Hang Around After Dark
Clifford’s Tower has a history so bleak it makes your average haunted house look like a Premier Inn. In 1190, it was the site of one of the worst antisemitic massacres in British history, when around 150 Jewish men, women, and children died there during violent riots. Consequently, if anywhere in England has earned the right to be genuinely haunted, it is this tower. York itself is widely regarded as one of the most haunted cities in Europe, which is either a tremendous tourist asset or an absolute nightmare, depending on your feelings about misty figures on staircases.
Meanwhile, the paranormal photography community continues to debate whether orbs, mists, and translucent shapes constitute evidence of the afterlife or simply evidence that phone cameras do peculiar things in low light near artificial floodlighting. Sceptics have long argued that most ghost photographs are explained by lens flare, condensation, or insects. The counter-argument, of course, is that none of those explanations are anywhere near as interesting.
The Verdict on This Clifford’s Tower Ghost Photo
Is it a ghost? Is it mist? Is it the optical consequence of a man breathing heavily after climbing medieval stairs in the cold night air of North Yorkshire? Honestly, it could be any of these things. What it definitely is, however, is a magnificent excuse to visit one of Britain’s most historically loaded cities, climb a floodlit tower alone at night after a ghost show, and then spend the following week quietly convinced that something old and unhappy had a look at your phone. The Clifford’s Tower ghost photo may not solve the mystery of life after death. But it does confirm that Yorkshire remains, reliably, an excellent place to frighten yourself silly.
Read the original story at Paranormal Globe.
🛒 Related Finds on Amazon
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
