My husband and I live in Scotland but we love visiting York for all its ancient history, brilliant old pubs, and its ghost stories. We have been many times, but on one of our more recent visits we were delighted to discover a new tourist attraction, the haunted house off Stonegate.
This house had been found behind one of the main shopping streets and "renovated" to its former glory as a family home of previous centuries. You could wander around it at will, taking photos as you pleased while listening to a tape recording of one particular ghost story associated with the building and generally just soaking up the creepy atmosphere. The tour took you up to the top room, the large, dark and creepy "seance room", the supposedly haunted attics, purported to have still been used as a bedroom as recently as the late 1990s, and down to the cellars which were dank, damp and spooky. There were other rooms that felt less spooky, yet it was in one of these we had our strangest experience.
It was on our second tour of this attraction and we had taken friends with us to appreciate the thrill. Though we hadn't done so on our first visit, my husband this time had taken his digital camera and was busy snapping away in the hope of catching some orbs or other "proof" of supernatural activity. It was only in the wainscotted room we found any. This room was small, covered in wood panelling with a small fireplace. The only item of furniture in this room as far as I can remember was a cheval glass mirror. I stood in front of this and asked Tom, my husband, to take a photo of me. He did so, checked the photo then said, "Now that's weird" and showed me the photo. Instead of my reflection or the reflection of the room itself, all that showed in the mirror were thick streaks of fog, kind of what you would imagine ectoplasm to look like. We were both shocked, but since our friends had gone ahead of us out of the room already, we didn't show it to them. Instead I told Tom to take another photo and this one turned out normally, showing my reflection and the room behind.
We finished our tour without further incident and looked forward to taking a closer look at the strange photo once seated in our favourite York pub shortly after. Of course we had told our friends what had happened and they were keen to view it too. Tom scrolled through all the pictures taken in the venue, including the one of my reflection in the mirror, but the one of the foggy 'ectoplasm' wasn't there. You all know that to delete a photo unintentionally is almost impossible as your camera will ask if you're sure you want to delete a photo before doing so. Tom definitely did not delete the photo intentionally so what happened to it? It certainly left us all with goosebumps!
On a subsequent visit to York and to the same attraction we again took photos and this time nothing untoward appeared. But I was on the website of the attraction sometime later, looking at photos other visitors had taken and someone had posted a photo very similar to the one we had taken and lost of the same mirror in that same room. That really gave me the shivers!
Sadly that tourist attraction has closed and is now a shop on Stonegate but whenever we go in it my husband, who is a bit sensitive, gets sweaty or tingling palms and light-headedness, especially in what was the "seance" room, even though we didn't have any experiences there during our previous visits.
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Cuddles, thanks for your comment. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a technophobe and don't really understand it! All I can tell you is the photos were taken on a digital camera (this would have been maybe 7 or 8 years ago) and we think all the other photos taken in that house remained on the camera. We only took the one other photo in that room, as I said in my story, and it turned out normal and stayed on the camera.