Chester: England's Most Haunted City

Spirit Footsteps?

Not far from Chester's Northgate arch stands the George and Dragon pub, an imposing Victorian black-and-white building seemingly haunted by the spirits of long-dead Roman soldiers.

The pub occupies a site straddling the old Roman road, or via decumana, leading out from the porta decumana, the north gate of the fortress. Roman military law forbade the burial of legionaries within the fortress, and so memorials to the dead lined the roads immediately outside. (Interestingly, many of the carved and sculpted memorial stones were reused by the Romans when they refortified the north wall of the fortress - and can now be seen on display in Chester's superb Grosvenor Museum).

Over the centuries, both landlords and regulars of the pub have heard the drum of marching feet beneath the floors - following the route of the old Roman road. Strangely, the sound seems loudest in the cellars, closer to the original Roman ground level, which once stood several feet below the modern surface.