In the English city of York, plumber Harry Martindale was known to many as a conscientious employee who will do any work with high quality and on time. Apparently, for this reason, he was invited to establish a central heating system in the basement of the city treasury.
It happened in February 1953. From early morning, the phlegmatic Martindale was busy with the work assigned to him. Everything went on as usual. But only until Harry heard an incomprehensible noise, which, as it seemed to him, came from the wall of the room in which he worked.
Slightly surprised by the incomprehensible sounds, Harry stopped working for a while and listened. Subsequently, he recalled: “At first I assumed that I heard the sounds of a radio receiver working somewhere nearby. I calmed down and continued what I had started."
But when the incomprehensible sounds, and in many ways erratic, began to gradually build up, Harry began to doubt that the receiver was playing them, and therefore became slightly worried.
But he did not give up the work he had begun, but carefully climbed onto the ladder to inspect the upper part of the wall. And just at that very time, he heard some incomprehensible fuss below, as if something alive was swarming there. Martindale dropped his eyes and was almost stunned: a man stepped out of the wall, on whose head a helmet of a Roman soldier was put on.
“I looked frightened at the helmet with a plume of feathers and did not know what to do, - later recalled Harry. - I understood perfectly well that whoever it was, he still shouldn't have been in the basement next to me. I took a step back in horror and fell down the stairs. Then he crept cautiously to the corner of the basement. Before me stood the massive figure of a Roman soldier. He came out of one wall and headed for the opposite. In the hands of the warrior was a trumpet, which emitted those loud sounds that surprised me so much. Immediately behind the trumpeter, a horse appeared from the wall. Another legionnaire was astride it. Following the horse, new Roman legionaries began to appear from the wall in twos. There were at least twenty of them.
Horror is far from the word that can define the state in which I was in those minutes. I literally felt my hair stand on end. And at the same instant I suddenly thought that if they looked to the right, they would see me here, in the corner. But luckily for me, this did not happen. They just stared ahead and disappeared into the opposite wall. When the last Roman passed through the wall and there was silence, I rushed out of the basement."
Not remembering himself from fear, Harry ran out of the basement and rushed to the office of the local museum, which was located in the Treasury building.
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The curator of the museum, who was sorting through some papers at that time, tore his eyes from the table and looked at Harry, out of breath.
“Judging by your appearance, you have never met the Romans. I guessed? The curator of the museum asked when the plumber's breathing recovered slightly. He invited Harry to sit on the offered chair and tell everything in order, and not missing even the smallest details.
Martindale said that “the Romans wore metal helmets that converged under the chin, and from my place, by the light of a single light, I saw that their faces were overgrown with stubble and were very tired. They had multi-colored feathers on their helmets that went down to the back of their heads. The clothes were the same, but covered with dust and dirty, as if they had been doing some hard physical exercise for a long time. Above the entire body of the legionnaires were leather strips, and below them were green skirts. They all had short swords on their right sides that looked like elongated daggers. On the left side, everyone carried a round shield ….
When Harry finished his story, he thought for a minute, and then added: "I also cannot understand in any way why I saw the soldiers leaving the wall only from the knee and up."
After he had finished speaking, the keeper took two sheets of paper from the closet and showed them to Harry. It turned out that these were written testimonies of two visitors to the museum, who also claimed to have seen ghostly legionnaires.
After that, Harry calmed down a bit. But, apparently, the shock caused by the meeting with the ghosts had such a strong effect on the plumber that he and his family soon moved to another city - away from the "damned" place.
The museum curator carefully recorded the strange story that happened to Martindale and, along with two other testimonies, sent it to the English archaeologists Peter Wenham and Patrick Ottaway. The scientists reacted very quickly to the information received and arrived in York in 1954. Having received the appropriate permits, they immediately began archaeological research in the basement of the city treasury.
The work was carried out very actively, therefore, on the third day, having removed a half-meter layer of rubble and soil, the researchers stumbled upon stone slabs. This, as it turned out later, was a section of an ancient Roman road!..
But this fact did not become a sensational scientific discovery, since historians have long known that the city of York at the beginning of the new era was built in the place where the military camp of the IX Roman Legion was once located. And based on some facts, scientists came to the conclusion that the city treasury, built much later, was located on top of the main road of the camp.
That is, it was located slightly below the basement floor of the Treasury building. And it was precisely by this circumstance that archaeologists explained why Martindale could not see the legs of ghosts.
Scientists also drew the attention of skeptical opponents to the fact that Martindale, who did not have deep knowledge of the history of Ancient Rome, as well as no idea about the weapons of Roman soldiers, still gave a fairly accurate description of the legionaries.
However, one of the skeptics reasonably noted that in almost every textbook on the history of Rome, you can find illustrations of Roman soldiers with rectangular shields, but not with round ones, as Martindale stated.
Ottaway, in turn, turned this fact in his favor, proving that the IX Legion was formed not from hereditary Romans, but from the local population - the Britons and Saxons, who just used round shields.
“The likelihood that the plumber Martindale was able to subtract this subtlety somewhere is very small. So Harry really saw warriors who are over 18 hundred years old,”Ottaway drew a line.
And after a while, Wenham and Ottaway explained the fact why the ghosts of the Roman legionaries, whom Martindale saw in the basement, looked very exhausted. It turns out that 10 kilometers from York were the living and training premises of the soldiers of the IX Legion.
“And there is nothing surprising in the fact that the legionnaires looked tired and dirty. After all, they were engaged in military training all day, and then to the place of the legion's deployment they made a ten-kilometer march in full combat gear, explained Peter Wenham …
Another story related to the ghosts of legionaries took place in the Algerian desert in May 1912. True, this time there were not at all the ghosts of the ancient Roman soldiers, but French soldiers.
It was during these days that the French legionnaires, stationed in a remote blockhouse, witnessed a strange sight: they saw the ghosts of their comrades walking on the sand. This case has never been the subject of special research, but was recorded and remains one of the most interesting and unusual examples of collective visions.
According to René Dupre, who described the event, when his company marched with two others towards the blockhouse, about two miles from their destination, they were ambushed by the Arabs and killed five legionnaires before fleeing. The dead were immediately buried, and stones were placed on the graves so that animals could not dig them up.
One night, two weeks after this incident, Dupre was on guard. At about midnight, he noticed a lone human figure staggering and dodging toward the post. As the man approached, Dupre could see by the moonlight that he was wearing the uniform of a legionnaire. Then Dupre suddenly realized that he could see other objects through his figure.
Dupre called other legionnaires, one of whom recognized Ledoux in a strange figure - one of the killed soldiers.
Four nights later, Ledoux's ghost reappeared. It happened at 1 hour 30 minutes after midnight. He, like the last time, walked, swaying, and then disappeared. One of the sentries said he saw blood on the phantom's face. And Ledoux was shot in the temple.
Three nights later, Dupre took up his night watch again. But this time he and the soldiers who were next to him noticed another lone phantom. In this figure, which also staggered from side to side, they recognized another killed - Schmidt, who reappeared two nights later.
No one could explain the strange movements of the ghosts until one of the legionnaires suggested that Ledoux and Schmidt were looking for each other. After all, during their lifetime they were close friends.
On the fifteenth night after Dupre first saw the ghost of Ledoux, he and about 30 other legionnaires at about two in the morning noticed two ghostly figures walking side by side in the sand. They were so far away that it was impossible to recognize them. But, of course, everyone assumed that it was Ledoux and Schmidt, who finally found each other.
The ghosts could be seen for about a minute, and then they disappeared into the dunes, and one of them, as if in greeting, raised his hand. After that, no one else saw the ghosts.
Bernatsky Anatoly