Before York's first Roman festival, the city's leading ghost hunter RACHEL LACY went on night patrol to seek the spirits of Eboracum

THE announcement that this weekend is the first Eboracum Roman Festival was just the excuse I needed to round up some friends to spend a night in the Roman Bath looking for ghosts - not in the pub, but the ancient bath underneath.

To our knowledge, this was only the second time somebody had spent the night down in the first century bathing place since it was rediscovered beneath the St Sampson's Square pub in 1930.

It certainly was the first time a proper ghost investigation had been conducted there.

People keep asking me why I go looking for ghosts when I scream, run away or mangle my friends when one appears.

My answer is always the same: I'm addicted to the adrenaline buzz.

There is also the excitement of feeling you have contacted the spirits; seen proof before your eyes of their existence and communicated with them on some level.

In York, the world's most haunted city, there are many opportunities for the ghost hunter. The fun now is finding the most haunted, the most frightening, or the most bizarre places to look for the spirits. The Roman Bath was an exciting prospect.

On our first visit to the bath early in the evening Diana Jarvis, the celebrity medium who has appeared frequently on television during her ghost-hunting activities, picked up something.

With no prior knowledge of the place, she went straight to the corner where there had been "something" sighted on the only other occasion a brave soul "slept in the bath".

She said she had a vision of two men on a latrine talking politics, the sort of politics that sent shivers down her spine and would end up in blood being spilt. This may be another first, seeing ghosts on a lavatory!

Our ghost-hunting group returned at midnight when the pub was quiet and placed "trigger" objects around the bath. This is something which would be relevant to people from a different era, and is drawn on paper or using chalk on the floor. Checks are made later to see whether they move.

We use coins, and a cross as a religious artefact, although this time we added a statue of Diana (the Roman goddess, not our medium). Disappointingly, the objects remained undisturbed.

More encouraging was Diana Jarvis's demonstration of psychometry, the ability to supposedly find facts about events by touching objects related to them. She laid her hand on a piece of stone paving and concentrated, and a few minutes later described an image of a woman giving birth, accompanied by the smell of juniper berries and something else unknown, essentially a "fresher smell than pine" but with a drug-like effect.

The mother was attended by three other women, including a priestess, who was there in the name of Hesta or Hestia, and the child being born was a first-born son called Caldus.

It wasn't until the next day I researched all this information to find that Di had provided us with the Greek name for Vesta, goddess of the hearth, and personification of the ceremonial flame, a pure and peace-loving goddess.

In Roman times juniper was used as an airborne disinfectant, clary sage was used in childbirth and, under certain conditions, can be hallucinogenic.

Roman women usually gave birth in their own homes surrounded by female relatives and a midwife, and Caldus was a genuine Roman name. Not proof that what Diana saw was genuine, but she was spookily accurate.

After a seance, in which a vision of a slave and a Roman legionnaire in full armour, including a plumed helmet, appeared to me, we actually managed to get some sleep.

Waking early, I spent an increasingly disturbing quarter of an hour listening to three heavy, distinct footfalls from the walkway at the corner of the bath.

No one could have got there without walking across a longish length of the metal floor, which I would have heard.

Ten minutes later I again heard someone walking towards us down the walkway, only this time it sounded like shoes on wood. But there are no wooden floors down there. I have since been told by Keith Mulhearn, organiser of the forthcoming Roman festival, that there were wooden floors there from about the 1940s to the 1990s. It seemed we had a more modern ghost.

After a much-needed coffee in the Roman Bath, I returned downstairs, picked up some coins near the fountain, added one of my own and threw them into the pool while saying a prayer for any lost souls we disturbed during the night.

As I stood in the caldarium (the Roman name for the steam bath) I heard someone whisper "save me". Di started taking pictures with a digital camera, and captured some amazing photographs of orbs, the balls of light that are supposedly the sign of a spirit being present.

We managed to get sequences of them in motion, multiple ones on the same shot, and some of the biggest and clearest orbs we have ever seen.

Perhaps the ghosts of Roman times had finally come to greet us...

Updated: 11:08 Wednesday, July 23, 2003