The Ghost Tour

For eleven years, Ned Pike had made a living out of frightening people, gently. Every evening at half past seven he met his group outside York Minster, wearing a black cape and a top hat that had seen better days, and led them through the narrow streets for ninety minutes of murder, plague and unfinished business. He knew his script like the back of his hand. With a single well-timed pause, he could make a crowd of grown adults jump out of their skins.

That Tuesday, the fog rolled in off the river so thickly that he could barely see the end of his own lantern. The group stuck to him like glue, all except one. When Ned counted heads at the end of the Shambles, he came up one short. The missing tourist was Mr. Okafor, a soft-spoken retired engineer from Lagos who had asked sharp questions all evening and written the answers in a little notebook.

Ned's heart sank. Finding someone in that fog would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but he could hardly leave a guest to wander the city alone. He handed the rest of the group over to the landlord of the Golden Fleece, promised them a free drink on the house, and set off to retrace the route, stop by stop.

At the first stop, beside an old church wall, a woman in a long gray coat was standing perfectly still. Ned's blood ran cold. His script described a Grey Lady who haunted that very corner, waiting for a husband who never came home. Then the woman sneezed, apologized and explained that she was waiting for a taxi, which, judging by her expression, had also never come home.

On Stonegate he almost walked straight into a Roman soldier, complete with helmet and shield. Ned, who told the story of the ghostly legion every night, felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck, until the soldier asked him for directions to the station. He was an actor on his way home from a children's museum event and had missed his last bus. Ned pointed him in the right direction and pressed on, feeling more and more as though his own stories were playing tricks on him.

By the time he reached the river, he was chilled to the bone and running out of ideas. A man in a soot-stained jacket was sweeping the steps of a closed cafe. "You haven't seen a gentleman with a notebook, by any chance?" Ned asked, half expecting the man to vanish into thin air. Instead, the sweeper jerked his thumb towards the Golden Fleece. "Went in about ten minutes ago," he said. "Asked me if I was part of the show."

Ned found Mr. Okafor sitting by the fire, surrounded by the rest of the group and a plate of fries. He had not been lost at all, or at least not for long. He had stopped to photograph a doorway, lost sight of the lantern, and simply followed the smell of fries and the sound of laughter. "I assumed it was all part of the experience," he said cheerfully. "The lady in gray was very convincing."

Ned opened his mouth to explain, then thought better of it. The penny had dropped: he had just walked the best tour of his career, and nobody had paid a penny for it. The following week, he added three new characters to his script: a stranded Roman, a lady waiting for a taxi that never came, and a sweeper who knew everything. They went down a storm.