NORWICH, England, September 20 (Reuters Life!) - They say that on a January night you can still hear the hooves of Oliver Cromwell's slaughtered cavalry echoing under the cobbles of Tombland -- the most haunted part of the ancient city of Norwich.
And they are not the only ones who stalk the streets of this Fenland city -- there are ghostly monks, strangled girls, soldiers, rebels and even a girl who choked to death eating her own parents to stay alive.
For most people who take part in Dave Chisnell's twice-weekly ghost tours of the city not far from where 700,000-year-old evidence of human habitation was discovered last year, it is pure theatre.
But for long-time Norwich resident Lee Goldin, 63, this is no joke.
"I have seen two ghosts in my life. I used to live in a haunted house in this city. I had to steel myself to come along tonight. I want to see one more. I want to be sure I am not imagining things," she told Reuters on a muggy September night tour.
Her ghost tour addict son Carl Paston, 43, is equally adamant. He has seen eight ghosts in his life -- including the executed second wife of King Henry 8 and mother of Gloriana, Elizabeth I -- Anne Boleyn.
They are among some 50 people following caped tour leader Chisnell as he leads his group from Norwich's oldest pub -- the 750-year-old Adam and Eve -- on a winding route through the back streets of the city whose first Cathedral dates back to the Norman conquest in 1066.
In fact, so many times have differing peoples with differing religious beliefs occupied Norwich that the city boasts a church for every week of the year -- and contrarily used to brag it had a pub for every day of the week.
SPINE-CHILLING TALES
The story of Cromwell's lost army is chilling.
Hunting a dissident royalist group Cromwell sent an army group into Norwich -- which is supposedly undercut with smugglers tunnels large enough to accommodate men even on horseback. They never came back.
The royalists, knowing they were coming, laid wires across the tunnels and when the horses and riders finally turned the corner they lifted them -- decapitating horse and rider at the same time.
Although no one has successfully explained how to commit such mass execution, it grabs the audience -- standing on this platform with the imposing cathedral behind them and on the cobble stones said to reverberate with the lost soldiers.
Perhaps the most poignant story Chisnell tells is of the Lady in Gray -- the ghost of a young girl locked up in the family house with her kin at the height of the plague in 1578 because people thought everyone inside was dead but were too scared of infection to enter.
"When they opened the house a few weeks later to take the bodies out for burial they found human teeth marks on the legs of the parents and flesh in the throat of the girl -- she had choked to death trying to stay alive," Chisnell said.
Perhaps one of the most enigmatic of Norwich's ghosts is a monk -- a stage struck monk to boot.
At the theatre in Madder Market -- madder means dyer in ancient English -- an obviously stage-struck spirit monk has been regularly seen, but not by all.
"At one recent staging of "Agnes of God" a group of school children of between nine and 13 came along to see it," Chisnell said.
"The following day back at school they were asked to write up their experiences. 13 of the 43 said the best bit was when the monk came across the stage -- there is no monk in that play."
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