Ghost Stories and Lore from British Teachers

A vase lifts from its shelf and shatters. A headmaster still patrols for latecomers, centuries after his own funeral. A boy who studied here four hundred years ago is said to walk the halls still - and everyone knows his name. Welcome to the haunted history of the British school.

For as long as Britain has built schools, it has told stories about them. Behind the chapel services and the exam timetables, in the chalk dust of the oldest classrooms and the locked wings nobody uses after dark, generations of pupils and teachers have reported something else entirely - footsteps with no one behind them, monks who never left the cloisters, and masters whose discipline outlasted their own lives.

In Ghost Stories and Lore from British Teachers, you will step into the corridors of England, Scotland, and Wales's oldest and most storied schools. From the real former pupil of York's St Peter's School whose spirit is said to remain, to a first-hand 1980s account from a teacher at one of Edinburgh's grandest institutions, this collection gathers genuine testimony, documented tradition, and the true history behind Britain's most haunted classrooms.

Drawing on historical record, first-hand witness accounts, and the folklore passed between generations of pupils, this book grounds every story in a real school, a real place, and - wherever the record allows - a real person.

Step through the gates and discover:

• The Restless Pupil: Guy Fawkes, a genuine former pupil of St Peter's, York, said to walk its halls still.
• A Teacher's Own Account: a first-hand 1980s testimony of cold spots, a levitating vase, and a shadow that would not explain itself.
• The Green Lady of Roath Park: Cardiff's gentlest, most beloved school ghost, cherished rather than feared.
• The Man Who Invented the School Ghost Story: M. R. James, and the tradition this whole book belongs to.