The Golden Fleece, York

The Golden Fleece takes its name from the wool trade that made medieval York rich, and its first appearance in the York City Archives is in 1503, when it was probably a merchant's house. It has been an inn since about 1656, receiving its licence in 1668, and it has the tilt and timber to prove it: the building leans visibly, having been built without foundations on the soft ground beside the old Roman road that ran through Eboracum. Roman remains lie beneath the cellar, which is where the marching soldiers of the ghost stories are said to come from.

By the early eighteenth century the inn belonged to John Peckett, Lord Mayor of York in 1701, and his wife Alice. The alley behind the pub is still called Lady Peckett's Yard in her honour, and she has never, in the pub's telling, entirely left. Its position at the foot of the Shambles, York's famous street of overhanging butchers' shops, meant that for centuries the inn's trade was drovers, traders and, later, coach passengers, and the pub's cellars were reportedly used as a temporary mortuary for bodies brought from the gallows at the Knavesmire. A replica of the skull of Elizabeth Johnson, hanged there on 23 August 1800, is on display in the bar; the pub made the papers when the skull was stolen.

The twentieth century brought the wartime tragedy of an airman, long described as Canadian, said to have fallen from an upper window, and the peace brought the ghost walkers. In 2002 the International Ghost Research Foundation named York the most haunted city in Europe, counting 504 hauntings within the walls, and the Golden Fleece, small, old, crooked and full of stories, has been the star of the city's ghost tours ever since. It remains a working pub with food, ale and, on the floors above, four bedrooms for the brave.

The Golden Fleece's national moment came on 19 April 2005, when Most Haunted broadcast an episode filmed here with Yvette Fielding joined by the Radio 1 presenter Scott Mills and his team. The programme presented the pub as York's most haunted and spent the night on the stairs, in the cellar and in the bedrooms; the episode is remembered more for its guests' nerves than for anything definitive, but it fixed the pub on the map for a generation of ghost hunters, and the pub has traded happily on the association ever since.

The everyday reports come from guests and staff. The Shambles Room, with its four-poster overlooking the medieval street, has the reputation for the most unsettling nights: guests describe being touched or pushed, the bedclothes tugged, and a hostile atmosphere that some have found too much to sleep through. Elsewhere on the upper floors, the recurring claims are footsteps on the stairs after closing, attributed to Lady Peckett, the airman glimpsed at the window, and the sense of being followed along the crooked corridor. One much-quoted online review complained not of ghosts but of an unearthly smell in the room, which is the sort of thing a 500-year-old building can produce without supernatural help.

Investigators who hire the pub for overnight events report knocks in the cellar, glasses moving on the bar and voices on their recorders, and photographs of orbs and shadows circulate freely. The sceptical case is easy to make: the building tilts, creaks and draughts, every guest arrives primed by a ghost walk, and a pub full of skeletons, skulls and ghost signage is not a neutral laboratory. But York's ghost economy runs on exactly that mixture of history and suggestion, and the Golden Fleece is its most cheerful example.

The Golden Fleece is at 16 Pavement in the centre of York, North Yorkshire, at the bottom of the Shambles and a few minutes' walk from the Minster, Clifford's Tower and the railway station. It is a working pub, open daily for drinks and food, with two bars, a function room and a menu that runs from baguettes to giant Yorkshire puddings; you can simply walk in, though it fills fast in the evenings and at weekends. The building is old and steep, with narrow stairs to the bedrooms and no lift, so it is not suitable for anyone who cannot manage stairs. There is no parking at the pub; use the city car parks or the park-and-ride.

To stay, book one of the four bedrooms above the bar: the Shambles Room with its king-size four-poster overlooking the street, the Minster Suite with a four-poster and private lounge, the Lady Peckett's Room, a cosy double, and the St Catherine's Room, a twin or triple with its en-suite hidden in a secret room. Breakfast is included and rooms start from around £90 for two. The pub also hosts occasional ghost-hunt evenings with outside operators. York's nightly ghost walks, several of which stop outside the Golden Fleece, make an obvious warm-up, and if the rooms are full the city has hundreds of hotels, inns and guesthouses within the walls, including a number of other pubs with reputations of their own.