The Golden Fleece on Pavement ranks among York's oldest surviving pubs, and it trades heavily, and honestly, on its established reputation as the city's most haunted, a claim it backs up with a genuinely developed cast of figures rather than a single vague presence. The best-attested resident by far is Lady Alice Peckett, wife of John Peckett, a Georgian-era Lord Mayor of York and former landlord of the inn himself, a genuine historical figure whose connection to the building gives her haunting real documented weight. She is said to walk the stairs and corridors in the early hours, fussing over the furniture as though still tending to her own household, and staff have blamed her directly for items being found rearranged overnight, exactly the kind of meticulous domestic attention a former landlord's wife might plausibly have maintained in life.
A second recurring figure is a Canadian airman, sometimes named specifically as Geoff Monroe, said to have died after a fall from a first-floor window in 1945 while stationed in York during the closing months of the Second World War. He is reported on the upper floor still dressed in full uniform, a wartime tragedy that has left its own distinct mark on the building quite separate from Lady Peckett's own Georgian-era presence.
Between these two well-developed figures and a handful of other, considerably less clearly attested spirits, the pub's own publicity claims as many as fifteen ghosts in total, a number genuinely worth treating as marketing rather than as any kind of documented count of actual reported sightings. Guests and staff continue nonetheless to report footsteps, cold spots, and a general, persistent sense of being watched on the stairs, keeping the Golden Fleece's reputation as vividly alive today as its long list of claimed ghosts suggests.
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