The Lost Boys of York

10 or 11 years old, scared, bedraggled, glimpsed from the corner of your eye before vanishing into the shadows; the lost boy of York is one of the more enduring legends of my favourite city, which is kind of strange when you realise the details are actually quite sparse.

There is no name, no agreed upon location, very few stories even of how the ghost came to be. People tend to love a good “origin story” for a ghostly visitor (usually steeped in tragedy) but there is next to nothing for the lost boy. One report suggests he may have drowned in the river Ouse during a dare gone wrong but that’s about as far as we can get.

For some of the ghosts in The Book and the Blade I was able to dig into old census records, biographies of famous people, or the exceptional Criminal and Execution Records and make some interesting connections (more on that in future posts) but for the lost boy there was very little.

Don’t get me wrong, a quick online search throws up a hundred blog posts, newspaper articles, and magazine entries about this mysterious inhabitant but they all pretty much say the same thing… there’s a ghost of a boy and he’s scared. That’s not much to play with.

So, I made it up.

I started with what we did have… he’s young, he’s afraid, he runs away or vanishes as soon as anyone sees him.

Arthur stepped forward, and their eyes met, the boy’s widening in fright, the whites showing against the grime of his face. Then, with a barely perceptible shake of the head and a gasp, he was gone, turning to flee up the stairs.

I believe we are hardwired to care for the innocent (most of us anyway) and there is something about a scared and bedraggled child that should pull at all our heart strings. This is what happened to Arthur. In fact, it’s what starts him on the whole adventure in the first place. Admittedly, there was also a cat doing some pretty impressive David-Bowie-in-Labyrinth-parkour to catch his attention (and get him out of the pub), but it was the vision of the lost boy that really set the wheels in motion.

Arthur is a drunk. He is not a particularly good man. But he is trying.

“Are you okay?” he shouted into the evening, a hint of pleading on the edge of his voice. “I just want to know you’re okay. I’m not chasing you,” he added, knowing as he did so that this was the calling cry of perverts and stalkers the world over. The night replied with judgemental silence and a cool breeze.

The lost boy of York has no specified location so I decided early on he was going to appear all over the city. I started him here at Micklegate Bar and peppered him throughout Arthur’s journey home. Originally, I was just going to use him as a bit of a jump-scare device or even comic-relief, but as I went on I realised I wanted to know more. I figured there must be some reason why the few agreed upon points for this legend were that the boy was scared and ran if anyone made eye contact.

To me, that spoke of loneliness, and what do lonely children want other than to be seen?

Arthur can see ghosts… and he has a heart. Every time the boy appeared I seemed to discover more about him and this came about largely because Arthur asked questions… and he listened.

Details emerged about the boy’s life that I never planned. He grew as the story grew, and by the time I’d finished the first draft, “Tom” was an integral part of the whole thing. But of course there’s a twist…

Arthur had seen something as the boy turned his back and ran, something familiar that should not have been. He needed to get up. He needed to get it together and go after the spirit—he needed to talk to him again. The ghost of the boy wearing a grey Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt.

Find out more in The Book and the Blade!

Thanks for reading,

Alex