Walpurga’s Wells: A Ghost Tour of Murders, Plagues and Hangmen

Wells is a city where beauty and darkness have always coexisted.

On this walking tour, you’ll explore the city’s ghostly history through the eyes of Walpurga the Wells Witch, hearing about murders, plagues, and restless spirits lurking behind medieval facades.

The tour starts at St. Cuthbert’s Church, where marble memorials honour the Tudway family – slave traders who bought respectability from the profits of their Caribbean plantations. You’ll pass a building where executions took place, visit the City Arms pub – a former jail where paranormal investigators recorded off-the-scale spirit activity – and walk streets whose very names hint at dark histories.

Along the way, you’ll hear how the Bloody Assizes of 1685 condemned hundreds of men to death or slavery in a single day, and why a grinning Cavalier ghost nicknamed “Charlie” still haunts the former King Charles Parlour on the High Street.

You’ll make your way to Vicar’s Close, the oldest inhabited street in the UK, where shadowy figures are said to move between the houses at night. The tour ends at the Bishop’s Palace moat, where the ghosts of Bishop Richard Kidder and his wife – crushed in their bed when chimney stacks collapsed during the Great Storm of 1703 – are still seen on the battlements.

On this 45-minute tour, you’ll also have a chance to:

• See Wells Cathedral, where a phantom monk roams the cloisters, and an invisible choir has been heard singing for centuries
• Hear how paranormal investigators encountered the ghosts of “Emily,” “Isabel,” and a menacing hangman at the City Arms
• Learn the story of Joshua Parker, the butcher whose murderous 1839 attack on his wife shocked the city
• Visit Chapter House, where plague victims were piled in 1348 and ghostly moans are still reported
• Discover the legend of the Wells dragon, whose dying curse still demands to be remembered
• Explore the site of St. Andrew’s Well, the ancient spring where the voices of water sprites can be heard

By the end of this tour, you’ll have encountered the unsettling stories that lie just beneath Wells’ polished medieval surface – where tales of myths, murders and spirits refuse to rest.