Halloween Ghost Tours!

Hi guys,


So as some of you may know, I'm currently doing a Masters in Print Journalism at Sheffield University, which is why I haven't been posting as many blog posts recently but I promise I haven't forgotten and will still be updating my blog as regularly as I can! 


For Halloween, I went on a spooky ghost tour around Sheffield with my flatmates and decided to write a quick story about it, hope you enjoy!

A fuzzy but atmospheric image of Mr P Dreadful describing a ghost outside the Lyceum Theatre.

Sheffield’s ghostly secrets are being retold in spooky strolls around its back streets. The Steel City Ghost Walks are especially popular at Halloween and Mr P Dreadful, the city’s resident ghost whisperer, can surely guarantee a chilling experience. As you follow him around the dark alleyways of the city, you will be regaled with tales of murder, scandal and ghostly encounters lasting to the present day. To make it worse, the stories are not based on rumour but on years of meticulous research and eye-witness accounts.

The ghost walks, which are unique every time, go across a variety of paths and sights, including the site of the Adelphi Hotel, the Lyceum Theatre and the Old Queen’s Head pub, one of the oldest buildings in the city.

Mr P Dreadful, whose namesake comes from the lurid story-telling paper the Penny Dreadful, is a clairvoyant and a medium. He claims to have been able to see and speak to the dead since he was a baby.

The walks were set up seven years ago, beginning as a joke with the Job Centre. But who’s laughing now? Mr P Dreadful, or 41-year-old Darren Johnson-Smith, has had over 30,000 people on his tours and wrote a book called ‘Haunted Sheffield’. His wife, Mrs J Dreadful, also runs the tours and has links with the supernatural. She reads tarot cards and claims to hear and smell the dead.

He said: “Even if I wanted to cheat on her, I couldn’t. She’d know exactly who I’d been with, at what time and where!”

The Ghost Tours run on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and begin at 7:30pm at the Town Hall steps. 

Horrendous picture of me with Mr P Dreadful, but it was the only one I had!

Thanks for reading,

Emma. xx