HERE'S good news for thrifty ghostbusters - a half-price haunting. Hallowe'en may be over for another year, but in Europe's most spirit-ridden city the dead can never rest in peace.

York's second Ghost Festival has been prodding at poltergeists and egging on ectoplasm since Friday. It climaxes this coming Saturday with a vigil at one of the spookiest spots in town: York Dungeon. Twenty of your mortal pounds buys you nearly 12 hours of sheer terror.

Festival organiser Psychic & Spectral Investigations (PSI) was planning to sell tickets for twice that but, thanks to a cash injection by the York@Large group, the prices have been halved.

The price includes a Necropolis: City Of The Dead ghost walk around York. Then you spend the night with Guy Fawkes, Dick Turpin and assorted plague victims in the bowels of York Dungeon. By 6am survivors will know whether the waxworks come to life after dark.

Appropriately enough for the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, the thrust of the evening is a search for Mr Fawkes, under the title Saint Or Sinner? This is the largest investigation ever undertaken by PSI and will be filmed for later release on DVD.

Booking is essential: telephone 07903 506219 to get your ticket. Half of the takings go to charity.

EXPECT your spine to be chilled like a good Chardonnay if an earlier Ghost Festival investigation is anything to go by.

York Ghost Finder General Rachel Lacy and her team stayed overnight at the Ebor Inn, Bishopthorpe, last Friday.

They took several photographs including one which showed the bar mirror. In it can be seen the reflection of an unknown person...

"I did my first ever investigation at the Ebor almost exactly four years ago," said Rachel, "so I've been waiting for a photo like this since then. A reflection of a person who wasn't physically there is worth shouting about!"

ON the anniversary of Trafalgar we asked: where did Boney go?

We referred to the oak model of a snuff-taking Napoleon seen for many years outside a newsagents in Lendal, York.

Peter A Jackson, of Shipton Road, York, got in touch to tell us how Napoleon stood outside the former toll booth at the Museum Street end of Lendal Bridge in 1904, and moved to Tanner's Moat in the 1920s.

He also remembers the figure on Kirkgate in the Castle Museum.

We are delighted to report that we have found Boney's present location. "Since 1997 he has been living in comfort in the Merchant Adventurers' Hall," reveals James Finlay, clerk to the Company of Merchant Adventurers, "where he is seen by thousands of visitors each year, apart it would seem from those from the York Evening Press!"

He was on loan to the company, said James, who added: "Why not come and pay him a visit?"

We did, and there was the great emperor, in a corner of a room off the Great Hall, with his back to Marks & Spencer's. Snuff said.

Updated: 11:15 Wednesday, November 02, 2005