The candles flicker as John Hughes walks into the bar of The Rummer Hotel, dressed all in black – for a moment, it's almost as if even the candles know the dark tales the 45-year-old has echoing in his mind.

By day, John offers hope to the unemployed in his role as a Job Centre assistant, but when night descends upon the city, the Redcliffe man's thoughts turn to the gloomier side of life.

For the past five years, John has been running Bristol's ghost walks, leading those who don't suffer from a nervous disposition through the cobbled back-streets of the city centre, back into the gloomy and morbid tales of those who trod these pavements in days gone by.

Some of those long-gone folk, John explains in a whisper, still tread lightly through the shadows of our city.

As he prepares to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his tours with a pair of special Halloween walks, John says there could have been no better place for us to meet than The Rummer.

"This place is 600 years old," he tells me, as he sips his drink. "It's one of the oldest coaching inns in the country. Oliver Cromwell stayed here once and it was an old pub even then.

"It has its fair share of ghosts. There is an Elizabethan child, who died of pneumonia while staying here. She still wanders around, and has often been seen by staff.

"There's also supposed to be an 18th century slave that haunts this place. I brought one of the ghost walks in here a couple of years back and one of the ladies took a picture of the fireplace with her mobile phone camera. When she looked at the image, she was amazed to be able to clearly see a man's torso in the shot, complete with a waistcoat."

John admits that in all his time walking through some of Bristol's most haunted streets, he's yet to actually witness anything spooky for himself.

"But I've talked to lots of people whom I trust implicitly – including policemen and firemen, who simply aren't the sort of folk to make things up," he says.

John first had the idea for the walks after taking a ghost tour in London.

"While I was on the walk, I started wondering why there wasn't something similar back home in Bristol," he says. "There's so much history in the city, I knew there must be plenty of ghost stories.

"So I decided to try to set one up myself. I spent eight months researching the stories. I walked around and talked to people about ghosts sightings to get some real depth and detail.

"For example, I talked to the firemen at the station off Temple Way, who have been frightened by the ghost of an old Templar Knight in their kitchen.

"Then there was the backstage staff at the Old Vic who were terrorised by a poltergeist in the props room. It's supposed to be the ghost of a young boy who worked at the theatre in the 18th century. He painted the scenery, but slipped and fell to his death.

"Pubs always seem to have plenty of ghosts, but the White Hart near the bus station is particularly haunted. There were two brothers who fought to the death there in the 1700s, and now one of them haunts the pub.

"Then there's the Odeon in Union Street, which is reputed to be haunted by Parrington Jackson, who was the manager there in the 1940s. He was shot dead in the back office. The gunman, who was never caught, timed his shots to coincide with the gunshots in the film that was being shown in the cinema that night."

John recently took the cast of the spooky BBC drama Being Human on a walk, when they took a break from filming in the city.

"They told me that while they were filming a scene in an old ward at the Bristol General Hospital, they saw the ghost of a 1940s nurse walking along the empty corridor.

"She hanged herself at the hospital after falling in love with a German prisoner of war who was being treated there."

But not all of Bristol's ghosts are quite so recently deceased. All Saint's Church, off Corn Street, is reputed to be haunted by monks murdered there by Henry VIII's men during the Reformation.

"There is the sad tale of the stable boy at the Llandoger Trow pub in King Street," John says. "He died there more than a hundred years ago. He is said to have worn a caliper on his legs and regulars have reported hearing the metal from the ghost's calipers scraping across the wooden floors in the rooms above the bar."

● The Special Halloween walks run this evening at 10pm and tomorrow at 10pm. Advance booking required. Tickets are £5 for adults, £4 for students, £3 for children. For details, call 07766 258407.

Throughout the rest of the year, the ghost walks run every Friday evening at 8pm, from outside the cathedral.