For one of our evenings in Edinburgh, we did a ghost tour with Mercat Tours. The main reason why I wanted to do this tour was so that I could see the underground vaults that form the South Bridge's foundations. The South Bridge now appears as a street on fairly level ground with buildings on either side, but it is actually a man-made structure linking multiple hills that had made travel on this side of the city difficult. Along with the North Bridge, these structures allowed Edinburgh to expand beyond the Royal Mile. Completed in 1788, the South Bridge was the first Edinburgh street purposely built to be a shopping street. Tenements and stores were built alongside the bridges' arches so that these arches were sealed off, and only a small section of the bridge's structure is now visible. Once these buildings sealed off the arches, numerous sunless vaults formed multiple stories of rooms underneath the South Bridge. These vaults were supposed to become storerooms and stores, but the roofs leaked so much that the owners quickly abandoned them. A shadow economy, both literally and figuratively, formed in the dark vaults. Thirty years after the bridge's completion, the city government sealed off the vaults and filled the chambers with rocks and rubble to prevent crime. In 1985 the government began to reopen the vaults, and they are now a tourist attraction. Ironically, some of the stores on the South Bridge now use these old vaults for their original purpose, as storerooms.
The tour itself was probably one of the cooler things I've done in Edinburgh. The tour guide was part-historian and part-actor as he added a little flavor to the historical narrative. He told a lot of stories about the city that I didn't know, and I'm now interested read more about the city's history. The whole tour wasn't about ghost stories even though this was the main focus. The first bit retold a story about torture and punishment in the city, and at another stop told he explained how people lived in Old Town. Both of these stories led into the telling of ghost stories. Then we went into the vaults, which was as cool as I thought it would be. Since we paid a little extra, we got to have another session with the tour guide inside a vault where we had wine and beer. In this session we heard a couple more ghost stories and could ask the guide questions. Overall, I highly recommend that tourists to Edinburgh take a ghost tour or some other history tour. There are also witch tours, Royal Mile tours, and graveyard tours.
This is on the south side of St Giles Cathedral.
A criminal was hanged just outside the church,
but the gallows malfunctioned so that the dude
strangled for a while. The officials brought him
down and into this side of the church where they
intended to declare him dead. He was actually
still alive, so they had to hang him again.
When he finally died, this dude was known
for having endured the longest hanging in history.
According to legend, his ghost walks back and forth
from where the gallows would have been and
into the stairs seen in this photo because he has
to relive his hanging every night.
He walks into the stairs instead of up the stairs
because the stairs were not built until after the hanging.
The yellow plaque in this parking lot marks
where John Knox is buried outside of St Giles Cathedral.
It was very prestigious to be buried next to
this church, so the graveyard became overcrowded.
Eventually, the grave diggers had to push down the bodies
in order to make more room for more corpses.
After a good rain that would wash away the top layer of soil,
the rotting heads of corpses would be visible.
Shortly after John Knox was buried here, the government
declared the graveyard closed.
Much later the graveyard became a parking lot.
This shows how Scotland treats its national heroes.
A candle inside the underground vaults.
Inside one of the haunted vaults.
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