Spooked in Scotland-Supernaturl Shnanigans in Black-Hearted Edinburgh

[Witch Miriam]

Spooked In Scotland - Supernatural Shenanigans In Black-Hearted Edinburgh
By Steenie Harvey, Living Magazine

A moonless night at the Mercat Cross on Edinburgh's Royal Mile—and it's Ghost Busters gone mad. Thirty people are following a black-cloaked witch down Advocate's Close. From the screeches, something nasty is happening in the City Chambers porticoes . . . maybe it's to do with the body-snatcher now racing down High Street. And here comes a vampire, chivvying his charges behind St. Giles High Kirk. There'll soon be more screams if the trailing brown-cowled monk is a "jumper-oot."

Most Edinburgh ghost walks are light-hearted. Most, but not all. Tonight I'm meeting Katie, my guide for the "City of the Dead" tour. No children, no pregnant women, no people with heart conditions. Our destination is Greyfriars Kirkyard. Forget those heart-warming stories about Greyfriars Bobby, the faithful Skye terrier. The Kirkyard has a nightmarish reputation for supernatural shenanigans.

Advertising boards post rave reviews: "Puts the other tours in the shade...the capital's REAL ghost tour" (Edinburgh Evening News); "Expertly brings Scotland's dark history to life" (Discovery Channel); "The best documented poltergeist case in history" (Radio Scotland); "Makes Blair Witch look tame" (Fox); "You're standing inside a tomb with 20 other people—and the girl next to you just fainted."

In the last four years, over 400 participants on this walk have apparently been clawed, bitten, and thumped by a poltergeist—120 were actually knocked unconscious. Fantastic...I can't wait to trade punches with a supernatural thug!

Horror Upon Horror

What transpired inside the graveyard? I'll tell you later. But first I want to dispel the myth that Edinburgh is staid and genteel. Although it's billed The Athens of the North, the Old Town's cut-throat alleyways are more suggestive of a Palermo of the North. Factor in the nightly fright-fest, and it's puzzling why whole coach-loads of visitors aren't collapsing into gibbering heaps.

Listen closely and you may hear the satanic Major Weir's death coach rattling down West Bow's cobbles toward the Grassmarket gallows. Or the lone drummer boy, trapped forever in subterranean passageways below the Royal Mile. And before wandering alone down Canongate, take heed that it's supposedly haunted by an aristocratic madman, the Duke of Queensbury's son. He roasted a kitchen boy on a spit—then ate him.

Scotland's capital teems with tales of haunted boneyards, haunted vaults, haunted inns . . . ghostly gray ladies, green ladies, headless ladies . . . Ho-hum stuff, maybe. The accounts of witch-burnings, plague, body-snatchers, and grisly torture, however, are all historically true. Even skeptics like me find it hard to dispel the notion that Edinburgh's dead aren't merely spinning in their graves—they're rising up from them at every opportunity.