On our last night in Edinburgh, Jessica and I wanted to do something fun and exciting, something we could only do here in this city. Having enjoyed the lovely castle, the delicious food, the delightful people, we wanted to see a different side of the city...the darker side. So, as any good tourist would do, we decided to take a Ghost Tour. There were advertisements for several along the Royal Mile, so we chose one that left at a time that suited us, 9:00. While we waited, we got dinner at the Piemaker ("Pies so fresh they'll pinch your bum and call you darlin'!").
Ten to nine rolled around and we stood outside at the sign waiting for the tour guide to arrive. While we waited, a rather large group of women gathered as well. A rowdy group, they had obviously been drinking quite a bit already and were ready for a good time. They were also in uniform--black shirts emblazoned with "Jo's Hens on Tour" on the front and names and identifiers on the back ("Raunchy Rebecca," "Naughty Natty," and the like) in bright pink, all wearing black and silver headband halos and strap-on wings. The group was led by "The Horny Hen." This was a hen party. Now, a hen party is something like a bachelorette party, except the women are all dressed similarly, so that everyone in town knows they are available. It also seemed to be more than just a one night thing, but rather a couple days' worth of raucous good times and rabble-rousing.
There were about 10 to 15 women in this group, but I can't be quite sure. They seemed to be all over the place. The tour guide soon arrived, a petite woman in her 20s with gorgeous, wide green eyes. She was wearing a long black dress, the costume for this tour company's guides. She began by hushing the loud drunken women, and told us where we would go first to buy the tickets and then where the tour would lead. We were to go to a few sites on the street, and then to the underground vaults beneath the bridge.
We headed off, Jessica and I fighting for a place at the front, along with 4 other non-intoxicated younger women so as to actually be able to hear the guide (Loren). After buying tickets, Lorin led us to Cowgate, at the bottom of a hilled alley. She explained how every morning at 7 and every night at 10, the bell in the square would ring, signaling the time to dump the chamber pots from the windows. Residents would then shout "Gardee loo!" (butchered French for "watch out for the water!") as they tipped their pots full of excrement, urine, food scraps, and dead rats into the streets below. The mess would then run into the Loch. The water here was the main source of drinking water for the poorer class that lived in the underground areas of the buildings. Sewage and animal and human carcases poisoned the water. Men were given 2 years to live after moving to these areas. Women and children were given 18 months.
After this delightfully disgusting explanation, peppered with "Hush girls!" we carried on up the hill, most of the Hen party straggling behind, chatting with guys, joking around, and just making general fools of themselves. We got to the main square where we were told that before the parking lot that was now there, the square was the "burial ground," but more like "body mound," for those that died during the Black Plague in 1645. It was also the site for public hangings and witch burnings.
Finally, we got to the entrance of the vaults. We stood in a room with various torture devices on the wall (chastity belts, iron masks, thumbscrews, The Chopper, a dull and light object used for slow and painful beheading, scythes for ear chopping, and limb restraints, among others) as Loren explained what we would see and what to expect. She told us that during every tour she has done, and that other guides had done, something strange happens, especially in areas with more paranormal activity, that is, more measured hot and cold spots, etc. You know, it’s the stuff you see on Ghost Hunters and special reports of haunting. She told us that if we started to feel faint, or if we feel something grab or attack us, to let her know quickly.
We went into the hallway. It was damp and chilly, lit only by Loren’s flashlight and a few scattered candles in niches in the walls. She explained that where we were was a “level 1” for paranormal activity. The room we would enter would be a two, and we would later enter a 5. We entered the first vault, and Loren explained the living conditions. 35 people would be crammed here, sleeping on matted straw, forced to make their bed a bathroom, as it was impossible to cross every sleeping body to the corner chamber pot. The smell attracted rats. Rats brought disease. Disease brought death. But disease wasn’t the only killer. Body snatchers would often enter the vaults at night, murdering the weak by sitting on their chests, restraining their arms, plugging their noses with two fingers, and holding the mouth clamped shut with the thumb. They would then sell the bodies, appearing as though they died a natural death, to universities for anatomy classes.
Honestly, it was pretty creepy. It was damp, and cold, and dark, the perfect environment for ghosts, if there were going to be any. But at the same time, the drunken Hen and her Chicks wouldn’t stop running their mouths. Several times Loren all but shouted at them to shut their mouths. I thought for sure they were going to scare away all the ghosts we might have seen. Well.
We moved back into the hall and looked into a room behind a barred door and window. It was a working Wiccan Temple, complete with pentagrams, chalk circles, and a naked golden statue of a woman, tied at the wrists with her hands above her head. Loren told us that this wasn’t the first chamber chosen by the Wiccans. Instead, they had chosen a chamber down the hall. It was discovered with a stone circle inside. It was later revealed that a different sort of witchcraft was practiced here. It wasn’t the nature-worshipping brand of the Wiccans. Rather, it was demon-worshipping, complete with animal and human sacrifices.
We filed into that room, as Loren warned us not to step inside the circle. We took our places, Jessica and me at the back of the room, in front of the candle in a niche, along with other girls. Keep in mind that they rarely shut up. Loren told us that she will not enter the room any further than just inside the doorway, because when she first came in to set up a candle with another tour guide, the candle flew across the room and smashed into the opposite wall. Also, she will not step into the circle, and doesn’t like to see anyone else do it, because the last time she saw someone do it, the man, a skeptic, crumpled to the floor immediately, smashing his head on one of the large stones. He was taken to the hospital after he dragged himself out because no one else would set foot inside the circle. She then told us that whoever wanted to go inside was free to do so, but after she had left the room along with anyone else that didn’t want to see what happened, and keeping in mind that we were on our way to see the most haunted room in the vaults.
Now, I know that to many of you, Loren may just sound like a very good actress, a ham of a tour guide, to create the reaction that the audience wants itself to have. Everyone wants to get their money’s worth, right? But in all seriousness, she sounded genuinely frightened of some of these things. She knew that something weird was going on in those chambers, something that nothing but the supernatural could explain.
And so we went into the hallway, where the brave were lined up on the left, and the not-so-brave on the right. Jessica and I got to the left, along with the whole group of hens. Loren told us that this is where 80% of the “attacks” happen on the tours. People are pushed, kicked, grabbed, scratched, cut; they faint, vomit. Every single tour has had an attack. Sometimes not just one person, but often 3 or 4 will experience something. After an extensive warning that there was to be no noise, no talking, no cameras, no cell phones, we entered the room first, lining up against the left hand wall, the drunken women giggling and chatting a bit. The 4 other non-hen party girls lined up on the right. Loren entered last, speaking harshly to the talkers, shining the flash light at them. She was tense and in a no-nonsense mood. She explained that the tour groups are supposed to be separated by sex, men on the left, women on the right, but since there weren’t any men in the group, she divided us by bravery (or stupidity?). The reason for this is that before, they didn’t separate the groups and women were attacked most often in the groups, and always on the left side of the room. So now they limited the possibility that women would get attacked by placing them on the right side of the room.
Loren then went into detail about why this room was extremely active, paranormally speaking. With the flashlight off, and the hens finally silent, she began. There was a fire above the bridge. People fled below, to escape the burning wood above. They knew that stone didn’t burn so they sought safety beneath the city, inside the arches of the bridge and its vaults. The men found this vault and decided that since it was larger, with its double high ceiling, it would hold more air. They threw the women and children inside to save them, closing the door behind them. Stone may not burn, but it does conduct heat. The room turned into a giant oven. It became so hot that the skin fairly melted off the people trapped inside as they scrambled to the door over each other, fighting their way to escape the heat, human flesh cooking in its own fat, people screaming from the pain and horror, and------
At this point there was a loud scream to my left, followed by several others. Loren threw on the flashlight, shining the light towards the sounds. One of the girls, a blonde, was on the floor, wild-eyed. Screams of “what happened? Who is that?” filled the room, and as I looked to my right at the open doorway that led to the dimly candle-lit hallway I saw a flutter of black about a quarter of the way from the top of the arch of the doorframe. I don’t know whether what it was was leaving the room or passing by, but it was gone quickly. Loren ran over to the still screaming girls , helped the blonde up, and told everyone to get out quickly, that the tour was over.
It was about 15 minutes before the tour was due to end. We passed rapidly through rooms that were surely part of the tour, without any explanation of the things inside (surely there would be a good story for the stocks we passed?) as we headed out of the vaults.
We came out to a pub for free whisky and shortbread (pass on both), but as we were leaving, I saw the blonde nursing her arm. Bright pink scratches had formed on her left forearm, and what looked like a bruise underneath them. She was telling the others “and then I was just on the ground, I don’t know what happened…”
I don’t know what happened either. She could have just been drunk and fallen over in the excitement, as one of the girls tried to catch her by the arm, leaving scratches. Maybe we were all just spooked, caught up in the moment and the history. I don’t know. But that’s what went down in the vaults of Edinburgh.
Take it or leave it.
