Edinburgh may be one of the easiest cities in Britain for anyone interested in ghosts.
The reason is not simply that the Scottish capital has plenty of haunted places. It is that so many of them sit within walking distance of one another.
Spooky Isles spoke to John S Tantalon, Edinburgh paranormal investigator, author and storyteller behind North Edinburgh Nightmares, about what makes the city so unusual.
John has spent more than 10 years investigating haunted locations and collecting ghost stories, although his interest began much earlier.
For him, Edinburgh stands out because the stories are concentrated into such a small area.
“There’s so many stories within one city,” John said. “You don’t have to go far to find a spooky location in the city centre.”
Edinburgh’s ghosts are all on your doorstep
That is very different from other parts of Britain, where haunted buildings can be miles apart.
John spent time living further south and remembers how much travelling paranormal investigators often had to do.
“I was down in Hampshire and Surrey,” he said. “There was a lot of the places I had to travel. You had to travel to visit them.”
Edinburgh is different.
“Edinburgh, you know, they’re all on your doorstep.”
A ghost hunter can move between graveyards, underground vaults, theatres, pubs and historic buildings without travelling very far.
Greyfriars Kirkyard, Mary King’s Close, Edinburgh Castle and the South Bridge Vaults all sit within the central city, alongside several pubs with their own paranormal reputations.
For visiting ghost hunters, that concentration can come as a surprise.
John recently spent time with an established paranormal investigation group visiting Edinburgh.
“They were saying just how overwhelmed they were with Edinburgh,” he said. “They were saying how everything’s all on your doorstep, it’s in walking distance.”
For John, that makes Edinburgh unusually practical as well as unusually haunted.
“You don’t have to go far to find a spooky location in the city centre.”
Centuries of life, death and misery
John believes Edinburgh’s supernatural reputation cannot be separated from the way the old city developed.
Rich and poor people lived remarkably close together, while large numbers of residents were crowded into a relatively small area.
“It’s been a very developed place over the years from wealthy people and very poor people living side by side,” John said.
Those contrasts created countless stories of hardship, disease, crime, death and ordinary human tragedy.
“There was misery and there was people living the high life all next to one another.”
John believes that history helped create Edinburgh’s remarkable collection of ghost stories.
“It’s probably produced an awful lot of stories from that alone.”
He describes the old city simply as “a mass population living on top of one another”.
Centuries later, many of those old locations remain part of everyday Edinburgh life.
Haunted Edinburgh is still alive
That may be another reason Edinburgh works so well as a ghost-hunting city.
Its supposedly haunted places are not all abandoned ruins or remote country houses.
The South Bridge Vaults remain beneath busy streets and businesses, while Greyfriars Kirkyard stands surrounded by the modern city.
Edinburgh Playhouse and Festival Theatre continue welcoming audiences while staff tell stories about figures supposedly seen inside their buildings.
Pubs including the Star Bar, Banshee Labyrinth and Sheep Heid Inn remain working businesses with their own continuing paranormal stories.
For John, Edinburgh’s ghosts seem to exist alongside ordinary city life.
A visitor can leave one haunted location and reach another within minutes.
That helps explain why the city made such an impression on the paranormal investigators John recently accompanied.
“They were just saying how impressed they were,” he said.
Few British cities combine so many ghost stories, historic locations and continuing paranormal claims within such a compact area.
Whether every Edinburgh ghost story is true is another question entirely.
But for anyone wanting to explore haunted Britain, John believes few cities make it easier.
“In Edinburgh, they’re all on your doorstep.”
Find out more about John’s tours at North Edinburgh Nightmares.
