Haunted Edinburgh

We started our day with a short history tour of the city of Edinburgh, apparently referred to as the Athens of the North. Once again the guide was great and clearly struggle to fit in all the information he had in his mind to a 70min tour. He rambled on and tripped on his own ideas as he tried to tell curious tourists everything he knew able the fabled and historical city. I guess Athens of the North isn't completely inaccurate. He had been a journalist, writer, and historian. He helped to create the movie Braveheart and later wrote Mel gibbon Autobiography, a very interesting man. He took us on a great tour along the royal mile that ended at the gate of the castle, which we would be seeing tomorrow. The royal mile was really cool, you could almost see the ancient city that lie within the old stones of each building, as the layout had changed very little since its inception in the 7th century. After the tour we went back down the royal mile to the cathedral and had some lunch to prepare for our night tour. This started by a very interesting, spooky, ad enlightening exploration of the underground, ancient city, that the more modern Edinburgh was built on top of. See, to connect the old town and the new town more effectively, the constructed a bridge, and filled it with lavish shops and high-end products, eventually becoming one of the most well known and wealthiest parts in all of the world. This made people want to live nearby, and so building were built alongside the bridge, and eventually began to fill out more and more, slowly devouring the older city that lay below. Although not fit for living, the poor in the 18th and 19th century had little choice but to access these areas and try and make them hospitable- in the end disease and death ran rampant. This is what lead to the whole purpose of the tour, the ghost tour. There have been many, many stories of ghosts and other supernatural events occurring in these parts and so we wanted to get a taste for it ourselves. It was surprisingly immersive, and when you are standing a cities width from the sun, in dark, wet undergrounds, with a guide sharing harrowing stories of the cities history and the horrendous deaths, fear does start to creep in. The tour got admittedly less scary as we left the underground, but more informative, as we then wandered the modern city and the graveyard. When he took us inside a mausoleum, the fear creeped back in, but after he finished telling his stories we were free to roam the outside world, free from any dark stories. It was exciting and quite an intense way to do a walking tour but it was very different. As someone who has now done many, many walking tours this was a refreshing way to learn a lot about the city while keeping it fresh and engaging. This ended a big day of walking through a great city, and one I would love to come back to, if not for the beauty- for the history.Read more