Friendly note: this is the same as what is on The Loch Ness Blog at the moment, so if you are a reader of both, feel free to skip one or the other.
When I’m really scared I feel like something is going to sneak up behind me and chop my head off, so I frantically pull my collar up to protect my little neck. I’ve been waiting to write about the forthcoming spooky topic until the very thought it of ceased to make me want to change into a protective turtleneck.
So here it goes…
Two Good People, Up For a Spot of Fun
My friend Squee came to visit me last week. When she moved to Michigan from England in our junior year of high school, we were immediate friends: we walked together at our high school graduation, we lived in Chicago at the same time for a while, she is babysitting our cat for us this year–she is one of the smartest, most interesting,
interested people I know in this world. Seeing her made everything right in me again. Each morsel of homesickness and every ounce of discontent was expelled from me, as only hours of talking to a true, longtime girlfriend can do. We had a great time walking through Glasgow, eating Scotch Eggs, and hunting for Nessy. On the last full day of Squee’s visit, the two of us took the train into Edinburgh.
After looking around the National Galleries, we came across a sign advertising haunted tours. Always up for a campy thrill, we giddily signed up for something called The Underground Tour. We were the only ones who showed for the tour–it was a Monday night, after all. The guide was a girl that was roughly our age. She sounded like she was
from Russia or Poland (or possibly Germany?), but had learned English with a Scottish accent. She put on no airs. She was honest. She was scared.
“Are you sure you want to go just the two of you?” She asked.
“Yeah–why?”
She looked sincerely uneasy, “I just have the creepiest experiences when its only a group of two.”
But of course, instead of deterring us, this news made us all the more excited. Silly girls…
Setting the Stage
The city of Edinburgh is built into massive hills. Many buildings are built on bridges that are hidden by slopes and for the most part, are unidentifiable to the causal observer as actual bridges. For little ole American me, the jumbled nooks, ancient crannies, hidden spaces, and cobbled alleys make Edinburgh a nearly incomprehensible place; it feels more like walking through an illustration in a Dr. Seuss book than walking through an actual city. It’s magic.
According to our tour guide, in centuries past, a bustling network of underground streets wove beneath the hills and bridges of Edinburgh. The underground streets had vaults in them that were used as workspaces by merchants and craftsmen, although this soon proved impractical–a few hours after it rained above ground, the water would seep through the earth and it would rain below ground as well. The underground spaces were then used as storage space, although the damp still made them less than ideal. Eventually, the underground spaces became refuge for
urchins, and were eventually forgotten about. Especially when really creepy things happened in them and the city went to great lengths to make sure they were forgotten…
The Story
In the 1970s, a student living in an Edinburgh dormitory heard a hollow sound coming from the wall of his second floor apartment. He asked the landlord what was behind the wall. The landlord wasn’t aware
that there was anything behind the wall, except of course the slope of a hill that the building was flush against. But what then, was that hollow sound? Inquires were made to the council to see if they knew anything. They did not.
With curiosity (and probably a few drinks) goading him on, the student broke through the wall one night, expecting to find an extra room, or perhaps a closet.
Imagine his surprise when he unearthed a passage into a long forgotten underground street.
These days, the underground street is dark. It smells like earth and the ceiling drips and echoes. Other echoes happen too. You never quite know where they are coming from. There is emergency lighting that flickers for no apparent reason. There is a turbulent mix of anger and melancholy rotting away in the space; its hard to describe, but you can feel it in your gut, on your skin, breathing at your neck.
The tour guide led Squee and I to the first part of the street, reported to have a low supernatural level: 1. You get a prickly feeling from this part of the street. You know when someone holds their hand an inch or two from your body and teases, “I’m not touching you”? It felt like someone was doing that; it felt like standing in a crowd.
Something was human about the energy. It wasn’t scary, exactly. Just really, really creepy.
On level 1 we went into a vault where homeless people hid when not having a home became a criminal offense in the olden days. We huddled together in the center of the room: you could sort of feel ghosts sitting with their backs against the walls: hungry, sick, and waiting.
Next, we walked up the stairs to level 2. Instantly, I was terrified. The energy shifted. I didn’t feel a human presence anymore. Something animal stirred in the shadows, and each step we took brought us closer to its matted fur, its low growl, its yellow eyes. I clung to Squee.
“Are you whimpering?” The guide asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I just like to know where sounds are coming from.”
Walking timidly to the second vault, clammy cold washed over me, followed by steamy heat. The guide explained that these were “pockets” of supernatural activity. We were walking through ghosts.
Close now to the second vault, a wave of intense nausea hit me. I was sure I was going to pass out. Most of you readers know that I pass out frequently at the slightest provocation–there is no stopping me from
slipping into unconsciousness once I start. But this time, in the underground street, was different. Just as the brown dots that mark the start of my descent began to crowd my peripheral vision, I sensed
something terrifying: a dog pacing around me. I felt him sniff. I could smell him too. I knew, without a doubt, that something really creepy would happen if I did pass out–that I would encounter the animal in
those lucid moments of unconsciousness. I regained my vision and squeezed Squee’s hand. “We are NOT going into that vault,” was all I could say. My terror only grew after hearing that I’m not the only one who’s felt the animal presence at the second vault.
The guide told us a story. A few years ago, a spiritualist rented out the second vault from the haunted tour guide owner for his coven. But after moving in, the place would get trashed every night after locking
up. The coven leader was sure that kids were coming in to vandalize the space, so he stayed one night to catch them in the act. In the morning, he was found cowering in a corner, pointing to a circle he’d drawn in the middle of the room.
“Don’t go near that!” He screamed. A ghostly beast had attacked him where the circle was drawn. He now rents a vault in level one and regularly cusses out the haunted tour owner for bringing people in the
vault that the beast inhabits. Claws are heard scrabbling and scratching across the floor. Some people leave the vault to find they’ve been bitten…
The third level felt like calamity. But it was a human feeling, and this relaxed me some. Squee, however, was suddenly more afraid than she’d been in all the tour. “What’s that smell?” She blurted. Immediately, I pulled my scarf further up onto my face so that only my eyes were showing. I did NOT want to smell anything.
“What do you smell?” The guide asked.
“Wood? Something…burnt?”
“We are NOT going in there,” I declared again.
The guide wrapped her coat tight around her. “Lots of people say they can smell burning in this vault,” she said. And then she told us another story.
In the seventeen hundreds, a huge fire raged in the streets of Edinburgh for days. When running from the flames got to be too much for the citizens, a number of them took refuge in the underground street that the modern-day dormitory was built flush against. The citizens figured that stone of the underground was flame retardant, so they
should be safe from the blaze. But as the fire raged on, the underground stone street grew hotter and hotter. The people inside were cooked. Literally baked alive.
So gruesome was the deaths of these citizens, that the city closed the street off and its existence was buried until the 1970s when that student broke through the wall.
At the end of the tour, we were offered a shot of whiskey and some shortbread. Squee tried to calm herself with a biscuit, to no avail. We were shaken beyond the fun frivolity of snacks. I was flat out nauseous.
Once out onto the street, we noticed that we were drenched with sweat, yet shivering, flu-like. “I never want to see or go to any place like that ever again,” we affirmed.
But after a cheerful (well lit) pub outing brimming with some of the best conversation I’ve had in months, we forgot the tangible horror of the haunted tour. By the time our train pulled back into Glasgow Queen Street Station, we were back to our usual invincible selves.
It wasn’t until we were back in the flat, telling Shaun all about it from the beginning, that the goosebumps, the overactive tear ducts, and the shivers reminded us that we experienced something truly terrible.
“I want to go on the tour!” Shaun said.
“Promise me you won’t ever go,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just promise.”
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Have you ever been to a haunted place?
::Random Tangent::
If The Last King of Scotland is playing at a movie theater near you, go
see it. It is the finest movie I’ve seen in some time. And the Scottish protagonist so perfectly embodies the emensly friendly, open hearted attitude that I encounter so frequently here in Scotland. The movie is
actually about Uganda under the mad dictatorship of Idi Amin, but the protagonist is a Scotsman living in Uganda. The acting is unbeatable; Forest Whitaker is perfect and an actor named James McAvory is my new crush. Gillian Anderson is in it too! So go see it–you’ll love it (aside from one scene that I had a
nightmare about last night). It’s an incredible movie.
