Edinburgh Vaults

When Edinburgh built the South Bridge across the Cowgate gorge between 1785 and 1788, it was meant to be the city’s first purpose-built shopping street. Only one of its nineteen arches, over the Cowgate, is still visible; the rest were enclosed by tenements, and the hollow spaces inside them were floored over to make about 120 vaults — cellars, workshops, taverns and storerooms for the businesses above.

The bridge was rushed and never properly sealed, so water seeped in and the vaults began to flood within a few years. Tradesmen moved out, and as the Cowgate became the city’s worst slum, the dark, airless rooms were taken over by the very poor, by illicit whisky stills — the Edinburgh Evening Courant reported a hidden distillery under the bridge in 1815 — and, by reputation, by thieves and worse. Rumors that bodysnatchers stored corpses there have never been proved, and there is no evidence that Burke and Hare used them. By the mid- to late 19th century the vaults were abandoned and filled with rubble.

They were rediscovered in the 1980s — the rugby player Norrie Rowan found a tunnel into them — and excavated in the 1990s; finds included toys, medicine bottles, plates and thousands of oyster shells. Once guided tours began in the late 1990s, visitors started reporting a strong sense of presence, footsteps, cold, touches and apparitions. Tour guides and the pubs that sit above the vaults have names for the regulars: “Mr Boots,” or “the Watcher,” a shadowy man in a tricorn hat and riding boots, said to throw stones, shove people and follow them with heavy footsteps; and the ghost of a young girl, Molly, reported by staff and visitors in the Banshee Labyrinth bar.

The vaults became a laboratory for psychologists. In 2001 Richard Wiseman and colleagues walked volunteers through the vaults and asked them to note anything unusual. As published in the British Journal of Psychology in 2003, people reported more experiences in vaults with a haunted reputation even when they didn’t know which those were — but the locations of their experiences also tracked physical factors such as lighting levels and variations in the local magnetic field. The authors concluded that hauntings may be, at least in part, people responding to ordinary features of their surroundings. Most Haunted (2003 and 2006) and Ghost Adventures have filmed there, and a 2009 BBC Three program recorded unexplained voices that sound engineers suspected might have drifted in from nearby clubs.

A strong sense of presence, footsteps behind visitors, sudden cold, touches and hair pulling, stones thrown, whispering, a tall shadowy man (“Mr Boots”), a little girl, and voices on recordings — reported by tour groups, guides, pub staff and TV crews.

The vaults off Blair Street and Niddry Street on the north side of the Cowgate arch (used for tours), particularly the darkest back chambers; pubs above the vaults, including those on Niddry Street and South Bridge, report their own ghosts.

The vaults are a centerpiece of Edinburgh’s ghost-tour industry and a Fringe festival venue every August; they have featured on Most Haunted, Ghost Adventures and BBC Three, and in novels and plays about the Old Town.