Edinburgh again – ghost tours and the castle.

Well the ghost tour wasn’t really a ghost tour; more a history tour of the ‘underground city’ – the chambers and vaults inside the hill where people lived (I say ‘lived’, it wasn’t much of an existence) up until the late 1800s.  Although the tour guide did his best to scare us by telling us all about the curse that was supposedly on the old bridge we were in (they built vaults in the bridges to be used for storage, except they leaked water and worse) and all the creepy things that had happened on previous tours.  If you’ve ever watched Buffy, our tour guide reminded me of Spike with a Glaswegian accent instead of a London one.  Although that was probably just because of the long leather coat he was wearing, because he looked nothing like him otherwise lol.  He was very funny and interesting though.  He’d psyched us all up during the tour by telling us about terrible happenings and hauntings etc, then we got to the final chamber and he told us that this was where the creepy stuff usually happened – the lights would go out, but this didn’t bother him, he said, because the lighting was old and the place was damp.  Then the torches would go out, which bothered him a little (it wouldn’t have bothered me, they were the kind you charge yourself by shaking, and he’d been shaking it the whole trip to prevent it from going out).  Then, the candles would go out.  Apparently this bothered him a great deal, because any good ghost hunter knows that when candles go out on their own it’s a sure sign of supernatural presence (or a wee draught, I thought to myself, especially since the candles were situated quite near to two small air vents in the wall of the vault).  He told us that when all these things happened, people on the tour would see things in the vault (he’d seen some horrific things himself, he told us), or come back and tell him about how they were followed home by something they couldn’t see, and would feel the presence for weeks afterwards, etc etc.  He didn’t tell us how often this had happened, and since the lights didn’t go out on their own that night (which I suspect they never did at all), he turned them out himself, to see if the spirits would come, despite the fact that they never had before when he’d extinguished all the lights himself.  Two people blew out the candles quite eagerly (I suspected accomplices), and he switched the lights off, then his torch.  Just as he switched it back on again, a large figure leapt out of the shadows and roared at us.  The 6′5″ man in front of me jumped backwards.  A few people squealed.  I remained standing straight with my arms folded, and I don’t think I even started, probably because I had been expecting something like it for the whole trip and this seemed like a pretty perfect time to do it!  I definitely found the London Dungeon trip scarier, and that wasn’t even supposed to be haunted or ghostly, they just swung you round in the dark and jumped out at you!  I guess I’d kind of expected them to do more of the artificial scaring lol.

It was still a cool trip though, learnt heaps about the history of Edinburgh, which was pretty disgusting in parts!  The city within the walls was one mile by 1/4 of a mile, and at one point about 200,000 people lived there.  Hence the living in a chamber inside a bridge with faecal matter dripping through the ceiling.  The tour guide said faeces a lot.    Eventually the government in England did something about it (around 1880), not because of the appalling living conditions or the fact that children as young as eight (probably younger) were being sent to work in the mines, but because they’d seen a picture of two children, a boy and a girl, strapped together in a harness ready to go down a mineshaft, dressed just in their underwear (clothes could get tangled in the pulleys).  Their objection?  Boys and girls would be morally corrupted if they saw each other in just their underwear.

So they decreed that the city wall was no longer protected, meaning that if it broke it wouldn’t be repaired from then on, allowing the city to slowly spread outwards.  Of course on hearing that it wasn’t protected anymore, the locals took to it with pickaxes etc and had it down within a few weeks.

Lots of other gruesome stuff too.  It was brilliant.  Also I was thinking in a Scottish accent for the rest of the evening thanks to Gerry (does anyone else have this?  If you spend time around someone with a different accent, do you start thinking in it?  Or am I just weird?  I think I know the answer to this… ).  The next time someone decides to have a go at us Kiwis for saying things like ‘fush and chups’ and generally mangling our vowels, I will send them to Scotland.  Brulliant, wuld (world) and cuss (curse), among others, are all words that I heard a lot last night (and in the last few days, too).

Got back to the hostel, decided not to attend the ‘no clothes’ party in the common room (not quite as dodgy as it sounds, you could wear things, as long as they weren’t clothes, like rubbish bags, or cardboard boxes) and toddled off to bed.

This morning we went to Edinburgh castle.  Luckily for me it’s just across the road (I can see it out the window of the hostel now) coz I was still tired!  We had a quick tour, then a proper look-round on our own.
Some highlights:
* St Margaret’s Chapel (may not be St Margaret’s, since it was built as a memorial to her by her son in 1093, before she was made a saint (1250ish), I didn’t think to check) – Queen Margaret lived in the castle (funny that, since she was Queen of Scotland ) and died there too.  Her chapel is the oldest building still standing in the castle, and TINY.  Like, seats 25 people tiny. Highlight because she was connected to the high school I went to.
* The Scottish Crown Jewels and the Stone of Scone (which is pronounced skoon, like the first half of schooner). This was fun because my pub quiz team once got asked a question about the Stone of Scone, and I giggled at the name. I don’t think I had any clue what it was for at the time (it’s an old bit of sandstone that’s been part of the Scottish throne and coronation ceremonies for centuries.

We also stood in the room where Mary, Queen of Scots gave birth to King James (although he wasn’t king then, obviously. That didn’t happen for another twelve months or so, because one-year-olds make brulliant monarchs Mary was actually a baby-monarch too).

I was really tired after spending three hours there so I headed back to the hostel while dad went to the Scottish museum. I dithered in a few souvenir shops on the way back coz I’d seen some cute tartans but decided I didn’t really want to pay NZ$50 for a scarf so didn’t buy anything. I did go into one non-souvenir shop called Ness, which had really awesome stuff. Like, really awesome. Mostly wool and tartan, but cool colours and cute stuff like hats and handbags and wallets, etc. I was seriously tempted by a few things but they were all really expensive (I couldn’t really justify spending over $100 on a handbag when I already have four or five!). I tried on one top that was very cute and on sale for $16, but it didn’t fit.
Probably just as well, really! I also looked for a book on Scots Gaelic in the castle bookshop but couldn’t find anything. I probably need to look in a bigger shop, I think. I’ve decided that my one really touristy souvenir is going to be a t-shirt that says ‘mind the gap’ – they’re everywhere in London and I really want one!

Tomorrow we’re heading for Hadrian’s Wall, then the next day to the Roald Dahl museum, which I’ve been looking forward to the whole trip.