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May 5th 2005
Glasgow, Scotland.
Well, yesterday was certainly a full one. After the day trip to Loch Ness, which returned around 7:30pm, I had some dinner, wrote down some core basics of my day on the internet (most of these blogs are written in full only days later), and then took off to attempt, yet again, to do the ghost tour of Edinburgh's underground vaults. I had tried to do this tour before but they do not run it unless there are four or more people and you can’t book ahead. And luck be a lady, but I turned up, gasping, at 10:37pm to find that the guide had dawdled over her apologies to the three other people and that, yay, now we could go. The ‘yay’ was from us, not her. But she took it on the chin and off we trundled to visit some above-ground significantly haunted sights, listen to some of Edinburgh's darker history, inspect some rusting metal torture instruments ("genuine"), and finally, fiiiinally, down go into some of the underground vaults.
Now, the story behind Edinburgh's underground city changes with each account, but the most believable for me is the following: In those days the city of Edinburgh resided entirely within the safety of the surrounding wall, which had been built against marauders but eventually led to an unwelcome confining of construction and progress, rather like a too-tight belt on a fat lady. The population of Edinburgh was escalating, yet there was no room for more housing, and they refused to leave the protection of the city walls. So they instead built up, which was unusual in such times. And after building the lower two or three stories of stone they had to use more lightweight, incidentally flammable materials such as wood and thatch. Well, guess how that turned out.
So after some of the greater fires had destroyed a lot of the buildings and they had to start from scratch they decided to excavate a bit and add some underground streets, then paved over much of that and built up and out again. The thing is, the underground vaults I saw are awful and cannot have been much better in those days. There are no windows or cleverly constructed skylights. There are no openings for chimney smoke and so the only lighting they could have used without killing themselves on the smoke was to burn fish oil, so that would have stunk. The walls, floors and ceilings are made from porous stone and are cold, dank and wet from the water dripping through from above. In winter it would have been like a moldy deep-freeze.
We were only able to see one alley or street, with about four vaults, or rooms. Many of Edinburgh's underground vaults are as yet undiscovered or used as storage rooms. The owner of the above property is the owner of the vault, so there are probably plenty of people with their own personal little underground piece of history, their own little alley; spare guestrooms, if you will. But it's too creepy for me.
You see, the original inhabitants of these vaults were the destitute and homeless of ancient Edinburgh. It was illegal to be homeless and the jails were hell itself, so although during the summer it was probably nicer to sleep aboveground, the city's undernourished masses would spend year after year underground, fighting and bickering over space in these tiny little hellholes. Our guide informed us that between two and four little families, or a maximum of about fifteen people, would band together to defend their little vault from newcomers. The average life expectancy after coming down to live in these rooms was apparently about a year and a half, so obviously it was not the ideal place to be. Disease and infection was rife. People probably did not bathe, and slept in huddled groups on pallets on the floor.
I listened to her talk, huddling from the chill in my nice clean jacket, listening to the water dripping through the stone-and-moss ceiling, and could not imagine how awful mid-winter in that hell-hole would be. Then she took us into another vault and told us about one of the greater fires of Edinburgh, and how people fled the above flames to huddle en-masse in these crypts, thinking they were safe from the fire. The lucky ones died quickly from smoke inhalation. The unlucky ones were cooked. The heat from the inferno raging above turned the stone rooms into ovens and apparently when the rescue workers finally managed to get down into the vaults about three days later, in this particular one they found all the people in one huge human pyramid in the centre of the room. Apparently, as the walls heated, and with the corridors blocked with yet more people with the same problem, people did the only thing they could do to get as far away from the baking sides of the room as possible: they clambered over the weak, the dead, and the dying, no doubt crushing the ones on the bottom in the process, all vying for the least unbearable spot. All ended up frying in one big pile of burnt limbs and bodies.
How gross is that? We went on and she talked about poltergeists and what had happened in certain rooms, but that one stuck with me. The tour included about four vaults along one big underground alleyway; the other alleys and such of Underground Edinburgh that we could see down the end of that alley had been boarded up over the years and we could go no further.
On the last vault we visited she spoke about how it had a poltergeist that seemed to feed on energy, on fear, and had been known to attack women and children. She banged her stick on the ground a lot to emphasis scary facts and occasionally turned off her flashlight or waved it about a lot. But it was the stories, not the dramatics, which sent chills down my spine. I was quite willing to let one of the girls in the three friends touring with me to clutch at my sleeve, though too stoic to do such a thing myself. It was comforting to feel her huddled against me, however, and know that there was somebody beside me in the dark. In the brief time before she had done so, it was very disconcerting and unnerving to stand alone in the dark with no links and listen to the tour guide talk and wave the torch around erratically. Even for a skeptic like me.
Suddenly her light went out and somebody bulky jumped out from behind the doorway with a torch to illuminate his face, crouching low and screaming "aaaaahhh!" before disappearing just as suddenly. It was all very quick, and for me, seen only out of the corner of my eye. We screamed like there was no tomorrow and it was a truly frightening moment, though of course some part of you wonders at the beginning of the tour if they'll try something like that. Very childish, really, and it would normally irritate me with its cheesiness. But it was somehow a great capper to that particular tour. My heart, already tripping uncomfortably in my chest from the stories, had lodged itself in my throat and stayed there for a good half hour after the tour.
One popular usage for old underground vaults is apparently to convert them into underground clubbing or gaming rooms. The pub that we ended up at for our free drinks had just such a usage for their vaults. I went down and explored. They had painted it and added lights, but it was the same rounded roofs, the same stone walls. It was creepy, after having done the tour, after seeing the vaults when unchanged from their original state and listening to the stories of woe.
This morning I left Edinburgh and headed for Glasgow via bus - for only £1!! Pretty groovy! But what I've seen of Glasgow is fairly depressing. I wandered haphazardly for ages and ages and could find no parks - I’d rather fancied a picnic. The streets I’ve seen are predominantly concrete and buildings with almost no greenery to liven them up. But then, it is an industrial town. Industrial towns are not known for their charm, but they are very valuable in their economic contribution to the country's wellbeing. And of course if it’s a decently sized city, which I wouldn’t know because I’ve no guides for it (only here about seven hours between buses), then maybe I’ve been wandering only the crappy districts of town and its better half is a veritable paradise.
Well, I can't spend all day in an internet cafe, though it may well be cheerier here than anywhere else on offer. I'll let you know how London goes.
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Dee
non-member comment
Chill
Hi, You write extremely well! I am sitting in my cozy, well lit living room with my kids right behind me watching "Power Rangers" and yet as I read your blog I had the unnerving urge to look over my shoulder! I'm going to let my mom know about your site. She is intriqued with hauntings. Going to stay the night on the Queen Mary Ship! Dee