With Halloween almost here, Edinburgh’s award-winning historical escape room experiences Escape the Past has researched and put together the top 10 most haunted locations in the city.
Escape the Past’s highly qualified, history-loving team of eight, are extremely well placed to give fellow city-dwellers, the capital’s most haunted locales.
The history-loving owner behind Escape the Past, Chris Wood, who studied history at Edinburgh University, said: “You just have to glance over our city’s history and you can understand why Edinburgh has such a chilling reputation. Few places on earth have packed quite so much murder, mystery and misery into just a few square miles.
“Beneath Edinburgh’s elegant spires lie forgotten vaults and buried streets once ravaged by the plague. Kirkyards that were plundered by resurrection men, the Grassmarket gallows drew crowds in their thousands to watch executions, and the city’s hilltops once blazed with the fires of the witch trials.
“We conducted research with our deeply knowledgeable team who have worked as veteran tour guides in our city, studied history and conducted a lot of research into our capital’s dark history, to create our escape rooms.
“For our research, we weighed up the number of recorded sightings, the paranormal investigations each place has attracted, and how long its legend has endured in Edinburgh literature and lore.”
Check out the top 10 most haunted Edinburgh locations in our photo gallery below.
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9. Festival Theatre
The Festival Theatre stands on the site of the former Empire Palace Theatre, where the world-famous magician The Great Lafayette died in a devastating fire in 1911, alongside 10 members of his cast and crew. Staff have since reported unexplained cold spots, shadowy figures in the auditorium and basement, mysterious diamond-ring sightings and even the distant roar of a lion in the empty theatre. | Google Maps
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10. Surgeons’ Square
Once at the heart of Edinburgh’s 19th-century medical world, Surgeons’ Square was home to Dr Robert Knox’s anatomy school, where notorious murderers Burke and Hare supplied bodies for dissection. With its grisly past, the square is haunted by its gory history and Robert Louis Stevenson’s chilling short story The Body Snatcher imagined a supernatural twist on its dark history. Pictured above is Dr Robert Knox. | Getty Images/ Hulton Archive