I’ve stood in what is officially the scariest place on earth. It’s about the size of an average suburban bedroom. And it can be found deep inside a cemetary about ten yards away from one of Edinburgh’s main streets. In August 2001 alone, 20 visitors to the place were attacked and left suffering from nausea, blackouts, illness, scratches, welt marks, and cold sweats. Some were knocked to the ground. And yesterday, I was stood inside there.
In its defence though, we did kind of goad it a little. After all, we did go on a ghost tour. Like the tourists we are, we can’t help but want to go. Human nature is that way – the desire to explore, the desire to discover, is the thing, the vision thing, that separates man from the mammals. The domestic animals still have a desire for it, Domesticus Humanis, in so much as we slow down on motorways and gawp are car crashes. What are we hoping to see? What are we hoping to experience? A variation on Jim Morrison’s experience with an Indian Shamanic Spirit as his parents drove past an accident in an arid flat wasteland?
If someone hadn’t wondered what rubbing two stucks together could do, they’d’ve never been fire. If Stanley Kubrick have never landed a black obilisk on a film set, man would never have discovered space travel. And if we had never visited a haunted mausoleum in Edinburgh, we’d’ve never been attacked by a Poltergeist. (At least, that's easily the most plausible conclusion based upon the events that took place).
Sometimes curiousity can be a bad thing. A ghost tour is tacky, cheesy, gaudy tourist fun. Gasp! As you stand roughly where some people fought aeons ago. Swoon! as tales are abound of ankle-deep shit rivers thrown from wooden towerblocks. Yawn! As the world’s worst poets appear to come from the locality. Just opposite where I sat with two of my friends an hour previous, enjoying some of the finest pasta God ever invented for man. (Well, actually, it was chicken). And Fear! as we enter the oldest graveyard in Scotland’s most haunted town.
As dusk falls, the curious, the brave and stupid, gather. In ones and twos, in groups of strangers who do not – and never will – know each other, we assemble at the steps of a normally locked haunted Graveyard. Originally, this graveyard was a chasm, a valley, a scar cut deep into the side of a sleeping city. And the valley, the chasm that the church was built upon, so swollen with flesh, has become a hill. The ground is so swollen now with the dead that in heavy rains the bones return to the surface. Visitors recall seeing thigh bones lying inside tombs during visits, spewed forth by the soil during heavy rainfall.
We’re standing on a hill made of bones. Whilst there are 400 headstones around us, estimates are that there at least another 349,600 bodies entombed in the ground beneath our feet. That’s four times the size of Wembley Stadium. That’s a lot of death and disease. An incalculable amount of misery.
Soon we will pass through the locked and cold gates of the Covenanters Prison, the site of the ‘Black Mausoleum’ - supposedly haunted by a spirit : that of George Mackenzie, a notorious, and fearsome man who took delight in condemning Covenanters to hanging by gallows, driven by the delusion of religious zealotry, and is buried in a cold tomb just feet away from the site of his darkest atrocities, and the graves of his victims. And we will soon be standing in that same tomb as daylight bleeds out of the sky.
At this point I’m not even scared. I didn’t know that experienced psychics smell rotting flesh that enter through the gates, or feel strange children glaring at them reproachfully. I didn’t know that there have already been two unsuccessful exorcisms, or that strange figures have been photographed in the deserted chapel I was stood within yards of. I didn’t know that early in 1999, a tramp seeking shelter broke into McKenzie's tomb, accidentally desecrated the coffin, and plunged though the floor of the small building into another tomb filled with bodies. I didn’t know Edinburgh City Council decided to lock the tomb gate after a string of visitors complained of intense cold and hot spots, and of sweet but sickening smells coming from it.
It’s the strangest situation. I’m stood with my friends Alix - whose been here before - and Vicky, at the gates to the Prison. We’re trying to be collected and calm. We are, after all, about to enter one of the scariest places on earth.
The gates are unlocked. There’s a dull clanking of metal against rusted metal as the door swings open, yet a feeling of an odd, unnatural peace. As if literally too much peace. Not even the chirp of a small bird singing in the summer evening breaks the silence. Its as if the sound has been sucked out of the world.
Gates are again unlocked. I can smell fear in my bloodstream - but I tell myself don't be so silly. Alix and Vicky enter the room, along with the others, and stand in the middle of the room, surrounded at all sides by fellow visitors. I hesitantly wait by the door, before I finally enter the room and swallow hard. I don‘t know how to explain it. But I felt that whatever was in there, it was not going to go quietly into the night. Not this time. I just felt it.
The first thing that strikes me is the size. It’s no bigger than a small second bedroom. The light is swallowed by cold stone. And the heat. The accumulated heat of 50 people in a confined space is hard. Akin to the opening of an oven door, the heat gently but firmly pushes your face. Supernatural activity can raise the temperature as well as reduce it.
I stand next to Alix, and I can smell fear : not hers or mine. But a sense of something that is both palpable, yet without form, in the air around us. The guide is mixing laughter with fear, telling seemingly absurd yet true tales of ancient slayings, detailing the many levels of Poltergeist activity, and waving her torch around. I think I’m getting paranoid. I know I’m trying to control my fear. Alix’s arm wraps around me, mine around hers, and her other hand is firm inside Vicky’s grip.
The last time Alix was here she hit a cold spot, and felt something move towards her. This time, it seems to recognise her in some way - and it might very well be coming again. Or is it me? or is it just looking for someone, something, some way in, to feed off our fear? Why do we put our heads in the mouths of tigers and wonder why they bite?
I feel strange, as if there is something waiting to happen. I knew before I entered the tomb, that something wasn’t quite settled within there. It looked normal, it smelt normal, but it seemed a room out of phase with the rest of the world. That’s why I didn’t want to enter. That’s why I hesitated. I place my hands inside my pockets – as much as possible. Surely a entity cannot penetrate fabric? Still, when you’re talking about something that has no physical form, hiding behind a physical form is no defence at all. I feel a vague scratching on my face, below my left eye, I wonder – is this the first form of physical interaction this poltergeist has? A vague scratching, itching sensation is apparently indicative of a presence – people who have felt this have reported bruising, scratches, wounds. Am I imagining this? Or am I pretending that this unexplainable sensation inside the heart of the most-documented case of poltergeist activity on the British mainland isn’t really happening?
Alix’s breathing has stiffened. I feel her sway backwards slightly, I hold her weight, I ask, “are you okay?“, and whilst she says “yes”, I wonder if this is true. Animals can smell fear. The same fear that dimly lives in the back of my mind. That despite reason and sense, there is the feeling that there is something here that we cannot see. More than that, she is feeling a pressure, unseen hands, pushing her back, further into the darkness. I don’t know this yet, but I know that something isn’t quite right. And I’m frankly, a little concerned. Control the breathing, keep your heart beat down. Calmness - the eye of the storm and see things for the way that they truly are. Zen. Whilst the guide talks, I hear two distinct thumps to my right. They are unclear. Nobody else registers these, possibly because they didn’t hear them, or possibly fear. Was I the only person that heard them? They don’t want to be seen as chicken shit do they? Not like me, someone who is literally immobilised with fear when meeting a desirable woman for the first time. These thumps are apparently a sign of activity.
I never thought that I’d be standing with a crowd of 35 people on a ghost tour of Edinburgh, in a mausoleum haunted by 'something', boiling warm and yet experiencing a strange feeling creeping up my legs that doesn't belong to this earthly plane.
There’s a coldness within me. It’s like a shiver, but slower, travelling slowly up your legs, past your knees, as if you stood in cold water, some time ago, and your trousers are slowly drying whilst you wear them. Being a pressure point, this sensation travels around you. You literally cannot escape it. It creeps within me.
There’s a scream of shock and terror, a run for the door. Alix moves, and we follow, picking our way through people, through innocent bystanders who whilst occupying the same physical space as us, are blessed with ignorance of contact. She breaks free of us, but we cannot allow her to go alone – apparently the poltergeist generates cold spots to separate and isolate potential victims. The door is opened, we stumble en masse from the tomb into darkness, and we simply do not stop. I glance backward, and cannot see anything. But I can feel. We are shaking, blood jumping in the veins, the terror of skirting briefly something unknown.
I don’t know what to say or do. We walk, we stumble, in some way we do something, we hold Alix safely between us, we talk as we race away from the tomb, aiming for the gates exit, those which are only unlocked by special permission. Nothing else exists for now except getting through those gates and away from this. We rack our brains for trivia, and then Vicky has a wonderful idea. Lets play the Alphabet game and concentrate our energies elsewhere. Akin to an Agnostic prayer, a chorus of digits fend off dark spirits. “A, B, C, D, E , F...“ we recite as one... surprisingly we get through the whole alphabet once, and are on our 36th letter – the letter G – by the time we emerge, shaking, terrified, into the main area of the graveyard.
We collapse onto stone. Deep breaths. Shaking hands. And I’m NEVER doing that again. We try not to think about it. Slowly, Alix recites a speech she learnt for her play (which is now playing at the fringe festival), about Toby and his Pilchard sandwiches, which serve to distract and focus away from hands without flesh.
Something unseen had reached out and tugged at her watch strap. The same arm that was nervously wrapped around my back. Something I should’ve felt brush me. Something that should’ve had to lift up the cuff of her denim jacket to access it, but didn’t need to. Whatever it was was without physical form, yet had presence. Something touched us.
Light. We need to banish dark thoughts with light. And to fight fire with fire, fight spirits with spirits. Stumbling from the darkness onto the main exit, into the evening glare off a Saturday night in a major town, past strange men on the phone, and odd couples standing on cobble stone, we turn right, and into the nearest pub, where, under the naked light of a 120watt bulb, red welts rise and fall in mere minutes upon her skin, hands shake, finally and calm. On those hands, the index and middle finger of each hand are stinging, as if you’ve brushed yourself against nettles, and four small scratches appear. Neither deep, nor angry, the flesh around these thin lines is sore, red, inflamed. And yet these start to disappear within minutes.
These are traditional signs of a poltergeist manifestation.
We’re standing about 200 yards away from the tomb that holds the most dangerous poltergeist in the island. It’s just touched us. And we’re in the pub. Unable to do anything but drink, and talk, and wonder. All we have are questions without answers. Experience without understanding : we recognise what has happened, we know what it was, but what does it mean? Ultimately it means we’re scared. Whatever it is is feeding off the fear of others, and probably getting stronger in there. Waiting for the time. And we’re never going in there again. Ever.
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