According to family legend, my great-grandmother defended her home against banshees in the West of Ireland. The banshee’s wails caused the windows to crack and her blood to curdle. Decades later, grandmother is convinced that my mother and I have similar fey blood running through our veins, so I suppose it’s no wonder that I eventually saw a ghost.
One spring, in lieu of visiting the family ancestral homestead in County Roscommon, Ireland I opted to fly to Scotland. Scotland was a place that I had always wanted to visit. I was quickly drawn in by the sweeping landscapes and adorable little lambs dotting the countryside. Eventually, my travels lead me to Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a city that has a long and storied history of violence and bloodshed, from Roman and Viking incursions to the Scottish Wars of Independence.
One day during this trip, I found myself nursing a hangover when I received a phone call from my mother. Her side of the family is notoriously superstitious and, like them, she harbors an obsession with ghosts and aliens, spending what little free time she has watching television shows about specters or extraterrestrials. Because my mom had logged in so many hours surveilling various haunted places, she knew that Edinburgh was a ghostly hotspot. My mother begged me to go on a ghost tour to the notoriously haunted Edinburgh vaults, and report what I learned back to her.
The Edinburgh Vaults, or the South Bridge Vaults, are chambers that were forged in the nineteen arches of the South Bridge, the construction of which began in 1785. Eventually the bridge served as a shopping street and the vaults below were first used as workshops and eventually served as living quarters for Edinburgh’s poor. As you can imagine, vaults under a bridge are dark and damp. Living conditions were akin to a slum, overcrowded with no light, running water, or sanitation. The vaults became a haven for violent crime and prostitution. According to one description, it was “a place to die, not to live.” As such, the authorities cleared out the vaults and shut them down just thirty years after the bridge’s opening. After being rediscovered and reopened to the public in the mid 1980s, the vaults have become a major tourist attraction.
With my mother’s urging, I signed up for a ghost tour. Like my longtime hero, Scully, from The X-Files, I am a notorious skeptic that values science over superstition. Any evidence of my “intuitive nature” or “fey blood” could be explained by luck or logic. As the tour guide briefed us on the vaults’ haunted history, I rolled my eyes. Tales of torture, of murder, of serial killers (William Burke and William Hare) entered one ear and went right out the other. I ain’t afraid of no ghosts, I told myself.
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