The Edinburgh Vaults

Let's talk about Edinburgh in the early 1800s for a moment.

The city has too many people in it. That is the whole story, really. Thousands of people crowded into a small medieval city on a ridge, stacking themselves into tenements that go so high up that the upper floors lean toward each other across the street, almost touching. Almost.

The vaults are below all of that. Below street level. Below the light.

The poorest residents of Edinburgh moved in. Whole families. Into chambers with no windows, no ventilation, no natural light of any kind. The walls dripped. The floors were mud and stone. There was no sanitation in any sense that a modern person would recognize.

They lit fires inside the vaults to keep warm. There was nowhere for the smoke to go, so it stayed. People slept in the smoke. Children grew up in the smoke.

Doctors who visited the vaults in this period wrote about what they found. The descriptions are clinical and measured in the way that people write when they are trying to remain calm about something that has upset them considerably.

Disease spread efficiently. Cholera found the vaults very accommodating. The people who lived there died at rates that even the Victorians, who were not squeamish about death, considered alarming.

This went on for decades.

And during this same period, just above, on the streets of Edinburgh, a different kind of business was developing. One that found the proximity of so many poor and desperate people quite useful.

Edinburgh in the 1820s has a very good medical school. The best in the world, some people say. And the medical school needs bodies. Cadavers for dissection. The surgeons need to know how the body works, which means they need bodies to take apart.

Legally, they can only use the bodies of executed criminals. There are not enough executed criminals.

This creates what you might call a market opportunity.

Body snatching is an established profession in Edinburgh. Resurrection men, they are called. They dig up fresh graves at night and sell what they find to the medical schools. It is illegal. It is also fairly common.

William Burke and William Hare looked at this business and decided the digging was inefficient.

Between 1827 and 1828, they murdered at least sixteen people. They found their victims among the poor, the desperate, the people no one would immediately miss. The vaults and the slums around the South Bridge were a ready supply.

They suffocated their victims, specifically so the bodies would show no obvious wounds. Then they sold them to Dr. Robert Knox at the medical school.

When they were caught, Burke was hanged. Hare turned king's evidence and went free. Dr. Knox was never charged.

Burke was publicly dissected after his execution. The medical school kept his skeleton. You can still see it today. This is information I am going to leave with you without comment.

Sometime in the mid-1800s, the vaults were sealed.

No one is entirely sure when. There is no announcement, no official record that says: today we are closing the Edinburgh Vaults. They just. Stopped. The entrances were bricked up. The people who had been living there went somewhere else, or did not. The chambers went dark.

Above, the city continued. The South Bridge carried thousands of people every day over its nineteen arches, over the ravine, from one part of the city to another. Almost none of them thought about what was directly beneath their feet.

The vaults sat in the dark for over a hundred years.

Think about that for a moment. A hundred and forty years, give or take. Stone rooms under a busy street. Completely sealed. Completely forgotten. Whatever had happened in those rooms, whatever objects remained, whatever had soaked into those walls, just sitting there.

Damp. Cold. Dark.

I want to say something reassuring here. I am finding it difficult to think of something appropriate.

The important thing, I think, is that things that are sealed eventually get opened. That is just the nature of things. Curiosity, renovation, accident.

In this case, it was 1985.

In 1985, a local rugby club was looking for a place to hold parties.

This is true. I did not make this up.

A man named Norrie Rowan discovered the sealed vaults beneath the South Bridge and thought: this is an interesting space. He organized the first tours. People climbed down into the dark with torches and saw the chambers for the first time in over a century.

They found things exactly as they had been left. Shoes. Bottles. Objects that had belonged to people who had lived and died there. The walls were still damp. The air was still cold. The chambers still had no ventilation.

The tours became popular. Edinburgh is a city with a strong appetite for its own history, particularly the dark parts.

And then people started reporting things.

Not immediately. But over time. Consistently. Across tour groups that had not spoken to each other, across years, across different guides.

A stone thrown by no visible hand. A scratch on the skin from nothing. A sudden drop in temperature in a specific chamber. A feeling of being watched that was specific and directional, coming from a particular corner, a particular doorway.

The researchers who came to study the vaults described them as some of the most reliably active paranormal sites they had ever investigated. Which is, depending on your point of view, either very exciting or quite concerning.

Among all the reported presences in the Edinburgh Vaults, one appears most often.

A boy.

He has been called Jack, or the South Bridge Entity, depending on who is describing him. He has been reported by dozens of visitors over the years. Children on tours sometimes try to interact with him. Sometimes they report that he interacts back.

He is not the only presence. There is a chamber called the Wine Vault where people experience what they describe as overwhelming dread. There are reports of hands that touch visitors and nothing there. There are the thrown stones, always small, always from the direction of a corner that no one is standing in.

The guides who work the vaults every night have their own views on this. Some are matter-of-fact. Some will not go into certain chambers alone.

The City of the Dead tours operate out of Greyfriars Kirkyard nearby, but the South Bridge Vaults have their own long-running ghost tour operation, running most nights of the year.

Thousands of people have walked those chambers. Many of them walked out with scratch marks they did not have going in. Some of them have photographs of things they cannot explain. Almost all of them would go back.

That last part is, if you think about it, the most interesting part of the whole story.

Okay. I think that is probably enough Edinburgh for one bedtime. You look very awake. That is fine. That is completely fine.