Spooky Tour

For our Bank Holiday Monday we decided to go for a day trip to Edinburgh by train. It only takes 2 ½ hours from York and the train journey is pleasant as you go through Durham and its great cathedral, Newcastle and its impressive bridges, along the breathtaking Northumberland coast, through Berwick on Tweed and finally Edinburgh. Although I’ve been to Edinburgh many times, I always find it fascinating and I discover something new each time.

One of new experiences in Edinburgh this time was to go on the Real Mary King’s Close Tour. Beneath the City Chambers on the Royal Mile lies Edinburgh's deepest secret - a warren of hidden streets where real people lived, worked and died between the 17th and the 19th centuries. Now a new attraction allows visitors to step back in time to walk through these underground closes and witness some of the dramatic episodes and extraordinary apparitions from this site's fascinating and historically rich past.
These buildings were inhabited during the Plague, and a lot of people died in the close. This has led to many ghost stories, which the guide was brilliant at explaining to us.

You are guided round the old houses and work buildings, which are still mostly intact - it's amazing to see the different rooms in the houses, and the old work-places. These have some (scarily life-like!) models put in to help you imagine how people lived. The atmosphere is brilliant, very electric, due to the huge number of recorded ghost-sightings. This is helped along slightly by the guide - at one point the tour were ushered into a room, in pitch darkness, and a ghost story told, along with sound effects – it was rather scary!!

The celebrity of the close's supernatural resident is Annie, a ghostly pre-teen who (so the story goes) scared the daylights out of a Japanese psychic in 1992. This lady had been unimpressed by the tour until she arrived at one of the many small rooms. There she was suddenly struck by an overwhelming feeling of sickness, hunger and cold and, when she tried to leave felt the ghastly tug of a ghostly hand on her leg. Poor Annie's spectral life has now been fleshed out and it is believed that she had been left to die by her family. Since then, people from round the world have come to "Annie’s room". Many have told tour guides of seeing impressions of the spirit in the room; some visitors, treating the room as a shrine, have left gifts for the little girl out of affection.

This was an absolutely fabulous tour, definitely one not to be missed if you're going to be in Edinburgh. And if you wish to listen to the audiotour in Italian, well, that's my voice!