Edinburgh Castle

The story

Edinburgh Castle stands on Castle Rock in the center of Edinburgh. It is a scheduled monument (Historic Environment Scotland SM90130), managed by Historic Environment Scotland together with the army. The rock has been occupied since at least the Iron Age, and there has been a royal castle on it since the 12th century at the latest; Wikipedia’s versions differ, one naming Malcolm III in the 11th century and another David I in the 12th.

The documented history is dense. In 1537 Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, was imprisoned in the castle and burned on 17 July. The detail that she was burned on Castle Hill carries a citation-needed tag on Wikipedia, but Ingram’s 1897 book says she “perished amid the flames on Castle Hill.” In 1689 the Duke of Gordon held the castle against the troops of William of Orange. In the 18th and early 19th centuries the vaults served as a prison of war, holding prisoners from the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence and the Napoleonic wars; 49 prisoners escaped in 1811, and the use ended in 1814. The castle was also a garrison and an arsenal, and it housed the Honours of Scotland, the crown jewels.

The legend

This page is short on purpose, because the honest finding is that the ghost stories attached to the castle have no old source that we could find.

The tales we read are these. A piper is said to have vanished in a tunnel, said to run beneath the Royal Mile; his identity is unknown. A headless drummer is placed in 1650 by the website Great Castles, as an omen of Cromwell’s siege. It says this comes from sentries’ reports, without a source, and that its story is adapted from Coulombe’s Haunted Castles of the World, without giving a date. It does not say who the drummer was, and we read no source for that. Great Castles also says that in 2003 a restoration crew in the Queen Anne building claimed to be harassed by ghosts of Napoleonic War prisoners, again without a source; it does not mention the vaults. Janet Douglas is sometimes cited as a White Lady, but that story belongs to Glamis (see our Glamis Castle page).

What we checked: Robert Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh (1868), in its chapter on Castle Hill, contains no ghost story. The versions of the Wikipedia article we read mention no ghostly piper or drummer and no ghost at all. Ingram’s 1897 book has an entry on Edinburgh Castle in an appendix; we read it, and it is a warning dream, with no piper or drummer. A 2003 study by Richard Wiseman and colleagues investigated alleged hauntings in the British Journal of Psychology; as far as we know it concerns the South Bridge Vaults and Hampton Court rather than the castle, and we did not read it, so it should not be cited for the castle. A search of US newspaper archives found no relevant article on ghosts at the castle.

No hoax is proven. The piper and drummer look like oral traditions of guided walks, but the evidence for that is only the absence of earlier written sources, which does not prove they are recent. We simply have no dated trace.

What remains today

The castle remains a major complex, with the vaults and other historic buildings, and it is Scotland’s second most visited tourist attraction according to Wikipedia, with 2,044,963 visitors in 2025 (as given there). The official site says nothing about ghosts.

Visiting

The castle is open to the public. The official page we consulted in November 2026 gave opening from 9:30 each day, with online tickets recommended. Check the official site for current hours and prices, since we have not verified them. It is a protected monument, managed jointly with the army, so follow staff instructions. Do not confuse it with the separate South Bridge Vaults.

Sources

1. Castle memories : twenty tales of Edinburgh Castle 1923 — Internet Archive · Ogilvie, J. N. (James Nicoll), 1860-1926, 1923-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
2. Edinburgh Castle Railway Fence — Archaeology Data Service via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
3. HSCO-90130-2007-02 Edinburgh Castle - Portcullis Gate — Archaeology Data Service via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
4. HSCO-90130-2012-01 Edinburgh Castle: Mons Meg — Archaeology Data Service via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
5. Wikimedia Commons category : Edinburgh Castle — Wikimedia Commons
6. Edinburgh Castle from "[Cassell's Illustrated Universal History.]". — The British Library via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
7. Engraving of Edinburgh Castle by an unattributed artist — University of Edinburgh via Europeana, 1834 · http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
8. Gezicht op Edinburgh Castle — Rijksmuseum via Europeana, 1753 · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
9. Gezicht op Edinburgh Castle en de National Gallery in Edinburgh — Rijksmuseum via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
10. Ghosts of Edinburgh Castle — Great Castles
11. Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis — Wikipedia
12. Official website
13. The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (Ingram) — Internet Archive, 1897
14. Traditions of Edinburgh (Robert Chambers) — Project Gutenberg, 1868
15. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.