Edinburgh Vaults

The story

The South Bridge was Edinburgh's answer to a problem of geography. Authorized by an act of 1785 and finished in 1788, it carried a new street over the Cowgate. Its nineteen arches were not left open: they were enclosed and divided into chambers, used by the businesses on the bridge above. Those enclosed spaces are what we now call the Edinburgh Vaults, or South Bridge Vaults. Part of the site swallowed the remains of Adam Square, which was demolished for the bridge; excavators later found original terracotta floor tiles, a hearthstone, the ruins of a fireplace and a well.

At first the rooms worked as planned, housing taverns, cobblers and other craftsmen, and storage for merchants on the bridge. But the bridge had been built in a hurry and its road surface was never properly waterproofed, so water seeped through and the vaults began to flood. Businesses started leaving as early as 1795, and most had gone by the 1820s.

As the Cowgate became Edinburgh's worst slum during the Industrial Revolution, the city's poorest people moved into the abandoned chambers. Conditions were grim: no daylight, stale air, no running water and no sanitation, with rooms lit by fish oil lamps and some families of more than ten crammed into a single space. Robbery and violence followed, along with illegal drinking dens and gambling. On 1 July 1815 the Edinburgh Evening Courant described how excise officers had uncovered an elaborate illicit whisky still under one of the arches, reached through a hidden iron door behind a bedroom fire grate; it had been running for a year and a half, with water tapped from the town supply and smoke vented into a neighbor's flue.

Nobody knows exactly when the vaults were finally shut up; estimates range from about 1835 to about 1875, and written records from the slum years are almost nonexistent. Rumor long claimed that bodysnatchers stored corpses there overnight, but this is unproven, and there is no evidence linking the murderers Burke and Hare to the vaults.

The chambers were forgotten until the 1980s, when a former Scotland rugby international found a tunnel leading into them. He reportedly used it to smuggle Cristian Raducanu, a Romanian rugby player fleeing the Romanian secret police, to safety so he could seek asylum, weeks before the 1989 revolution. In the 1990s he and his son cleared hundreds of tonnes of rubble by hand, uncovering thousands of oyster shells. A 1985 excavation had already revealed middens full of toys, medicine bottles and crockery, proof that people had once lived down here.

The legend

Two separate vault complexes are open today, run by competing tour companies: the Blair Street side belongs to Mercat Tours, while Auld Reekie Tours handles the Niddry Street side. Ghost stories are often attached to the wrong side, so it helps to know that most of the famous claims belong to Mercat's Blair Street vaults.

The ghost lore here is young. Mercat itself dates the reputation for apparitions to the reopening of the vaults in the 1980s, and by 2001 the company had been keeping a log of visitors' reports for about five years. The stories draw on the vaults' real history of poverty and crime, but no named historical figure stands behind them.

Mr Boots, the Watcher. The best-known presence is a tall, intimidating man in a grimy blue coat and battered leather boots. He is said to stare out of doorways, stride along passages and snarl "Get out" at visitors. Travel sites add that he shoves people or throws stones, and some place him in the Niddry Street vaults instead; those details rest on weak sources.

The White Room. Mercat also tells of an unnamed young woman who is supposed to have died in a chamber known as the White Room.

Visitors on tours describe figures in doorways, footsteps, disembodied voices, icy touches and marks appearing on their skin afterward. Auld Reekie promotes its Niddry Street vaults as among the most paranormally active places anywhere on the planet, without naming specific ghosts.

On television. Most Haunted investigated in 2003 (series 3, episode 3) and came back for its live Halloween special in 2006. Ghost Adventures visited for season 1, episode 7, first aired on 28 November 2008, and the crew claimed many encounters. The Ghost Files team of Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej picked the Blair Street side as the setting of its first international hunt. In 2009 a BBC Three crew left presenter Joe Swash alone overnight; his microphone picked up about twenty minutes of voices he did not hear at the time, ending in what sounded like children shouting. Engineers wondered whether noise from nearby nightclubs was leaking into the tunnels, but the source was never pinned down. The footage aired in Joe Swash Believes in Ghosts in January 2010.

The science. The vaults were the setting for a well-known experiment on hauntings. In April 2001, during the Edinburgh International Science Festival, psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire and colleagues including James Houran led about 250 volunteers through vaults that Mercat considered either "haunted" or quiet. Volunteers reported flashes of light, whispers, apparitions, heavy breathing and sudden temperature drops. Some 51 percent reported something unusual in the reputedly haunted chambers, against 35 percent in the others. The resulting paper, published in the British Journal of Psychology in 2003, found that experiences tracked differences in lighting and local magnetic fields rather than what volunteers already knew about the rooms, and the authors cautioned that such reports are not necessarily evidence of ghosts.

What remains today

The vaults survive inside the arches of the South Bridge, cleared of rubble in the 1990s. North of the Cowgate arch, the tunnels are used mainly for tours. On the south side, the chambers form an events venue, The Caves, which hosts private events, weddings, dinners, live music and occasional club nights; the illicit still of 1815 stood in one of the arches next to it.

Visiting

The vaults can only be visited on guided tours. Mercat Tours, which says it holds exclusive access to the Blair Street vaults, runs tours there, including the "Haunted Underground" ghost tour. Auld Reekie Tours runs a one-hour vaults tour of the Niddry Street side and an adults-only "Terror Tour." Check the operators' websites for current times and book ahead.

The vaults are commercially operated, with no public access outside tours and events; do not try to get in on your own.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Edinburgh Vaults — Wikimedia Commons
2. "Exploration of Ghost-like Phenomena" — ABC News (April 2001) — ABC News (April 2001
3. "Ghost Adventures 1x07: Edinburgh Vaults" — TVmaze — TVmaze
4. "Mr Boots, the Watcher" (blog) — Mercat Tours — Mercat Tours
5. "The Vaults Tour" (Auld Reekie Tours) — VisitScotland — VisitScotland
6. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
7. Wiseman et al., "An investigation into alleged 'hauntings'", British Journal of Psychology (2003) — University of Hertfordshire Research Archive — University of Hertfordshire Research Archive

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.