Greyfriars and More – Edinburgh: I’ve only once been to the annual festival in Edinburgh and that was in 2013. I enjoyed the week there but really decided it wasn’t for me and once was enough. Better if I go there again to go outside that week and enjoy the city.
Wednesday 14th August was one of the more interesting days and we spent much of it in Greyfriars Churchyard, where we had gone to watch a play, Eugenie Grandet, based on the tragic and dramatic 1833 novel by Honoré de Balzac.
Our walk there from the flat we were sharing with a group of friends had taken us past the school which was the inspiration for Hogwarts and the various monuments at Greyfriars were perhaps in keeping with the mood of the excellently performed play.
We lunched in the Mosque – a good cheap curry, before going on to Scotland’s most haunted pub in the underground vaults in the heart of the old town, the Banshee Labyrinth. We were there for a performance of ‘Evie and the Perfect Cupcake‘ an hour long poetic spoken word monologue by Tina Sederholm, a warning against the dangers of beauty and success. It was a fine performance. The cellars are dark and musty and I took no pictures.
For the evening we had booked on the City of the Dead tour which was suprisingly interesting. Our tour began at the monument to ‘Greyfriars Bobby’ but our guide led us to the fake grave of Greyfriars Bobbby, from which he extracted the coins left by tourists. He then told us neither the dog nor his master were buried in Greyfriars and that the dog came to his master’s grave came not out of loyalty but for pies and offal dumped there and his body when he died was probably thrown into an unknown ditch.
Earlier in the day I’d photographed the locked area of Greyfriars cemetery though the gate. It was getting late and rather dark when our guide unlocked the gate and took us through into the area where around 1200 covenanters were left to more or less starve open to the elements in what he called the ‘first concentration camp‘. Locked there by ‘Bluidy Mackenzie‘ the Lord Advocate, some were executed and hundreds died of malnutrition and exposure. Mackenzie’s own tomb is a few yards away.
According to our guide, Greyfriars had begun as a pit, and the hill on which were were standing was formed by the thousands of bodies piled there since it became a cemetery in 1561. It and the Banshee Labyrinth where we had been earlier were said to be the most haunted places in the city.
By now it was getting quite dark and our guide got our a small torch to light himself as he talked, telling us that this area was now kept locked because many visitors there – including some on earlier City of the Dead tours – had been attacked by an unseen force, feeling as if they are being strangled, and thrown to the ground. Many others had felt strange temperature drops during their visits and had reported strange bruising.
As he stood in front of Bluidy Mackenzie’s tomb we were treated to an animated retelling of the story of a homeless man who in 1999 had broken into a tomb to shelter on a stormy night, our guide illuminating his face with a torch in true horror-film lighting. You can read more of the story on My London Diary. It got us fully into the mood for when one of the guide’s colleagues jumped out of darkness dressed as a ghost and screaming.
And as we sat down to dinner with our friends back in the flat I looked down at my hands and saw I had a small strange black bruise on my first finger after the tour…
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