Edinburgh Dark Secrets Old Town Ghost Walking Tour

The Winding Alleys of the Old Town

The walk begins among the closes and wynds of the Old Town, the narrow passages that drop steeply from the Royal Mile. In the 1600s tens of thousands of people lived packed into tall tenements here, sharing water from public wells and throwing waste into the street below. Disease spread fast, crime was common and punishment was public, which is why so many of Edinburgh's ghost stories begin in these alleys.

As the light fades, your guide brings this world to life with tales of Scottish myths and faerie lore, sinister neighbours and unexplained events, mixed with plenty of humour. This is a classic Edinburgh Old Town ghost tour on foot, so expect slopes, cobbles and steps rather than a show. The atmosphere is best from October to March, when the 17:30 start is already after dark.

Plague and the 17th-Century Houses

The Black Death reached Scotland in 1349, and plague returned to Edinburgh many times, the last great outbreak striking in 1645. Victims were isolated, sometimes in their own closes, and families were moved to huts on the open land south of the town. Plague doctors were hired by the town council to visit the sick, protected by long coats and beaked masks filled with herbs believed to purify the air.

Your guide explains how they worked and why their methods failed, while you walk past the stone houses that survived those years. Along the Canongate, Huntly House of 1570, now the Museum of Edinburgh, and Acheson House of 1633 show how wealthier citizens lived, with timber galleries, crow-stepped gables and carved inscriptions. These buildings help you picture the crowded, fragile city behind the legends.

The Scottish Witch Trials

From the Witchcraft Act of 1563 until its repeal in 1736, thousands of people in Scotland were accused of witchcraft, and a large share of them were executed, usually by strangling and burning. Most were women, but men accused as warlocks also died. The great trials of 1590, linked to storms said to have been raised against the royal fleet, began a panic that returned in waves for more than a century.

In Edinburgh, most burnings took place on Castlehill, at the top of the Royal Mile, where a small bronze fountain called the Witches' Well now remembers the victims. During the walk your guide explains the beliefs, spells and confessions behind the trials, and how torture produced the evidence. It is the darkest chapter of the tour, and hearing it on the old streets of the city where so many trials were held makes it all the more powerful.

Old Calton Cemetery

Old Calton Cemetery, also called Old Calton Burial Ground, opened in 1718 on the southern slope of Calton Hill, just east of Princes Street. Its high walls and circular mausolea were built partly to guard against body snatchers. Above the graves rises a tall obelisk of 1844, the Political Martyrs' Monument, dedicated to reformers transported to Australia in the 1790s for demanding the vote.

Many call it one of the most haunted graveyards in Scotland, and in the evening light, with views over the rooftops towards the Old Town, it is easy to understand why. Your guide tells the story of the black market in corpses that supplied the city's anatomy lectures. Old Calton Cemetery is generally open daily in daylight hours, and it is a short climb from here to the top of Calton Hill if you want to return for the views.

Canongate Kirkyard

The Canongate was a separate burgh outside the town walls until 1856, built along the lower part of the Royal Mile towards Holyrood. Canongate Kirk was completed in 1691 for the local congregation after the abbey church at Holyrood became the royal chapel, and its curved Dutch-style gable and the stag's antlers on the roof make it one of the most distinctive churches in the city.

The kirkyard behind it holds graves of merchants, scholars and craftsmen, with views up to Calton Hill. Here your guide tells the story of the West Port murders of 1828, when two lodging-house keepers killed sixteen people and sold their bodies to an anatomy school, a scandal that led to the Anatomy Act of 1832. A Canongate Kirkyard tour at dusk is a fitting place to end a walk through the city's darkest secrets.