Edinburgh Old Town Ghost Walking Tour in Italian

St Giles' Cathedral and the Mercat Cross

The tour starts on the High Street, a few steps from St Giles' Cathedral, the High Kirk of Edinburgh. A church has stood here since the 12th century, and the crown spire completed around 1500 is one of the symbols of the city. In the cobbles outside, the heart-shaped Heart of Midlothian marks the entrance of the old Tolbooth prison, where condemned prisoners waited for the gallows.

Next to the cathedral stands the Mercat Cross, the market cross where proclamations were read and public punishments were carried out in front of the crowd. Your Italian-speaking guide uses these first stops to set the scene: a crowded medieval town on a narrow ridge, ruled by fear of plague, crime and witchcraft. This is where the darker side of the Royal Mile comes into focus.

Fleshmarket Close and the Tron Kirk

Fleshmarket Close is a steep stepped alley that drops from the High Street towards the valley to the north. It takes its name from the meat market that once stood at its foot, and in the evening its narrow walls and lamp-lit steps make it one of the most atmospheric passages in the Old Town. Your guide tells the stories linked to this close and to the trades that filled it.

Back on the Royal Mile, the Tron Kirk was built between 1636 and 1647 and named after the tron, the public weighing beam that once stood beside it. Its spire was rebuilt after a great fire in 1824. When the church closed, excavations inside uncovered the remains of Marlin's Wynd, a 16th-century street with the foundations of houses, a reminder of how many layers of the city lie beneath your feet.

North Bridge and the View to the New Town

North Bridge crosses the deep valley that once held the Nor' Loch, a polluted lake below the castle that was drained in the 18th century. The first bridge, completed in 1772, opened the way for the elegant New Town to the north; part of it collapsed during construction in 1769. The present steel bridge dates from the 1890s and passes over the roof of Waverley station.

In the evening this is one of the best viewpoints in Edinburgh: the lights of Princes Street, Calton Hill with its monuments and the castle rock above the gardens. Your guide pauses here to explain the contrast between the ordered New Town and the dark, crowded Old Town behind you, before leading you back towards its secret corners.

Niddry Street and the Hidden Vaults

Niddry Street runs steeply down from the High Street to the Cowgate, right beside South Bridge. Hidden inside the arches of that bridge, completed in 1788, are the Edinburgh Vaults, chambers first used as workshops and stores and later occupied by the poorest people of the city. Some of their entrances open onto Niddry Street, which is why it is one of the most talked-about streets in haunted Edinburgh.

Your guide tells the stories of the vaults and the Cowgate below: overcrowding, crime, body snatchers and the strange events reported there ever since. This walking tour stays at street level and does not enter the vaults, but standing in the narrow, dim street where they begin is enough to make the tales vivid, especially once darkness has fallen.

Greyfriars Kirkyard

The tour ends in Greyfriars Kirkyard, opened in 1562 on the land of a Franciscan friary. Greyfriars Kirk, completed in 1620, saw the signing of the National Covenant in 1638, and after 1679 hundreds of Covenanter prisoners were held in a field at the back of the kirkyard, now the walled Covenanters' Prison. Among the elaborate tombs you also find iron mortsafes that once protected the dead from body snatchers.

Greyfriars is often described as one of the most haunted graveyards in the world, and your guide shares its legends as dusk settles over the gravestones. It is a peaceful place by day, generally open in daylight hours, with views of the castle; is Greyfriars Kirkyard worth visiting at night with a guide? For the atmosphere and the stories, it is the highlight of any Edinburgh ghost walk.