Edinburgh Castle

OVERVIEW

A fortress on a volcanic plug above the Old Town, a royal residence from the reign of Malcolm III until 1633 and a garrison since, with St Margaret's Chapel of the early 1100s, the Honours of Scotland and the National War Memorial. It is Scotland's second most-visited attraction and still an army headquarters. Its ghosts are a piper who went into the tunnels under the Royal Mile and never came out, a headless drummer seen before the 1650 siege, and prisoners in the vaults.

HISTORY

Twenty-six sieges are recorded; the Lang Siege of 1573 destroyed most of the medieval castle. The vaults under the Great Hall held prisoners of war in the eighteenth century, including Americans after 1776, whose carvings survive. In April 2001, for the Edinburgh International Science Festival, Dr Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire led 240 volunteers with no knowledge of the castle's stories through rooms in the vaults over ten days, with thermal cameras and magnetometers, and asked them to record what they felt.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

In Wiseman's experiment almost half the participants reported unexplained experiences — cold, being watched, a touch on the face, tugging at clothes, shadowy figures — and the reports clustered in the rooms with a haunted reputation that the volunteers had not been told about. Wiseman's reading was that environmental cues, not ghosts, produced them, and that people are good at finding the 'right' rooms. The piper and drummer are legend; the 2001 study is on the record, and is why the castle is here.

VISITING

Open daily, ticketed; book ahead in summer. The vaults are on the visitor route.