Edinburgh’s ghostly Christmas

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Edinburgh’s ghostly Christmas
December 20, 2010
REBECCA MCQUILLAN
heraldscotland

or hundreds of years, we have been fascinated by ghost stories at Christmas.

Here, Rebecca McQuillan ventures into Edinburgh’s subterranean Mary King’s Close with a team of spirit hunters

Like Ebenezer Scrooge awaiting the Ghost of Christmas Past, I am a little bit nervous, to be honest. I don’t really believe in ghosts, but I don’t go looking for them either. It would be very inconvenient, as a sceptic, to actually meet one, so I have tended to avoid abandoned tenement buildings in the dead of night.

Until now. In the interests of research into our enduring fascination with ghosts – particularly at Christmas – I find myself descending the steps of Mary King’s Close, the underground warren of streets in Edinburgh’s Old Town, on a dark December night, with a medium and a ghost hunter.

Ghosts have swirled around Christmas and midwinter festivals throughout history, a tradition kept alive in literature and on TV. In Britain, the association between Christmas and ghosts is mostly owed to Charles Dickens, who published A Christmas Carol in 1843, but the supernatural associations persist even today. This year Radio Scotland is airing five ghost stories by writers including crime author Denise Mina and Booker Prize-nominee James Robertson, while on TV, John Hurt will star in Whistle And I’ll Come to You, about a man’s ghostly encounter on a beach. In today’s arts section, there is specially written ghost story by Louise Welsh and Zoe Strachan.

Mary King’s Close is reputedly one of the most haunted places in this haunted city and we are here to see if we can detect anything that could confidently be described as paranormal activity. The sloping street is quiet and still, and we start our investigation with a walk through the shadowy rooms, medium Linda McCann and I, to see what she can “pick up”.

The close is actually a network of streets and tenements which were built over when the Royal Exchange (now Edinburgh City Chambers) was constructed in 1753. The subterranean spaces, a remarkably preserved time-capsule from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were largely forgotten until being reopened as a tourist attraction in 2003.

Now, after hours, we walk through rooms, once homes and workshops whose residents were blighted by the plague, which struck Edinburgh at Christmas 1644.

Tonight, the rooms are lit with flickering faux candles and smell of the past. Some are as cold as death. I realise I am conditioned to be spooked by shadows and silence, and am glad not to be alone, even if my companion is a medium. At least McCann isn’t scary, in spite of the head-to-toe black. She does this as a hobby. “I love my spooky stuff,” she whispers with a delighted giggle.

It’s a bit like being with a translator. From time to time, she breaks off in mid-sentence and cocks her head to one side, before saying “thank you” as if to herself and turning back to me to report what the latest spirit has told her. We were apparently greeted by a slaughterman named William and a woman named Agnes who was complaining about the stench of manure in the street.

In the slaughterhouse, McCann becomes grave and averts her face, whispering that “there’s a cow over there with fear in its eyes”. In the so-called plague room, she pauses by the model of a corpse on the floor. “I’m getting a John ... Craigie,” she says, her brow crinkling with concentration. “He says this is meant to be his body but he never lived here. He’s laughing at me and saying ‘I wisnae even as tall as that’.”

She pauses and flicks the bottom of her coat. “Don’t touch me, sweetheart,” she says softly to empty space, whispering “Just kids playing” as we walk out of the room.

Finally we emerge back on to the covered close. It’s been intriguing to watch, and McCann certainly believes what she is experiencing, but it doesn’t amount to evidence.

So now we move on to the more “scientific” bit, courtesy of Mark Turner of Ghost Finders Scotland,a full-time paranormal investigator. It’s time to try recording electronic voice phenomena (EVP).

Turner has been investigating ghosts for eight years, his interest fuelled by a childhood fascination with ghosts and what he describes as an intense fear of nothingness after death. I was bracing myself to meet a zealot, but, mercifully, he comes over as sober and measured. “I’m not 100% believer and I’m not 100% sceptic,” he says. “I want to know the truth.” Don’t we all?

Some mediums, he says, are too quick to attribute sights and sounds to the paranormal, while some parapsychologists discount evidence that could undermine their sceptical view. “I put myself in the middle of all that – it’s about balance.”

Well, he would say that to a journalist, wouldn’t he? What about when he’s with like-minded friends? He looks taken aback and insists he would say nothing different. “Three years ago, I would have said I’m more a believer than not, but I’ve become more sceptical because of the sheer absence of hard evidence.”

Turner draws a distinction, in paranormal theory, between a ghost, which he regards as a recording of a past event being played back, and a spirit, “the essence of someone’s soul you can interact with”. His approach, he explains, is to try to get spirits to provide information that can be confirmed by historical record.

To test for EVP, we go into the underground home of a Mr Chesney, sawmaker. McCann won’t come in with us, having once, she says, been berated by the late Mr Chesney for walking into his home uninvited, so it’s only Turner, the close’s assistant manager Susan Dunnet and myself.

Turner starts by showing me his pride and joy, an ageing Panasonic dictaphone. Brought out in the late 90s, this particular model resulted in complaints from ordinary customers who were picking up what sounded like other voices. Before it was recalled, paranormal investigators snapped up as many as they could. Now the model sells for $5000 online. Turner’s got six. He claims one has even been shown to pick up vocal sounds inside a Faraday cage, which blocks radio waves.

We stand around the dictaphone and Turner presses ‘record’. Speaking loudly and clearly, he says: “If there are any spirit people around about us, could you please come forward and identify yourself by telling us your name.” We stand in silence for several minutes, and then I ask the thin air for its occupation. Turner picks up the dictaphone, rewinds it and presses ‘play’.

First comes the bright, confident voice of Turner, then a pause, then an indistinct, rasping sound like a voice heard through radio interference. I feel myself frowning. What is that? I then hear my own question and then another, fainter noise. We play it again, in silence. Is it a voice?

“Right,” says Turner decisively and heads through the door into Mr Chesney’s hallway where he has set up his laptop. Inputting the audio file, he brings up a graphic read-out. There are two dense areas of scribbling when Turner and I spoke, and two others – a little less dense but with similar peaks and troughs to my voice – following our questions.

Turner then slows down the recording – spirits apparently speak very quickly – and we listen again to the first “answer”. We are listening for a name, and there are indeed two distinct sounds – words? – one with two “syllables”, the second with three. We listen intently, twice.

“The second word sounds to me like Ferguson,” ventures Turner.

“Maybe Jamieson,” offers Dunnet.

“Alfred Jamieson,” I say, trying out the sound.

We play it twice more.

“Jefferson?” I say.

“It’s something -derson,” says Turner. “I’d say Alfred’s pretty clear.”

Perhaps it’s Henderson, Alfred Henderson. That certainly fits the sound and you can even detect a Scots accent. Oddly, I am not spooked, but excited. We have a consensus.

But then I catch myself. The fact is that we are looking for a name, but if we were looking for a film or book title, we’d probably hear that too.

Turner nods: “That’s where you have to be careful, because the human mind is trained to look for patterns. You have to check yourself.”

The next day, staff at Mary King’s Close do a quick check of the records and don’t turn up any mention of an Alfred Henderson. To investigate thoroughly would take hours going through the city records. Even then, could you call that proof? Surely it would be merely circumstantial. We will never know what caused the rasping sound. Stray radio waves, perhaps. But, if so, why wasn’t it a continuous noise?

Finally, we perform a seance. Suddenly, and for the first time since entering Mary King’s Close, I feel afraid. I’ve never done one. It doesn’t fit with my no interference policy.

Still, this is for research, so McCann, Dunnet and I take up positions in the silent slaughterhouse and link hands, while Turner walks around us carrying gizmos with flashing lights. McCann asks for any nearby spirits to make their presence known by touching our hair or throwing something, “though not at us please”.

Eventually, there is a faint bang next door. “Did you hear that?” says Turner, on full alert. “It didn’t come from the audio equipment,” says Dunnet.

Oh come on. It simply sounded like the building settling, I venture, adding that my flat sounds like the percussion section of an orchestra at night. “Buildings settle because of changes in temperature, but it’s a constant temperature down here,” counters Turner. I am unconvinced.

It’s a beguiling thought, that we can tune in to the voices of the dead, or get them to bang a wall on cue, but the problem with all such phenomena is that there is almost always an alternative explanation. So it comes down to a question of individual interpretation, which is hopelessly subjective.

Turner agrees. It is one of the frustrations of his work. The biggest problem of all is, when you don’t know how to define a ghost, then how can you measure it, to prove or disprove it?

We may never be able to measure a ghost and so they remain an tantalising possibility, which may explain why, even now, they have such a strong place in our culture.

Belief in supernatural beings has proven stubbornly immune to modern rationalism. Surveys consistently show that a sizeable minority of people are convinced ghosts do exist. In a poll of 2060 people by the theology think tank Theos in 2009, 39% believed in ghosts.

Roddy Martine, the writer of Supernatural Scotland and his recently published follow-up Haunted Scotland, has migrated from agnosticism to belief, something that for him is tied up with his Christian faith. He readily admits he finds both his religious and supernatural beliefs “reassuring”, leaving himself open to the charge of wishful thinking.

But he is unconcerned. “After a while the body of evidence builds up,” he says, settling into an armchair in the lounge of his Edinburgh flat, photographs of his family smiling down on him from the sideboard. “I’ve seen ghosts on two occasions, and I can find no logical explanation for what I saw or felt.”

Ghost stories make the best fireside anecdotes and Martine’s got a cracking one about his former Edinburgh flat, where he lived in the 1980s. A small apparition would occasionally appear there, often standing at the end of the bed. Those who saw it, Martine and the occasional startled guest, described the same thing: a boy in a striped jacket with longish hair.

One day, on a train home from Glasgow, Martine got talking to an elderly woman. It emerged that she used to live in the same house before the First World War and her young brother had died of leukaemia there. Martine checked the deeds and found that they tallied with the woman’s story: a family named Seaton had lived there in 1912. He insists that his guests were not told about the ghost in advance, which raises an interesting point: that of corroborating statements.

Dr Caroline Watt works at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University. She investigates paranormal phenomena such as psychic ability in laboratory conditions and also researches the psychology behind supernatural belief.

“It’s quite difficult to explain when two people see the same thing,” she says thoughtfully. It is particularly interesting when they describe their experiences independently, without conferring.

Very few so-called ghost sightings can be confirmed as such, she says, but we do know that psychological factors influence people’s belief in the paranormal. The more excitable type of witness can trigger something called “psychological contagion”, in which one person becomes agitated after supposedly hearing or seeing something, creating a spiral of anxiety during which each person in the group takes their cue from the others. Ghost sightings can also be greatly influenced by expectation and atmosphere.

Dr Watt and psychologist Dr Richard Wiseman conducted an experiment in Edinburgh’s Vaults, the supposedly haunted underground spaces beneath South Bridge, where members of the public were asked to report any experiences they had.

“Clustering of reported phenomena coincided with what the staff identified as the hot spots, and that was the case for those people who hadn’t visited the Vaults before as well as those who had,” she says.

When there was a greater contrast in brightness between a corridor and a room, people reported more experiences. There were also more in larger rooms.

“You could speculate that, from an evolutionary point of view, people feel safer in smaller spaces and more vulnerable in larger ones.”

In conclusion, Dr Watt says: “I don’t think we have evidence to say ghosts exist as an objective phenomenon. We have a lot of evidence that psychology plays a role in these experiences and that would make me doubt paranormal experiences. But there are a small number of persuasive cases.”

So what do I think, I ask myself as I walk home from Mary King’s Close. If spirits can communicate, why do they not do it more often and more clearly?

If, as Turner notes, many people see “ghosts” when between sleep and wakefulness, surely they are simply dreaming?

But then what about the corroborated stories? Do I believe? With my head, no, but with my heart? Perhaps just a little bit.

www.ghostfinders.co.uk.

Radio Scotland’s Ghost Stories at Christmas run each day from Monday, December 27, to Friday, December 31, at 11.45am.

Whistle And I’ll Come to You is on BBC2 at 9pm on Christmas Eve.

Haunted Scotland by Roddy Martine (Birlinn, £7.99) is out now.