Review of the “City of the Dead tour” of Edinburgh

The last tour of the evening was scheduled for 10:45 p.m.
“Good” I thought, “so the tour will terminate at midnight, the perfect time to be in a hunted graveyard!” My girlfriend wasn’t looking forward to the experience at all but decided to come along for the only reason that she was more scared to spend part of the evening in the hotel room by herself.
At the rendezvous outside Saint Giles Cathedral there was a group of approximately twenty people. The tour guide, a young Scottish girl, was addressing the crowd about the seriousness and dangers of the tour: people apparently get bruises from the ghosts and suffer panic attacks, start crying and wish they have had spent the night anywhere but there. “You are still in time to change your mind and decide not to come to the graveyard” she said and my girlfriend would have agreed, she was already holding me as tight as she could and the tour had not even started!
We walked behind the Cathedral to the main square where the guide explained to us the tortures that were going on during medieval witch-hunting times and she was very theatrical and persuasive in describing the pain inflicted to the unfortunate ones, picking some of us to play the part of the victims. The main part of the tour however, after a 10 minutes walk through Edinburgh’s chaotic Saturday night streets, was the Greyfriars graveyard enveloped in the windy moonless night.
As soon as we reached the graveyard’s gate the guide started re-enforcing the ghost stories and related poltergeists that previous tour participants had apparently experienced and that we will probably soon witness too. I was trying my best not to be influenced by her talking and it was difficult though, she was doing her best to convince me that something bad was going to happen and the surrounding graveyard looked like an army of ghosts ready to stand up at any moment to scare me away.
We reached the Covenant prisons with the Black Mausoleum after a short but frightening walk through the graveyard with the sensation at every step of having awakened an unkind ghost.
The prison was a small dump room with an awkward sinister feeling, and the ghost tour guide’s stories were filling the room with imaginary visions of dead people’s spirits ready for revenge. At the back of the group a girl was crying, some people looked horrified and others sceptical, and my girlfriend in the meantime was clinched to me hoping for the tour to finish soon. I was looking around trying to keep a clear mind and figure out if I could really see a ghost without letting my imagination leading me into believing something that wasn’t there, but I couldn’t focus. I wish I was there by myself or with just another person, so as not to be influenced by the guide’s stories and people’s fears and scepticism around me.
My thoughts were then interrupted by a shout and although it was a human one it was frightening nonetheless, and we all reacted shouting back, like if it could change anything.
It wasn’t a ghost of course but just another guide that thought one last blow of fright was the only possible ending to an evening enveloped by frightening stories and unanswered doubts.