Edinburgh Vaults

The caves party flat was a regular haunt for my lot after clubbing, beside caves venue , it was basically an underground flat that ran as an unlicensed venue, a pal of mine actually lived in it for a while, There was also the 109 in Newington, this was a townhouse that ran on the same principle. This is around 2010/2012 More on reddit.com

Em ok, so 5years ago I went on a paranormal investigation in to the vaults that aren't normally opened. They are opened once or twice a year for certain events like this one which was for Halloween I believe. Anyway it started at midnight and finished at around 4am. There was maybe 35 people in total and we were all split into groups and each group went into a different vault with there paranormal investigator. There was one vault that had a weegie board set up in it, that our group went into first. I refused to take part (call me paranoid) but was happy to watch. The whole thing was pretty creepy but wasn't particularly buying it as real and was convinced the glass was just moving through the power of suggestion or something similar, but soon as they stopped and it was time for our group to move onto the next vault and as we were all leaving (I was the last one to leave the room) the glass actually slides off the table at full force and smashes to dust of the side of the wall. Saw it with my very own eyes. A few people thought I had done it, but I wasn't even close enough to accidentally have pushed it or anything. Anyway the next part will stay with me forever. We're in the next vault and we are surrounded by EMP detectors, two of them are in teddy bear forms as there's apparently a spirit/ghost of a little girl in this vault. So we're standing around the room in a circle and our paranormal investigator is trying to communicate with a ghost/spirits. Eventually a man gives out a small Welp and claims something pinched his arse. Then one by one a few more guys were claiming there butts were getting pinched, so the paranormal investigator by this point is getting all sorts of excited and starts asking if it could maybe try and pinch one of the females bums or better yet if they could try and push sombody. I swear on my grans life but what happened next was that I felt two hands push me from behind very hard to the point I was literally standing the middle of the circle, everyone now staring at me , flashlights on me asking what happened and before I could even get a word out, one of the EMP bears that was right behind me against the stone wall was flashing like crazy that some folk noticed straight away. Obviously nobody was behind me when this happened. We were all standing in a circle, arms width apart and nothing behind us all but concrete stone walls. One of the most memorable unexplained experiences of my life that il never forget. Other things happened aswell, not just to me but other people in different groups. More on reddit.com

The stuff you'll hear on the underground tours is 96% bollocks, Mary King's is a bit more historical in its focus - unless you specifically choose to go on one of its ghost tours, you'll mostly get told about the history of the Close and some of its historically documented residents. Whether it's worth the price largely depends on 1) whether you like history, 2) whether you have the kind of imagination that lets you picture what a place used to be like, and 3) whether you get a good guide. More on reddit.com

Ownership is pretty unclear. I worked for the First of May Bookshop at no.45 Niddry Street in the late 70s and we were the first to use them for decades. The area behind the shop had been used by a wine and spirits merchant before WW2 and was full of bottles and glasses - we filled and sold two skipfuls when clearing it out to make a meeting room. (I still have two of the glasses). At the same time Julian Bannerman was single-handedly clearing his way up from the Cowgate with a shovel and wheelbarrow to build his bar. It was a bit like good-natured trench warfare with each of us claiming our bit. A lawyer in our collective said properties in areas like that were often bought and sold in pubs in the early days and some transactions were just untraceable. Rutherfords the wine merchants owned several properties in Niddry St in 1847-8 according to the Post Office Directory and I'd guess they had a lot of the ground level for the next century, not just the bit behind us. Storing booze and glassware was about all it was good for, it was very damp. The fake history industry ("Town Below the Ground") has created a shitstorm of wishful thinking about this place. We were told those cellars had been used as bomb shelters in WW2. I don't see how that could be possible with tons of decades-old glass cluttering it up. The Blair Street side was a whole different universe, I don't know much about it. The central wall was loadbearing and you couldn't do more than poke small holes in it. More on reddit.com