Edinburgh Vaults

This happened years ago (October or November 2011) when I was living in London and working as a study abroad advisor for American college students, and it's been on my mind a lot recently. Every semester at the program I worked at, there's an optional trip to Scotland that starts and ends with a night in Edinburgh, and there's a tour of the Highlands in between. A couple of the students wanted to do the walking tour of the "haunted" vaults (I use the quotation marks because that was how I felt at the time -- like sure, "haunted," yeah right). I told the students when to meet outside of the hostel if they wanted to join and was surprised when nearly every single one of them came down. It was around 30 or 40 altogether.

Most of the tour was interesting because of the history, but I thought the ghost stories and "haunted" aspect of it were pretty gimmicky as the tour guide took us through three of the underground vaults. But the students were having fun and I was just glad they weren't getting too drunk at the hostel and embarrassing me, so I was happy.

The guide started talking about this "entity" that lives in the "third vault" -- no one really knows what this thing looks like (there are lots of reported ghost sightings, but the Entity is different), only that there are several stories of people leaving the vault and finding scratches on their bodies. Two Canadian tourists apparently left the vaults covered in scratches, and there are a handful of other stories, and then one creepy story the guide told was that a woman took her younger daughter on the tour, and when the flashlight went out in the third vault, the mother realized the daughter had moved all the way across the room -- and the daughter said someone with "three fingers" grabbed her hand and walked her there. When I was there with the students and other tourists, the vault was super cold, and the guide's flashlight went out. It was spooky because that's a spooky ass setting, but again, I thought it was sort of a cheesy tourist trap.

We finished the tour and I went back to my room to Skype with my stepdad, a history professor, about all of the cool things I'd seen. After our call, I went to change into my PJs and as I took my pants off I noticed three long, perfectly straight scratches that basically wrapped from just above my knee up my thigh around toward my butt. They looked like cat or kitten scratches. I hadn't felt a single damn thing when I was on that tour. It scared the shit out of me, naturally. I called my best friend in London and made her get on Skype to see them, and then I went down to where the students were hanging out and asked a couple of the girls I'd become closer to to come look in the bathroom. I felt like I was going crazy. A couple of them saw the scratches and were like "Nope nope nope bye bitch I am out of here."

A little bit later, one of the male students came up to me and was like "Hey, me too." He had three scratches behind one of his ears.

TL;DR -- yes, those underground vaults in Edinburgh are really haunted.