Our last night in town, we decided to take one
of Edinburgh's famed ghost tours. This
city has a long, long past with a real lot of bodysnatching, witchcraft,
headstone removal,
desecration, corpse dumping, live burial and plagues to go with it.
In
fact, the Royal Mile - the main piece of road between the castle and the
palace - has an
entire other road underneath it. It was the old main road, and when the
Black Death started
killing all the peasants, they simply covered it over and buried them.
So there's this mile-
long series of "vaults" under the city. Edinburgh is positively
FULL of crap like this.
It's SO frickin awesome.
We
unfortunately missed the vault tour, but we instead went into an old
graveyard. It's called Greyfriar's Cemetary. On the far side is a place
called
The Covenanter's Prison where's there's a crypt called the Black Mausoleum.
This is the site of the best documented poltergiest study in the world,
the
McKenzie Poltergeist. Apparently, people on a regular basis experience
cold
spots and suffer cuts and bruises.
Our
tour lead us to the Black Mausoleum, where we had to stand in the dark
for 10 minutes. It was like an episode of Fear Factor, except my ass wasn't
parked on a couch this time.
"I'm .. so... scared... right... now..."
sniff.
Whew, glad that's over! Where' the pub?.
Faith and our tour guide round up some pints. This
guy was very cool, and we ended
up club hopping with him and some guy from Vancouver until about 3:30
am.
Next day, we left the U.K. bound for Amsterdam.
But we wouldn't stay there long,
as we had a train to catch to Munich, Germany. To beer, meats and Declan,
to be
precise.
