If I may, for a moment, somewhat incongruously quote from seminal 80's teen flick The Lost Boys, "If all the dead people buried around here stood up at once, we'd have one hell of a population problem." OK, that's most likely a misquote, since it is straight from memory, but you get the idea.

Edinburgh suffers much the same problem, except it seems that, over the years, many of those dead and buried have indeed been standing up - in spirit form anyway. I have to confess, this is one of the most interesting things about Edinburgh to my mind. The half-remembered tales of ghosts and grisly murders holds a ghoulish fascination for me and I love knowing I live in a city that has such a wonderfully rich, dark, underbelly to its history. I love knowing that there are streets underneath our streets and getting into the basements of old church buildings just to imagine what it would have been like for the people who lived and worked in them.

I think, when I was young and still just visiting Edinburgh from the far away shores of America, that the thing I found most intoxicating about the city was this - the Old Town in particular just reeks of history and it is so easy to imagine yourself taken back centuries to a time which is now most entirely considered the realm of fiction, but here - it feels real, it brings back that people really did live in these conditions and the law was not quite what it is today. Ah well, here are some stories to whet your appetite - hopefully, you'll be intrigued enough to search out some more of your own…

If you want to read more about Edinburgh's dark side, I recommend the following books, which were instrumental in putting this collection together, by filling in details of stories I'd heard and introducing me to some new ones too:

The Town Below the Ground, by Jan-Andrew Henderson and Ghostly Tales & Sinister Stories of Old Edinburgh, by Wilson, Brogan and McGrail. Both are published in Scotland by Mainstream Publishing and are available in major Edinburgh bookstores.

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