A favourite haunt of metal enthusiasts, the Banshee Labyrinth is also a who’s who of ghostly characters.
Image Credit: Edinburgh Live
Nowhere is Edinburgh’s grimy and ghoulish past more confronting than in the bowels of the Old Town’s Cowgate.
Walking the low-lying road – now matted with bars – the city’s layers feel stacked up around you, like you’re at the bottom of an archaeological dig.
You pass off-shooting cobbled streets and closes that bring you up to the Royal Mile while the arches of the George IV and South Bridge loom overhead. It’s not a difficult canvas upon which to impose visions of black markets, brothels, and illegal gambling which were once the daily fabric of this thoroughfare.
Take a stone’s throw of a turn away from Cowgate and you’ll find the Banshee Labyrinth on Niddry Street, fitting comfortably into its surroundings. Claiming to be ‘Scotland’s most haunted pub’, the venue plays with its inherent spookiness in a way that is irreverent and fun.
The establishment’s warren – or ‘labyrinth’ – of seven windowless chambers includes a 50-seater cinema, venues for live alternative music, and a pool room. It’s dimly lit throughout and festooned with ghosts and other ghoulish décor (including, currently, a bisexual bat).
Gimmickery aside, this nightclub is about as close as it gets to walking into the city’s historic vaults without paying to take an official tour.
Why? Because half of the Banshee Labyrinth is made up of the original 18th century vaults themselves. Lauded as one of the most haunted places in Scotland, the vaults certainly legitimise the horror theme the Banshee Labyrinth touts so successfully.
South Bridge and its Vaults
The life and death of the South Bridge vaults was as fleeting as it was checkered – they were built, opened, and abandoned in less than 80 years.
The purpose of South Bridge was to bypass the impractical and unattractive slums of Cowgate by creating a highway from the city centre’s Royal Mile to the soon-to-be-built university campuses on the southside.
It was also the city’s first purpose-built shopping street. Being only 55ft wide, shops were built from Cowgate level upwards to flank the bridge, forming today’s Niddry Street and Blair Street in the process.
The vaults were built under the arches of South Bridge. Image Credit: City of the Dead Tours.
After the bridge had opened in 1788, the city spotted potential in its 18 arches and made shrewd use of their negative space (leaving one arch untouched and still standing over Cowgate today). Floors and ceilings were built beneath the arches to create a honeycomb of vaulted chambers. These workshops and storage spaces could be accessed through, and used by, the South Bridge businesses – thus, the vaults were born.
However, trouble began almost immediately. Having never been waterproofed, these cellars were prone to seeping, leaks, and flooding.
Jamie Corstorphine, manager of City of the Dead tours, says:
“It’s always damp. You cannot work in these conditions, you cannot keep stock in these conditions.”
By 1792, only four years after the bridge had opened, the vaults were quickly being abandoned.
At least by legitimate businesses.
“In Niddry Street South, where our vaults are, that was named Whiskey Row because there was eight different distilleries busted there between 1800 and 1815”, says Jamie.
Drinking dens, sex work, black markets – the prestige and splendour of South Bridge envisioned by city planners quickly gave way to all kinds of illegal activity. Squatters too, with a choice between the Cowgate slums and the dark cavities of the vaults, often chose the latter and cholera and disease swept voraciously through these damp, overcrowded spaces.
The vaults were eventually cleared of inhabitants and filled with rubble by 1865.
The Residual Ghosts
Brimming with disease, death, and despair, it’s not surprising that the historic vaults have been a point of pilgrimage for a range of enthusiasts, from academic parapsychology groups to televised shows like Ghost Adventures and Most Haunted.
Even would-be sceptics are often convinced.
“I always think of scientific reasoning before I think ghost but… there’s definitely something in there that’s not human,” Jamie says.
Theresa Dewa, who has worked at the Banshee Labyrinth since 2019, feels similarly:
“Most of us are sceptics outside of the building,” she says of herself and colleagues.
“My background is in medical research. I don’t tend to believe in ghosts, it’s just I can’t explain what’s going on in the building.
“It’s really difficult to find an explanation for the sound of footsteps when you’re looking at the camera, but you don’t see anything, or when you’re hearing all these doors slam open in a place where there is no wind.”
The footsteps Theresa is referring to are often accompanied by the jangling of keys and whistling – the sound of an entity known as The Watcher. A regular in many Niddry Street establishments, it’s thought that this ghost can be heard retracing his route as night watchman of the vaults – oblivious to the walls that now stand in his way.
Image Credit: The Banshee Labyrinth
Though seemingly benign (as ghosts go), it may be the case that The Watcher sometimes becomes disgruntled when encountering what he believes to be trespassers.
On occasion, when bad weather and Edinburgh’s unreliable buses have made it impossible to get home, staff members have taken refuge and slept in the bar. On separate nights, two different members of staff have awoken to a menacing figure standing over them in the completely empty building.
Theresa says:
“[He] implied just by looking at them: ‘get out of my building’.
“We had a third member of staff who took a nap in there and he woke up to a little girl’s voice saying: ‘it’s okay, we like you here’.”
Commiserations to the two other less likeable staff members.
Hearing a child’s voice is not an entirely out of pocket experience to have at the Banshee Labyrinth.
“When we were renovating the pub, they opened up one of the chimneys and a little girl’s shoe fell out,” explains Theresa.
“In the 1800s a girl went missing and they’re pretty sure she passed away in the chimney in the vaults.”
This child – known as Molly – appears to patrons who worry about the unaccompanied minor at the back of an over-18s bar and they regularly report her to staff.
As if this wasn’t bone-chilling enough, Molly – who Theresa describes as “mischievous” – got especially creative in making her presence known on one occasion.
“After the pub closed and we were cleaning – a little girl’s handprint appeared in the condensation on the window.
“There hadn’t been a kid in the pub for three or four years, at that point.
“We washed the windows, and it went away for a little bit. And then it came back.”
Doubling down on the ever-terrifying ‘children-and-ghosts’ theme, the few children ever to set foot in the Banshee Labyrinth seem to be receptive to one spectre in particular.
Two young children from the owner’s own family, separately, have asked aloud about the “man on fire”, and wondered what he wants.
No adults have ever reported seeing this ghost.
Image Credit: Banshee Labyrinth
Other honourable mentions in the Banshee Labyrinth cast of misfit ghosts are Old Jock, who touches women inappropriately in the bathrooms, the Banshee, for whom the bar is named and whose shriek notified the owner of a death in the family, and whichever poltergeist is responsible for such shenanigans as moving tables and shattering glasses at random.
Lord Nicol Edwards
It’s not only the vaults that feed the Banshee Labyrinth’s paranormal frequencies. Where the bar currently stands was once home to a man named Nicol Edwards.
During the 16th century, with King James VI at the helm, a rash of witch-hunting and religious fervour swept through Scotland. It was during this historical phenomenon that, in addition to violently beating his own wife, the Provost of Edinburgh is rumoured to have viciously tortured women accused of witchcraft in the basement of his home before they were brought to trial.
“A medium has come in and told us that she has heard many women screaming – and a man who says they belong to him,” says Theresa, referring to one of the bar’s gig rooms that was originally part of Lord Edward’s house.
“It’s only in that one room, unlike other ghosts that kind of wander throughout the entirety of the bridge.
“It’s quite possible these are the women Nicol Edwards supposedly tortured.”
The Banshee Labyrinth is hosting the 2024 Edinburgh Horror Festival from October 31st to November 3rd, with a packed lineup featuring storytelling, markets, magic shows, and everything in between.
See the Banshee Labyrinth’s Instagram or Facebook page for daily live music and cinema screening updates.
Featured Image Credit: The Skinny
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