Edinburgh Castle

There has been a fortress on the Castle Rock for as long as there has been an Edinburgh. The oldest surviving building in the city is St Margaret's Chapel, built around 1130 by David I and dedicated to his mother; after the Reformation it fell out of use and by the 16th century was being used as a gunpowder store, which tells you something about the castle's priorities. It has since been restored and still hosts weddings and christenings.

Almost everything else medieval was blown to pieces in the Lang Siege of June 1571 to May 1573, when supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots held the castle against the king's party and English artillery reduced its defences to rubble. The rebuilding that followed gave the castle its distinctive Half Moon Battery, a much larger garrison and a secure prison for prisoners of war. From then until the Napoleonic Wars the vaults beneath Crown Square served as a military gaol, crammed at various times with French, Spanish, Dutch and American prisoners; names, dates and messages they carved into the wooden doors are still visible. In 1811, 49 French prisoners hacked through the south wall and let themselves down the crag on ropes; the hole they made can reportedly still be seen.

The castle holds the Honours of Scotland, the oldest crown jewels in Britain, and since 1861 the One o'Clock Gun has been fired from Mills Mount Battery every day except Sundays, Good Friday and Christmas Day. It was also where Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, was burned as a witch in 1537, which is why the Grey Lady of Glamis is sometimes claimed here too.

The most rigorous account of Edinburgh Castle's hauntings is a scientific paper. In April 2001, as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, Dr Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire took 240 volunteers through the castle's vaults, cellars and dungeons over ten days. The participants were chosen because they had no prior knowledge of which parts of the castle were supposed to be haunted, and they were led in small groups through a mixture of rooms with a reputation and rooms with none, recording their experiences as they went. Thermal imagers, geomagnetic sensors and temperature probes logged the conditions in each space.

By the end, 51 per cent of participants reported something they could not explain, from sudden cold and a sense of presence to figures glimpsed in doorways, and the largest number of experiences came in the vaults with the haunted reputation, even though the volunteers did not know it. "We had certain places that had a reputation for being haunted," Wiseman said, "and when we took people into those places even when they didn't know the history they had weird experiences. That suggests there is something about that location which is creating those ghostly experiences, whether it's the size, or the look, or the lighting levels." The study was published in 2003 in the British Journal of Psychology as "An investigation into alleged 'hauntings'" by Wiseman, Watt, Stevens, Greening and O'Keeffe.

That conclusion is also the sceptical view: Wiseman's team found that the "haunted" rooms tended to be darker, colder, more enclosed and subject to more magnetic variation than the others, and argued that such environmental cues, rather than spirits, may be what people are responding to. Outside the laboratory, the reports continue in the usual way: pipes heard beneath the Royal Mile, drums on the ramparts, and figures in the vaults. Edinburgh's ghost-tour operators, including Mercat Tours, retell the castle's legends nightly.

Edinburgh Castle sits at the top of the Royal Mile in the centre of the city and is cared for by Historic Environment Scotland. It is open daily except Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and it is very busy: book a timed ticket online in advance, especially in summer, at Hogmanay and during the Military Tattoo in August, and check the website for current hours. Inside you can see St Margaret's Chapel, the Honours of Scotland, the Great Hall, the prisons of war exhibition in the vaults, the dog cemetery and the One o'Clock Gun, which fires from Mills Mount Battery every day except Sunday.

The castle does not run ghost tours of its own, but the city's ghost-walk operators cover its legends from the esplanade and the Old Town closes. Expect steep cobbles and a lot of steps; a courtesy vehicle runs from the gate to the top for visitors with limited mobility. There is no parking at the castle, so use the city centre car parks or public transport. Hotels and apartments surround the castle on Castlehill, the Grassmarket and Princes Street.