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The Edinburgh Vaults – Underground Secrets
Edinburgh sits on seven hills, much like Rome. Only two of these high points are visible today- Castle Hill and Calton Hill. Between the hills, the city was built up with various bridges connecting them. One of the most famous was the South Bridge connecting Old High Street and the University district. In the poor neighborhood of Cowgate, narrow streets with a gate at either end called closes were knocked down and their stones reused to create the elaborate system of 19 arches. It spanned a chasm over 1000 feet long, and at its highest point it stood 31 feet above ground. The bridge’s foundations, which penetrated Edinburgh’s bedrock, went…
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Hauntings 7 – WAVERLY HILLS SANATORIUM
Nothing like a good old fashioned early-20th century asylum to get the old sixth sense tingling, right? How many horror movies, psychological thrillers, and ghost stories have featured an asylum wherein everybody died save one, crazed patient who either a) killed everyone, or b) died himself and is haunting the dreams of randy teenagers…. A lot of what we know about the limits of human psychological endurance came from research done by the Nazi’s during the rise of Hitler and subsequent world war that followed, but a large portion of that research was grounded in the experimentation done by burgeoning psychologists (then called “alienists”) in places such as Waverly Hills.…
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Hauntings Part 6 – CLIFFORD’S TOWER
Clifford’s Tower in York, England has seen many deaths over the centuries. Henry VII used to hang the corpses of his enemies there as a warning to his rivals, and it has been used as a prison, but perhaps one of the most poignant points in it’s long storied history is in 1190. Anti-Semitic attitudes were on the rise in the northern part of England, and despite having the protection of the crown The Crusades were used as an excuse to attack local Jews, but this was more of a thinly veiled debt-avoidance tactic. Many nobles owed the Jewish moneylenders more than they could pay back. Anti-Semite riots broke out…
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Hauntings 5 – Ghosts of St. Paul’s Chapel
Okay, let me be clear here, if I wasn’t already. I am a skeptic. I wouldn’t believe in ghosts at all if I hadn’t seen them with my own two, admittedly bad, eyes. But, to borrow a phrase. “I see dead people.” Over the American holiday of Thanksgiving (lets be clear, I am American and I love me some Thanksgiving, that was for YOUR BENEFIT, Britons!), I have had the opportunity to visit New York City with family. I crossed a few things off my bucket list, like watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live, taking the NY subway, and most importantly, visiting the site of the Twin Towers. Before…
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Hauntings Part 4: Lincoln Ghost Train
As soon as I was old enough to have free rein in the library, I have gravitated to ghost stories. I used to give myself nightmares reading “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and later the short-lived “Tales from the Crypt” graphic novels. But always the stories that drew me in hard, the ones that still linger in my dreams to this very day were the ones involving ghostly vehicles. Ghost ships, ghost trains, ghost cars. And despite what I have come to understand about ghosts, such things still give me the heebie-jeebies. There are number of reported sightings of such things over the years. The Mary Celeste, the…
