Continuing from yesterday (I didn't get much feedback but what I got was great) I'm offering another true tale from my favorite city, Edinburgh. This one starts with a little information about architecture.

When Edinburgh was built it was during the time when Scotland was constantly being raided by Vikings, English, and other Celtic tribes. A very sturdy wall was built around it, but that caused a problem. There wasn't much space to live inside the wall, but if you lived outside you weren't safe.

So the people did the only thing they could do...they built up. In a time (the seventeenth century) when most buildings were only 2 or 3 stories tall, Edinburgh had buildings that were up to 13 stories. This led to a bit of a pollution problem. You see, things were fine if you lived up a few stories, but if you were down on the street level it got really bad. Why? No sewers. All of the people on all of the upper stories would just use chamber pots to go to the bathroom, then they would open up the window and pour them out. It got so bad for people walking on the street that they passed a law. The only time you were allowed to dump your chamber pots was at 10pm. You had to open up your window and yell GARDY LOO! (which was actually taken from the French, gardez l'eau, meaning “watch out for the water.”)

Anyway, this was still a problem for the people who lived on the first floors. Edinburgh was built on a great hill and reports exist of when it rained that people's homes would be flooded ankle deep in raw human sewage. This would all flow downhill to the river, which became so polluted that you could actually (not that you'd want to) walk across the river without sinking into water.

But they still ran out of room, so they engineered more solutions. They filled in the gaps of the hill using ancient Roman technology, the vaulted arch, and built more buildings on top of that. However, that left space down below. There were now large underground vaults carved into the Edinburgh sandstone.

For a while, the vaults were rented to businessmen for storage. They would store goods and foodstuffs like cheeses down there. But when the businessmen learned that sandstone is not water-proof, they stopped using the vaults altogether. No one is going to buy a wheel of cheese that's been aged in sewage water.

So what happened to the vaults? They became housing. That is where the poorest of the poor lived. Thieves, beggars, and those too crippled or ill to make enough money to live up above. They crammed into lightless tenements covered in filth. It was said that for all of the thieves and cut-throats living down there that no police or guard would go into those dark holes.

Now I've been in them. Architects have started to explore them and there have been permanent lights installed in some sections. You can even do a video search on the web for Edinburgh Vaults and come up with enough footage to give you an idea that even in modern times these are not a comfortable place to be. They are garage-sized man-made caves that were never meant to keep humans safe.

But something particularly nasty happened there in November of 1824. Edinburgh caught fire. The city burned out of control for three days on the fifteenth through the seventeenth. Mobs ran all over the streets. Some trying to put out the fires. Some looting. Some fleeing for their lives. It was this last bunch that wound up having it the worst.

Several hundred, if not a few thousand people (the numbers will never be known) realized that the vaults under the city were made of stone, and that as stone doesn't burn they could take refuge there. True, there were some murderers and thieves down there, but if enough people went they would be safe enough. They ran to the vaults for shelter, some with prized heirlooms, some with food. But nothing that they took was going to save them.

They crammed themselves into the stone chambers just as the flames reached the entrances. Now they were cut off. They had no where to go, and they were packed in so tightly it could never be said who was a refugee or who was a native resident of the vaults. But as the fire raged around them, burning the buildings above, they became horrified to realize they had made a terrible mistake.

For not only does sandstone allow water to pass through it, it also conducts heat. This miserable teeming mass had just taken refuge in what was to become a giant oven. All of them, every last man, woman and child, was roasted alive in one of the most destitute places in the world. The screams, crying, begging and desperation must have been unbearable. Perhaps it's for the best no one survived, because no person was ever meant to be witness to that much suffering.

It was only after the fire was out that the surviving citizens of the city realized what had happened. There was no way to tell who was who. No way to count the dead. They were all heaped in to carts and poured into mass graves. The vaults were sealed for more than a hundred years, and due to the fact that no one wanted to talk about the horrors that had happened there...they were forgotten.

They were stumbled on again, by accident, in the late 20th century. But one thing is certain. If you believe for a moment that hauntings surround places of great misery and death, then this is such a place. It's next to impossible for anyone to stay in the vaults for very long without feeling uncomfortable, unsettled, or for them to perceive a deep and shadowy sorrow.