My husband will wear a kilt.

The train to Edinburgh was smooth.  We sailed through Scotland’s rolling hills and grazing sheep effortlessly with the graying sky as our backdrop.  Night one, we decided (Dennis, Lindsey, and me), was either for pub hopping or ghost hunting.  We decided to compromise and go for both.

Edinburgh is known as one of the most haunted places on the planet.  Its history is rich with centuries of death, torture and suffering.  We decided to join a terror tour.  Not one of the ones peppered with corny tour-guide jokes with cheap scares and silly stories.  We decided to go on the tour that started long after the nighttime fog had settled around the gothic castle towering over the city and the pubs were starting to close. 

I downed my gin like I’d been doing it for years and set off, certain that the terror the tour promised would be lost on this horror movie enthusiast. 

We walked the streets, shuffled through the red light district and stopped on a staircase while we learned about some of the more gruesome history of Edinburgh’s past.  The witch burnings. 

Our guide asked me to stand up on the steps above the crowd.  I took Lindsey with me.  Said she wanted to use me as an example.

There were three things they looked for in a woman they wanted to see burn.

The first being red hair.  (Really, red hair always gets me in trouble)

The second was a birthmark, where satan marked her in the womb.  (I tugged my sleeve over my birthmarked forearm)

The third was that she didn’t bleed.  (I thought of getting my nose pierced and finger pricked at blood donation stations and how my blood hesitates to flow)

It’s intriguing that such a far away fragment of Scotland’s vast history is so present in its citizen’s minds today.  I had dozens of witch comments while I was there. 

One of the last stops on our tour was the underground vaults.  These are the rooms that are supposed to be the most haunted in the world.  Knowing the power of suggestion, our tourguide lead us through the vaults, letting us experience each one before asking how we felt in them and explaining what happened there. 

I thought most of it was rubbish.  Except the last room. Women weren’t supposed to go in this room because of all the negative things that happened in it, but they just say that stuff to scare you, right?

When I walked in, I had the overwhelming urge to cry.  As I stood there, I started to feel tugs on my shirt and brushes on my hands.  A few minutes later, as I was about to leave my knees buckled and I fell to the ground.  When I went to stand up, my shoulders were forced down.  It was terrifying.

In the hallway, Lindsey pointed out the scratches on my neck.

Dozens of people have died in that room.  The first was a group of families who were cooked alive after being locked in the vault during a fire.  The men, instead of watching their wives and children burn to death, slit their throats.  The tugs visitors feel are apparently the children looking for their moms, and the urge to cry is the sadness they felt. 

The second string of deaths in that room occurred when a merchant rented it out.  The vault served as his clandestine location for raping and murdering red headed women.  (lame)

I love Ghostbusters and I love scary movies, but I’ve never put a lot of stock into the supernatural.  But I know that there is energy inside of us.  Electricity in our neural synapses.  And Mr. Cassity taught me in physics that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed.  So what happens to that energy when we die?  Wouldn’t it make sense that in areas with high concentrations of deaths in a small amount of time, that lingering energy would pool together?

It sounds logical.  I like logical.  I don’t know what happened in those underground vaults, but I know that regardless of whether the ghosts were in my head or real, I was afraid.  Did I really need to be?  Probably not.  But fearing the unknown is quite the human reaction to unexplainable occurrences. 

What about you, do you believe?