However I agree with 136, there are many more haunted places, such as Greyfriars Graveyard which is just down the road, not to mention the underground city under the Royal Mile.

There are many good ghost tours and one is Mary King Close which takes you down to the a underground street of the same name, and off that street there is a chamber filled with dolls and toys after a Japanese psychic said on a TV show that she could see a little girl crying because she couldn’t find her doll, so lots of Japanese viewers sent toys to Scotland and then people all over the world started doing it too. The houses on Mary King Close were bricked up and the plague victims and families were left to die inside. If you enter the City Chambers and go 6 floors down you can [if you know the right people] open a small door that leads directly to the subterranean streets for yourself but you’ll need a torch and a bit of string because it’s a labyrinth.

The Meadows is a beauty spot in the middle of Edinburgh, which has never been built on because that is where pits of plague victims were buried. I went on a ghost tour of the under city and 3/4 of the crowd were skeptics. By the end, the tour guide challenged us to walk through a cursed underground stone circle and nobody would.

Something very strange happened to me in my own house, I’ve already written the story so I will edit it for you.

It was a veyr hot night in 2006 so I decided to sleep in the cool lounge room downstairs.

I approached the glass door and hesitated, had a very strange feeling that I shouldn’t go in, a turn of instinct, but I went in anyway.

I entered the dim darkness, shuffled blindly to the long sofa and lay down on the cool fabric. A faint night-light in the hallway provided enough illumination to see by, so my eyes scanned the room adjusting to the dimness as I lay with my head resting on the arm of the couch.

Beyond my feet, the thin night-light weakly shone through the panes of glass and the still frame of the half-open door.

I was waiting for something.

Then I saw something in the corner of the room.

I saw a shape, in the corner of the room clearly, but not with my own eyes. When people talk about a sixth sense or a third eye, I now know exactly what they mean.

It was real, a shadow, similar to a cloud in that it had no definite, tangible limits and its relative shape and size was tall and thin enough to pass through a doorway. I can describe it as a psychic displacement of an elemental light, a tall, broad aura of darkness.

I was very aware that there was absolutely something there, and being rational (I have a Masters in Biomedicine and would normally consider myself non-religious) I remember blinking, trying to be sure I was awake. I was wide awake, and it was still there. I was very clear on this.

And then it began to move.

Towards me.

I watched as it approached me, so surprised and dumbfounded that I didn’t even think to recoil.

The moving darkness crossed the other sofa, and approached my bare feet, and as it made contact, a shivering coldness dissipated through my body. I was shaking violently and uncontrollably as if possessed, from my head to my toes.

I was rational, but in my head, alarm bells were pealing and jangling.

My mind was collected, but my body was in the throes of a fit and I knew I should leave, so I replaced the cushions then sprang from the sofa, through the glass doors, down the hallway and up the stairs.

As I scrabbled up the staircase, I looked back down the corridor to see anything following.

There was nothing in the hall.

I leapt up the stairs and dived under my duvet, trembling, eyes fixed on the doors and corners of my darkened bedroom, replaying the events with clarity, mind scrambling for explanations, wondering if it wasn’t too late to wake my mother before, exhausted, I eventually fell asleep.

It is a cosy and amiable room, we all watch evening TV there, but after I told my family they listened with curious smiles, and avoided it after bedtime. When my uncle’s family came to visit a little later, my sister gave up her bed and slept in that room knowing what happened to me, but nothing transpired. I never went down there after midnight again.

We live in a cul-de-sac of 17 new houses built in 2001, on the peripheral woodlands of a formerly large country estate in West Lothian. The manor house was converted to a pub hotel that was boarded up in 2007. Second and third properties were partially built in the immediate vicinity of the old house and barn but had planning issues and building work slowed to a stop.

Investigating might also mean recounting the story and it’s not a big community. I’ve known fever-induced hallucinations, drug-induced out of body experiences and potent dreams. This was like nothing else. This was real. I can’t describe what some of my hallucinations were about because the concepts and constructs in them that terrified me can’t be related by common language words and ideas.

It was a different state of mind.

And when I was little (like, 5) I used to play out in my backyard a lot. One day I saw a little boy there. I asked him if he wanted to stay and play with me, and he said yes. His name was richard. He came back for a couple weeks, then disappeared. I asked my mom “Where’s richard” and told her what he looked like. She turned pale and told me that was one of my cousins that died when he was a child. I haven’t seen him since.