It’s spooky season so for most tour guides that means ghosts, but for us at the Edinburgh Street Historians, it means a True Crime tour. The reasons for this I’ll outline later, but can we just pause for a second to appreciate how cool an idea that is?
It wasn’t my idea, it was Roisin of the Forgotten Women’s tour who suggested it to me. The basic premise is that instead of doing a ghost tour, we’ll be focusing on the real dark stories of Edinburgh with a focusing on the criminal element.
What is Edinburgh’s relation to crime and stories about crime? Let’s explore together.
Background
The Edinburgh Street Historians from the beginning has been about doing different tours from everyone else. I personally led the first tour back in 2024, on December 15th. It was a standard Old Town tour. I did it in commemoration of being 20 years post surviving a vehicular incident involving a bus, a van, and a 12 year old boy nobly accepting a hit that could have otherwise hurt someone else. For more on that look here. Putting a tour together for charity in a one week period inspired me in how to run the Street Historians as a group. We had to put on tours that could be enjoyed by locals as well as by visitors. We had to diverge from the standard fare. We had to be ethical. We had to be good for guides and good for the city.
The modern Edinburgh tour operator offers three tours: Old Town, Harry Potter, and Ghosts. I was having misgivings about Potter which grew as we approached Pride, causing us to dramatically drop it, to replace with an LGBTQ+ tour. Already I was not keen on doing a ghost tour because there’s lots of options. Also, I don’t like the timing of most ghost tours in the evening. It turns every day into a split shift. Nobody likes split shifts.
Dropping Potter tours left a gap in the afternoon schedule. LGBTQ tours work better sparingly than every day, excluding Pride and Fringe. Something needed to fill the afternoon gap and the True Crime tour fills it beautifully.
My Personal Problem With Ghosts
The problem with ghost tours is that they are very broad as a category. Ghosts for some people has got to be spooky stories like those you’d tell around a campfire. Some are looking for something gory. Others want jokes and costumes. A few believed in ghosts, thought they’d seen them, and were looking for philosophical answers into what was life. I will freely admit it was a needle I couldn’t always thread. I came to despair the nights I had to work ghost tours in my last tour job.
Mixing together the spiritual and paranormal with medical and criminal felt a big ask. Especially since, as a free tour guide, it’s a huge undertaking put upon self-employed freelance to please everyone while making money consistently.
But I do love a number of the stories. It speaks to a dark part living inside the souls of us all, of greed, of wrath, which wants to be cruel. Doing it in a laser focused way makes more sense. Having a far more clear topic from the outset makes even more sense.
My Own Disbelief in Ghosts
Most ghosts are seen in low-light conditions by people who are inebriated.
Edinburgh and It’s Dark Stories
To give a brief list, we had regular executions and public torture in the city centre. We had judges murdered in the streets. We had huge witch hunts, often extra-judicial. Then you get to more recent times and we had two of the first modern serial killers providing bodies for the medical school. These are all some of the coolest stories in Edinburgh but they do not properly belong on other tours.
Onto the True Crime tour!
Focusing on crimes, murder being the main one of course, means looking at Edinburgh deeply. Why do we have so many gory stories in our past? Why were we so keen on executions and corporal punishment? How does this affect things to the present day? Come on the tour to find out (booking window above, get in touch here for private tours)
It involves asking how the city is so lovely these days, particularly in the centre and outlying parks. It also involves asking how much of our present day is built on dark foundations.
An afternoon tour?
That means you can see what we’re talking about easier and the chance of being interrupted by drunk hecklers is much lower.
Conclusion: Come on the True Crime tour!
We’re still working out a couple of kinks to the show so it’s a bit of a soft launch at present. The plan is to start out fairly small, with only Tuesdays and Thursdays, but gradually I’d love to get more guides in on this so we can deliver more the whole week. The point is, the True Crime tour is a great idea that we’re trying out because we want to make this city a more interesting place for guests and locals. The Street Historians carry on in our mission to make touring an asset for the city.
The writer of this piece is contemplating doing “nothing November”.
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