Lights, camera, action: These ghost hunters got a shock
Janice Murdoch-richards, 55, from Glasgow
Standing in the dark cavern, blinking while my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I jumped as a woman standing near me suddenly squealed.
‘Oh my God, I’ve just seen the shadowy figure of a man standing there,’ she sad, pointing to the entrance of the chamber.
I walked over to the doorway and looked out, but there was no one there. No one alive, anyway.
Me, my husband Steff and our intrepid team of ghost hunters were investigating one of the world’s most haunted places, the notoriously spooky Vaults, a labyrinth of underground stone chambers beneath Edinburgh’s South Bridge.
The Vaults were built in the late 1780s as storage and workshops for shopkeepers but soon became slum dwellings, brothels and illegal drinking dens. Violence and death were rife and notorious 19th century serial killers Burke and Hare are rumoured to have searched for victims and stored bodies there.
Numerous spooks have been spotted down in the Vaults, the most infamous being a malevolent ghoul dubbed The Watcher. Tall and dressed in a knee-length black coat, he is said to stand and stare at visitors, sometimes throwing stones or growling nastily.
Thinking about The Watcher on that cold night in October 2019, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
Could the shadowy spook standing in the doorway actually have been him..?
After that, people in the group kept spotting an apparition staring intently at us as we moved from chamber to chamber.
And pebbles and strange, old fashioned tiny black coins kept being thrown at our feet.
Photoshoot
It just made me more sure The Watcher was stalking us, following our every move.
At around five o’clock in the morning the guests on the ghost hunt were all standing in one of the caverns.
‘Why don’t you go in the corridor outside and take some photos while no one’s around?’ I suggested to Steff.
‘Good idea,’ he nodded, heading off into the ominous darkness.
He wandered back around 15 minutes or so later.
‘Did you get any photos?’ I asked him.
‘A few,’ he replied.
The following morning, I loaded Steff’s pictures onto Facebook. I didn’t examine them in any great detail, just put them up for our followers to see.
A short while later, a staff member messaged me.
Jan, just look at this picture! he’d typed.
Spectral figures
I logged back on and looked at the photo.
Two spectral figures were standing side by side in the gloom. The one on the left was clearly a man wearing a dark knee-length coat, the other smaller figure was a woman in a long dress.
‘Oh my God!’ I whispered. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Then my phone started pinging.
It could be The Watcher, numerous people commented.
I realised they were right. The male spirit fitted the description of The Watcher to a ‘T’. The photo of the spirits just added to my suspicion that The Watcher had ben following us round all night.
It’s a truly extraordinary picture. We were lucky enough to have snapped not one but two spirits. And even more amazing, one of them is among the world’s most famous ghosts and ghouls.
For more about Jan and Steff’s group visit lanarkshireparanormal.com or find them on Facebook.
The evil ghoul was stalking our every move