Alex Pryce aims to banish Edinburgh ghost tours

Spooky spectacles, such as the new Paradox Experience, are being challenged by a sceptic who wants to see reason triumph

Much like death itself, the ghost industry of Edinburgh crept up on us. A decade ago it amounted to little, just a smattering of walking tours through the clammier catacombs of the Old Town, where in ye olde days, we were assured, peasants expired in a squalor their spirits allegedly seemed compelled to revisit.
Now, though, the tours have a new lease of life, or afterlife. You can’t progress up the Royal Mile these days without skirting forests of A-boards and resting actors in Regency ruffs, each selling the X Files-meets-Time Team take upon the city’s picturesque horrors.
An ever-increasing proportion of the city’s tourist economy is a thing that goes bump in the night, which is rather galling in the city that was the cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment. The news rather darts like an icy hand right up the nightdress of Alex Pryce too, as the Edinburgh-based thespian and theatre director prepares to challenge the hokum of Edinburgh’s ghost industry.
A one-man ghostbuster, Pryce will be escorting his charges, he hopes, into the clear light of reason by exposing what lies, or doesn’t, behind the veil: “I’m not sure why Edinburgh even has this reputation as such a focus of paranormal activity,” Pryce says.


“Historically, other cities such as York have more substantial reputations for this sort of thing. In Edinburgh the stories behind the hauntings just don’t stand up to examination. There’s no serious look at history or culture, it’s all showbusiness.”
We’re presently in the midst of the fifth Ghost Fest, an annual smorgasbord featuring all forms of Auld Reekie paranormalism. This year also witnesses the debut of The Paradox Experience, a technically based attempt to let ghost-hunters get closer to the action. Ghosthunter Paul Rowland, who developed the gadgets of the Paradox Experience, said: “It’s the first opportunity to go on a tour with equipment that’s custom-built for detecting ghosts. It’s an entirely new kind of ghosthunting.”
Edinburgh’s ghost world gravitates towards the networks of closes and alleys on top of which the Old Town was constructed. In the vaults in Blair Street, Rowland demonstrates the technology. A videocamera takes footage of the darkness in the vaults, another contraption records Electronic Voice Phenomena, which is evidently a ghost-watching codeword for the sporadic howls of feedback it emits.
Rowland has tons of this Heath Robinson technology: aqua-sonic dual-microphone systems, magnetic field sensors, galvanic skin response, biofeedback monitors.
“Edinburgh proved very promising indeed,” says Rowland. In the catacombs of Mary King’s Close, the chilling, perfectly-preserved 17th century street beneath the City Chambers, he detected three presences, an adult and two children. The Paradox systems emits merely a noise that changes in frequency if a “ghost” is nearby — identification is the job of a medium or psychic.
“There is an unsavoury element to ghost tours,” says John Lennon of Glasgow Caledonian University, co-author of Dark Tourism, a study of how horror and heritage combine.
“They focus on pain, poverty and cruelty, combined with unprovable speculation, which aren’t the best parts of what we are. You find something similar in tours of Auschwitz but there’s an overwhelming justification of historical interest. That doesn’t hold for the ghost industry.”
The purpose of the Paradox Experience isn’t to photograph or sound-record chain-clanking, heads-under-armpit ghosts. Rather Rowland measures changes in energy fields caused by the presence of ghosts.