Niddry Street runs close to the South Bridge vaults more generally, and the Banshee Labyrinth's own cellar rooms are built into the same run of arches, giving the pub a share of that wider site's dark reputation. Its own specific story adds a named, if hard-to-verify, historical figure: Lord Nicol Edwards, said to have been a self-appointed witch hunter operating in the sixteenth century, who supposedly used the cellar to interrogate and imprison people accused of witchcraft before they were sent on for trial elsewhere in the city. No independent record of Edwards beyond pub lore has surfaced in the course of writing this entry, and the claim should be read with appropriate caution.
The haunting itself takes its cue from the pub's name: a banshee, in Gaelic folklore, is a spirit whose wailing cry is said to foretell a death in the family that hears it. Staff and customers describe hearing a similar cry inside the pub, on at least one occasion said to have preceded news that a member of staff's relative had died, though this is recounted rather than independently documented. A separate, more physical strand of reports describes a more conventional poltergeist — glasses knocked or thrown from tables with no one nearby to account for it. The pub's own claim to be "Scotland's most haunted" is a piece of marketing shared by more than one Edinburgh venue rather than a title conferred by any outside body.
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