Edinburgh Castle has accumulated more ghost stories than almost anywhere else in Scotland, which is what several centuries of siege, garrison and prison will do to a place. Visitors and staff report the standard repertoire — cold spots, footsteps with no one behind them, a sense of being watched — concentrated especially around the underground vaults, where French and American prisoners were held during the wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the Half Moon Battery.
The most told single story, though, is the phantom piper. A young piper, the story goes, was sent down into a tunnel believed to run from the castle all the way to the Palace of Holyroodhouse — or, in some versions, to Mary King's Close — playing continuously so that people walking the Royal Mile above could follow his progress by ear. Partway along, somewhere near the Tron Kirk, the piping stopped. When a search party went in after him, no trace of the piper was found, and the tunnel itself is said to have never been properly located since.
Some versions add that the tunnel was deliberately sealed afterwards, out of fear of whatever had taken him. Whatever the truth of that, people still report hearing faint pipe music along the Royal Mile with no piper in sight, generally taken as the lost piper still making his way through the dark.
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