George Heriot's School owes its existence to the will of George Heriot, court goldsmith and jeweller to King James VI, who left his fortune to found a hospital school for "puir, faitherless bairns" — poor, fatherless children — of the city, a foundation that opened in the building on Lauriston Place in the mid-seventeenth century and continues as an independent school today. Its steep turrets, ornate stonework and division into four named houses have made it one of the most frequently cited real-world templates for Hogwarts, sitting as it does directly beside Greyfriars Kirkyard, itself thoroughly covered elsewhere in this register for the Mackenzie Poltergeist.
The school's own haunting rests substantially on the testimony of a single former staff member, named in the account as Beverly, who worked there through the 1980s. She described a period marked by persistent cold spots in parts of the building, and by small objects moving or being displaced with no ordinary explanation — most strikingly, a vase that she and colleagues say appeared to lift and float briefly before crashing to the ground and smashing. Separately, she and others reported glimpsing a dark, shadowy figure inside the building, its presence described as distinctly malevolent rather than merely unsettling, which vanished the instant it was looked at directly rather than lingering to be properly seen. No name or documented history has been attached to the figure, and the account rests on staff recollection rather than a formal investigation, but its specificity — a named witness describing a consistent, repeated set of experiences over a defined period — sets it apart from some of the vaguer, undated hauntings collected in this batch.
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