George Square predates the University of Edinburgh's presence there by roughly two centuries, laid out from the 1760s as one of the city's earliest planned residential squares, well before the university's twentieth-century expansion absorbed much of it into a working campus of lecture halls, offices and libraries. The library building at its heart, among the older structures kept through that redevelopment, has picked up the kind of low-grade, undocumented haunting tradition common to old academic buildings anywhere: students and staff describe cold spots that come and go without explanation, sounds heard with no obvious source, and apparitions caught only in the corner of the eye among the stacks, gone by the time anyone looks properly.
A related but distinct thread of campus folklore, told among students independently of the library reports, concerns a monk said to haunt the university's old chapel — a story with the shape of a long-running, informally passed-down legend rather than a documented sighting tied to a specific date or witness. Neither strand carries a named historical figure or specific incident behind it in the sources consulted for this record, and both are included here as genuine, still-circulating student tradition rather than as well-evidenced hauntings.
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