The jail is a good example of a building whose reputation grew once it became a tourist site. The reports are general rather than tied to a named prisoner: steps where nobody is walking, patches of cold, shapes in doorways, a tug at a sleeve. Ghost guides describe the jail as sitting in what they call the most haunted square mile in Scotland, meaning the Old Town.
The building itself is well documented. The Mysterious Britain entry describes the Victorian regime of the treadmill and the crank, the earlier and much worse Tolbooth cells, and the military use that followed. The ghost reports are undated and unattributed, and they are recorded as a tradition of the place, not as an investigated case.
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