The History of the Edinburgh Vaults

Beneath the Royal Mile, running under South Bridge and into the closes of the Old Town, sits one of Edinburgh’s most remarkable architectural accidents: around 120 stone chambers, sealed for over a century and rediscovered in 1985, that have since become the setting for the city’s most popular ghost tours.

This is the history of the Edinburgh Vaults — built in 1788, abandoned, occupied by the destitute, forgotten, and eventually reopened to a city that had almost stopped believing they were there.

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Building South Bridge (1785–1788)

South Bridge was Edinburgh’s solution to a practical problem: the Old Town had no direct route south. Connecting the Royal Mile to the developing southern districts meant spanning the valley of the Cowgate, a drop of around 30 feet.

The bridge was designed to hide itself. Rather than leaving its nineteen stone arches visible — as North Bridge to the north leaves its arches open to the air — South Bridge was built with tenement blocks running directly from the bridge parapet down to street level on both sides. The result is that today only one of the nineteen arches is still visible: the span over the Cowgate. The other eighteen are buried inside the tenement walls, and the chambers formed between them are the vaults.

The foundation stone was laid on 1 August 1785. South Bridge opened in 1788. Almost immediately, the flaw in its construction became apparent.

The Water Problem

The bridge surface was never properly waterproofed. Edinburgh’s rain — arriving in short, frequent showers year-round — seeped straight through the paving and into the vaults below. Within a few years of opening, the merchant tenants who had leased vault space for wine storage, coopers’ workshops, cobblers, and taverns began to find their goods and tools sitting in standing water.

By 1795, the exodus had begun.

Life in the Vaults (1795–c.1860)

As merchants fled, the cheaper chambers became available to those with fewer options. Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century was a city under enormous pressure: the Highland Clearances had driven families south, Irish immigration was rising, and the industrial economy was creating a permanent urban poor with nowhere to go.

The vaults absorbed some of this overflow. Families crowded into chambers that had been designed for wine barrels. Illegal whisky stills appeared. Smugglers used the interconnected chambers to move contraband across the city without appearing on the street. Unlicensed taverns and brothels operated in the lower chambers.

Rumour connects the vaults to body-snatching — the practice of stealing fresh corpses from graveyards to sell to Edinburgh’s medical schools, which had a constant demand for cadavers in the era before the Anatomy Act of 1832. No documentary evidence places Burke and Hare specifically in the South Bridge Vaults, but the trade they were part of was real, and the vaults would have been a logical overnight storage point.

Eventually, even the destitute left. By around 1860, the chambers had been filled with rubble and bricked over. For over a century, they were forgotten.

Burke and Hare: Edinburgh’s Most Famous Murderers

William Burke and William Hare did not operate from the vaults, but they are inseparable from Edinburgh’s ghost-tour tradition — and their story ran directly through the neighbourhood the tours cover.

Between November 1827 and 31 October 1828, Burke and Hare murdered at least sixteen people in Edinburgh’s West Port district, selling the bodies to the anatomist Dr Robert Knox at Surgeons’ Square for £8 to £10 per cadaver. Knox, who lectured at Edinburgh University’s medical school, asked no questions. The demand for fresh bodies came from a legal vacuum: anatomy was taught from real corpses, but the only legal supply was the bodies of executed criminals — far fewer than the medical schools needed.

Burke was arrested, tried, and hanged on 28 January 1829 before a crowd of 25,000. His skeleton is still on display at the Surgeons’ Hall Museum. Hare turned King’s evidence and was released; Knox’s career never recovered despite no criminal charges.

Greyfriars Kirkyard: A Parallel History

The ghost tours link South Bridge to Greyfriars Kirkyard, about a five-minute walk. The kirkyard’s history is as dark as the vaults'.

Established in 1562 on land gifted by Mary Queen of Scots — on the site of a dissolved Franciscan friary — Greyfriars served for centuries as Edinburgh’s principal burial ground when the overcrowded plot at St Giles’ Cathedral could take no more. The first burial on the site dates from 1562; the Kirk building was not completed until 1620.

The Covenanters’ Prison (1679)

In the summer of 1679, after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, around 400 of the 1,184 captured Covenanter prisoners were marched to Edinburgh and held in a makeshift open-air enclosure in the field south of the kirkyard — the area now called the Covenanters’ Prison. They were kept on four ounces of bread a day, through a Scottish autumn with no shelter. Many died of exposure. Others were hanged or died of disease.

In November 1679, the remaining 257 were sentenced to transportation to the American colonies. Their ship sank off Orkney. Forty-eight survived.

The prison was the territory of Sir George Mackenzie, the Lord Advocate who prosecuted the Covenanters. He is buried in the Black Mausoleum at the far end of the Covenanters’ Prison — and that mausoleum is where Edinburgh’s most persistently-documented paranormal story begins.

The Mackenzie Poltergeist (1998–)

In December 1998, a homeless man broke into the Black Mausoleum seeking shelter and fell through rotten floorboards into a chamber of disturbed human remains. From 1999 onward, tour groups visiting the Covenanters’ Prison began reporting scratches, bruises, and sudden collapses in or near the mausoleum. More than 450 such incidents have since been logged.

Whether or not you believe in the paranormal, the Covenanters’ Prison is the only section of Greyfriars Kirkyard that is actually locked — gated off from the rest of the cemetery, accessible only on a guided tour with City of the Dead Tours, which has held sole access to that section since 1990.

Rediscovery: Norrie Rowan (1985)

The South Bridge Vaults lay sealed under the Old Town until 1985. The man who found them was Norrie Rowan — a former Scotland rugby international and the landlord of the Tron Tavern on the Royal Mile — who was working on his premises when he broke through into a sealed tunnel.

Rowan and his son Norman spent years excavating the chambers by hand. What they found had been untouched since the mid-nineteenth century: household objects, shoes, old bottles, and the general detritus of the lives that had been lived underground.

The vaults opened to guided tours in the early 1990s. By then, the ghost stories had already begun.

What Survives Today

The vaults currently accessible on tours are a fraction of the original 120 chambers — around 12 to 18 rooms, depending on the operator and route. Auld Reekie Tours and Mercat Tours each hold private access to separate sections of the vault network: Auld Reekie in its own set of rooms, Mercat in the Blair Street Underground Vaults (approximately 20 rooms, the largest contiguous section).

The physical conditions have not changed substantially since the chambers were sealed. The stone walls absorb and retain moisture from the bridge surface above; water still drips through after heavy rain. The air stays damp and noticeably cool year-round. The ceilings range from about six feet in the main chambers to less than three feet in the connecting tunnels.

Ready to Go Down?

The top-rated Edinburgh ghost tour — 4.6/5 from 6,862 guests — takes you into the South Bridge Vaults and through Greyfriars Kirkyard with a local Auld Reekie guide. Free cancellation up to 24 hours before. From $35.

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