Speaker 1: You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.
Speaker 2: A quick note before the show, I want to thank
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Speaker 2: Every ghost story has two ingredients, a ghost and a story.
Speaker 2: In Edinburgh, Scotland, there's a graveyard that has piled up
Speaker 2: stories for nearly twenty years of people experiencing odd things
Speaker 2: and receiving mysterious injuries. The locations known as the Greyfriars Kirkyard,
Speaker 2: and the ghost has been called the Mackenzie Poultrygeist, though
Speaker 2: it bears little resemblance to the Poultrygeist's common to parapsychology
Speaker 2: people tour in the kirkyard, a reported receiving strange cuts
Speaker 2: and bruises and experiencing many strange phenomena. So bundle up
Speaker 2: in your warm clothes and get ready to walk around
Speaker 2: in the foggy, cold and damp looking for ghosts in
Speaker 2: the kirkyard. It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 3: A giant hairy creature park Ape Park mat in Luckness,
Speaker 3: a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the
Speaker 3: Highlands of Scotland, in a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 2: Monsttal Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
Speaker 4: I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 2: In this episode, we'll be talking with Fred Fogerty, one
Speaker 2: of the tour guides for City of the Dead tours
Speaker 2: in Edinburgh. Fred was kind enough to talk with some
Speaker 2: very short notice and we had a wonderful time chatting
Speaker 2: with him. I think you'll find he's quite a storyteller.
Speaker 2: I suspect his tours would be a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: We did have more questions than we had time for us.
Speaker 2: We've continued our conversations via email after this chat, and
Speaker 2: I'll talk about that after the interview. Karen and I
Speaker 2: live a bit too far away to go investigate this
Speaker 2: case ourselves, but perhaps some of our listeners will be
Speaker 2: intrigued and go have a look. I think there's some
Speaker 2: interesting aspects to this story to have a look at,
Speaker 2: some on the ground and probably some in the library Monstertal. So, hey, Fred,
Speaker 2: we don't really know much about you, so this is
Speaker 2: all really quick, and we really appreciate your promptness in
Speaker 2: joining us and making time for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2: Could you give us a little bit of an intro
Speaker 2: for yourself, like who are you? Like a bio.
Speaker 5: Written down somewhere, but essentially.
Speaker 6: I can read it true your life, But essentially I
Speaker 6: work for a City of the Dead tours in Edinburgh
Speaker 6: in Scotland. We take tours into two quite remarkable locations,
Speaker 6: the first being the Comminats Prison, steeped in history, it's
Speaker 6: so important for Scottish history, and most importantly into the
Speaker 6: Black Mausoleum and we learn more about the Mackenzie poltergeist.
Speaker 6: That's fascinating phenomenon that for that, since nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 6: has been known to violently and physically assort people in
Speaker 6: and around the Airy Graveyard. We also go into the
Speaker 6: south Bridge Vaults, part of Edinburgh's underground city, and we
Speaker 6: go into the southernmost section, is fairly undisturbed, one of
Speaker 6: the least least refurbished portions, and go on about the
Speaker 6: south Bridge entity and it's relevant.
Speaker 5: There's various guises.
Speaker 6: I have been doing that for over a decade, particularly
Speaker 6: with regards to the graveyard.
Speaker 5: Having a wonderful time.
Speaker 6: I've got quite an eclectic history of various things. I
Speaker 6: worked as a professional breakdown ser I've worked as a
Speaker 6: welfare advisor.
Speaker 5: I also work as a hypnotherapist.
Speaker 6: And that's the reason why I'm in Chicago at the
Speaker 6: moment and a similar time zone to yourself, studying with
Speaker 6: my friend and mentor learning about other than conscious communication
Speaker 6: and not psychology.
Speaker 5: So all of these things, what else is there to say?
Speaker 5: I'm not sure.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Alison, whom you spoke with recently, describes me as
Speaker 6: a colorful freak.
Speaker 5: It's just probably accurate.
Speaker 2: Well, you sound like you're going to be a really
Speaker 2: interesting discussion here. You're going to bring us a very
Speaker 2: interesting discussion, So that's awesome. So she also described you
Speaker 2: as a fairly skeptical person. So but maybe that's not
Speaker 2: how you view yourself? Where do you feel about like?
Speaker 2: I guess you'll talk about this as you go along,
Speaker 2: but how do you feel about her? These? Like what?
Speaker 2: I guess maybe what's the most compelling sort of paranormal
Speaker 2: things you've run into?
Speaker 6: So like it comes across a broad range of things.
Speaker 6: To be honest with you, Blake, I've either myself have
Speaker 6: walked out of this particular portion of the graveyard with
Speaker 6: three fairly deep gouges across my chest in a very
Speaker 6: typical pattern, and that after maybe seven years or so,
Speaker 6: six years of doing the tours, I felt nothing at
Speaker 6: the time.
Speaker 5: It's very common.
Speaker 6: I've experienced things where someone on my tour has seen
Speaker 6: something described to me what they've seen, and later on
Speaker 6: I've discovered that a friend of a friend and didn't
Speaker 6: make it to a particular portion of a tour because
Speaker 6: she saw, in her words, very very closely matched what
Speaker 6: this other person was describing, but from a different angle
Speaker 6: at a different place. And these two stories linked up
Speaker 6: so elegantly, like two cogs in a perfect machine.
Speaker 5: Uncanny. Yeah, I've walked out of them.
Speaker 6: Well, my first tour inside of his place, I experienced
Speaker 6: what people are supposed to describe as cold spots. But
Speaker 6: for me, it's not about the typical dropping temperature that
Speaker 6: people often describe. For me, it is more like an internal,
Speaker 6: like a visceral experience, like a like a real intense discomfort,
Speaker 6: like the kind of experience you might get it well
Speaker 6: from me personally, when I've walked into a place where
Speaker 6: a room or met somebody and absolutely did not feel safe.
Speaker 6: And it was my first ever tour, and I had
Speaker 6: eight customers with me, and the eight of us left
Speaker 6: only five minutes into a fifteen minute section of the
Speaker 6: tour in that particular location because we could not stand
Speaker 6: the experience.
Speaker 5: And yeah, no, we just left.
Speaker 6: We didn't do the scary stuff in there at all.
Speaker 6: That we didn't even get much into the scary stuff.
Speaker 5: We left.
Speaker 2: Well, if you felt scared, you you didn't really need to, right, Yeah, indeed.
Speaker 5: So it's just it's just really weird.
Speaker 6: I mean, yeah, these things for me are fascinating. But
Speaker 6: if you're interested, asked me the question about I miskeptic,
Speaker 6: what does that mean? Later on with my experiences, I'm
Speaker 6: very happy to talk about it until until you respalled off.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, well we'll get to it. But I think
Speaker 2: you fit on a lot of topics that are going
Speaker 2: to be delved into deeper as we get into our question.
Speaker 2: So this is exciting.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I thought we'd start We'll go back
Speaker 1: to the beginning and talk about grief ries kirkyard in general.
Speaker 1: So kirkyard that's a Scottish term for churchyard exactly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we just used the woman in Scotts We've got
Speaker 6: kirk instead of church.
Speaker 2: Oh. Oh, I had a question to follow up question
Speaker 2: and I forgot to ask, which was how do you
Speaker 2: determine a cold spot when you're in Scotland? That was
Speaker 2: my joke I forgot. Oh, very good point.
Speaker 6: We run a we run a similar joke. Do you
Speaker 6: feel do you feel like a really cold sense in
Speaker 6: your ankles? It just really gets the set in from
Speaker 6: the skin starts to get deeper and deeper, and you
Speaker 6: start to get like a flesh like the goose bumps
Speaker 6: at the back of your legs and this discomfort that
Speaker 6: works its way up your your leg, up your calf right.
Speaker 5: What we call that it's a very technical term. It's
Speaker 5: a draft.
Speaker 1: And you are a hypnotherapist, not you the way the
Speaker 1: way you were describing it to sound it like a
Speaker 1: hypnotherapy script or something. So grayfries Cookyard. It's got a
Speaker 1: very long history. But can you give us an overview
Speaker 1: or if it's past.
Speaker 5: Sure, very very brief.
Speaker 6: Gray Friskyard is an extraordinary piece of Edinburgh itself. It
Speaker 6: sits in the southwestern corner of what used to be
Speaker 6: the Old Town and one of our very important structures
Speaker 6: runs along the western side of it, and in fact
Speaker 6: bisects the graveyard. Well it divides it up, and that
Speaker 6: is the flood in the wall. Now, the graveyard itself
Speaker 6: was we began use primarily as an important place of
Speaker 6: burial for the Gray Friars. I think there were Franciscan
Speaker 6: months months at the time, and that was in the
Speaker 6: early sixteen hundreds. Various other portions of the graveyard were
Speaker 6: donated to the church to be used as burial grounds,
Speaker 6: and the Covenant's Prison, which sits to the southernmost point
Speaker 6: of the graveyard and juts out quite prominently, was the last.
Speaker 5: Piece of ground given to the graveyard for burial. Prior
Speaker 5: to that, it had been used, as a name suggests,
Speaker 5: as a prison for these people known as the Cobinators,
Speaker 5: and they were I mean the history is fascinating.
Speaker 6: It's also absurdly complex, and I hope you'll forgive me
Speaker 6: for this, because I ditched history at the age of fourteen,
Speaker 6: because I couldn't make sense of it, like all this
Speaker 6: stuff about name, date, battle, who one who lost, in
Speaker 6: some other nonsense. I gave up history after I got
Speaker 6: past the Romans and chariots. I enjoyed the Romans, the Egyptians,
Speaker 6: a bit of medieval stuff, and the dinosaurs, and that
Speaker 6: was what I enjoyed.
Speaker 5: So I ditched it as soon as I could.
Speaker 6: And it's only by coming back to this company, this
Speaker 6: City of the Dead Tours, and working really just an
Speaker 6: administration briefly, that I discovered how extraordinary history is when
Speaker 6: when you have these these amazing people by colleagues I
Speaker 6: work with and the people who came before me as well.
Speaker 6: I've just been the most extraordinary storytellers. Now there's a
Speaker 6: script for the tours, no one's really seen it. Everyone
Speaker 6: does their own research the tours. They're they're most extraordinary
Speaker 6: storytellers and amateur historians, and everything about it brings the
Speaker 6: history to life, brings the location to life, and it
Speaker 6: makes it relevant to us right now far as.
Speaker 2: Well human narrative, right, I mean it's about people at
Speaker 2: that point, right, not just dates and names.
Speaker 5: Yes, and that's that's a lovely way to describe it.
Speaker 5: I think.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So I got working there, I discovered much more
Speaker 6: about it.
Speaker 5: It got more into it.
Speaker 6: So what I'm saying is that the history of the
Speaker 6: Cobinanchers themselves, these people who in the Graveyard itself in
Speaker 6: sixteen hundred and thirty seven, right, Charles the First wanted
Speaker 6: to unite the disparate churches being in the Scotland, and
Speaker 6: Scotland would have to change your style and worship in
Speaker 6: the English way, and being forced into the English way
Speaker 6: was I believe a step too close to Catholicism. And
Speaker 6: they absolutely, they just repelled. In sixteen thirty eight they
Speaker 6: drew up a lengthy document entitled locally Colloquially is a
Speaker 6: National Covenant with God in the Graveyard itself the went
Speaker 6: it was a lengthy document. If I butcher it for you,
Speaker 6: it goes along the lines of Charles, You're okay as
Speaker 6: a king, You're not better than God, and we reserve
Speaker 6: the right to worship God any style we see fit.
Speaker 6: I think that's beating want to learn from one of
Speaker 6: my colleagues, my first every tour. But essentially essentially that's
Speaker 6: that's what the relevant portion it comes down there, And
Speaker 6: it was an extraordinary move.
Speaker 5: It really was an extraordinary move.
Speaker 6: This National Covenant that they signed is both I think
Speaker 6: one of like a real early example of the church
Speaker 6: and state being separated in an illegal document. Right, But
Speaker 6: it's also like the ramifications of this thing are far reached,
Speaker 6: so the point where the portions of it, and it
Speaker 6: is possibly subjective, it certainly looks like it to me,
Speaker 6: portions of it were taken nearly rebatum and used as
Speaker 6: a foundation for things like the American Constitution.
Speaker 5: Right. It's the impact that this document has from the
Speaker 5: mid sixteen hundreds that we still feel today. It's extraordinary.
Speaker 6: So we cross some time here, and it's point Charles
Speaker 6: the second is on the throne. The covenantal armies, the
Speaker 6: armies of people who who support this document that's brought
Speaker 6: this this notion.
Speaker 2: You know, for the American audience is how long are
Speaker 2: the terms of office for these kings? How long are
Speaker 2: they elected for.
Speaker 1: Just four years?
Speaker 2: The the the the administration is is as long as
Speaker 2: the king lives, right, So that's or until there's a
Speaker 2: battle right.
Speaker 6: Until they advocate or until I mean, there's a lot
Speaker 6: of politics that goes on with a lot of the
Speaker 6: royals behind the scenes.
Speaker 5: And yeah, like so history is not my strong point.
Speaker 6: There's so much there that you do well to get
Speaker 6: a history and on to talk about it because it is.
Speaker 2: That's okay.
Speaker 5: I mean, yeah, long mexxed up story.
Speaker 2: But it's interesting. It is interesting, so keep going.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, where was I? I have no idea A.
Speaker 6: Second, I think, so these these people, what ends up
Speaker 6: being formed is this covenant army is known as people
Speaker 6: who support this, this national Covenant. They end up going
Speaker 6: heading down to England fighting for their rights. There's loads
Speaker 6: more with this. This is really just the butchering of
Speaker 6: the history to get us to where we need to be.
Speaker 6: The armies don't do well, right, they do remarkably well.
Speaker 6: They're given back this very basic right. I mean, the
Speaker 6: notion that there are people can rise up and commit
Speaker 6: treason in essence and that's exactly what it is, and
Speaker 6: do so well that they are given back this very
Speaker 6: basic right and they're permitted to return home. I mean,
Speaker 6: that's that's extraordinary to me, that notion they can all
Speaker 6: commit treason. There's extra pressure placed on the king from
Speaker 6: a rebellion at the same time, and it just essentially
Speaker 6: in essence is okay, whatever you want to leave me alone.
Speaker 6: I would obviously paraphrase for you there because I wasn't there.
Speaker 6: And they return, Sorry that's not accurate. Some of them return,
Speaker 6: but there is still a chance to go on and
Speaker 6: take the flight to the English. I mean, the history
Speaker 6: of England and Scotland has rarely been amicable at best,
Speaker 6: so at this point here the fortunes of the combinations
Speaker 6: change quite rapidly, and eventually there are.
Speaker 5: Only a handful of these people remaining.
Speaker 6: Now depending on where you look, it's either four hundred
Speaker 6: or twelve hundred people.
Speaker 5: They are marched.
Speaker 6: Back up through England into Scotland, allegedly with no shoes
Speaker 6: on their feet, and said it's a long way, right,
Speaker 6: it's not an easy walk either, right, there's no there's
Speaker 6: no nice paths. Marched all the way up, yeah, right,
Speaker 6: and then marched all the way up with shoes their
Speaker 6: feed to Edinburgh. And this man George McKenzie, who is
Speaker 6: at this point the King's advocate, so he's the he
Speaker 6: starts off some readays I keep getting this suse, I
Speaker 6: keep telling people he starts off as a lawyer, that
Speaker 6: starts off life as a lawyer. In fact, he starts
Speaker 6: off as a child. He becomes a lawyer later.
Speaker 1: On lawyers children.
Speaker 5: Oh that's a good.
Speaker 2: Question, pause for laugh. No, that's good, that's good.
Speaker 6: So he he is. So he's a king's representative in Edinburgh. Right,
Speaker 6: And the story of this man is complex as well,
Speaker 6: Like it's it's always easy for us to it as people,
Speaker 6: I guess, as humans, to create an easy narrative to
Speaker 6: explain stuff and to give people an idea of things.
Speaker 5: But in fact I think it's more complex.
Speaker 6: So he is tasked in Charles with the idea of
Speaker 6: creating a statement with these prisoners that is so dramatic.
Speaker 5: That it is so effective that it will stop any
Speaker 5: kind of uprising from happening again.
Speaker 6: Right now, bear in mind, at the time Edinburgh streets
Speaker 6: are allegedly an inch deep in everyone's sewage, we regularly
Speaker 6: turn to a torture, public humiliation, execution, witch hunting.
Speaker 5: Hey, like life is cheap.
Speaker 6: The figure that is thrown around is that for a
Speaker 6: portion of our history there were I'm not sure if
Speaker 6: its ability, but the story goes that are up to sorry,
Speaker 6: in excess of eighty thousand people at its peak in
Speaker 6: a space that is two thirds of a mile by quarter.
Speaker 6: You can imagine too, like eighty thousand, Like even if
Speaker 6: the number is only slightly accurate, we're still left with
Speaker 6: a staggering number of people in an extraordinarily small portion
Speaker 6: of space, living in the kind of poverty, not poverty,
Speaker 6: and well, poverty exists there as well, as we'll get into,
Speaker 6: perhaps in the South Bridge boards.
Speaker 2: Being treated only marginally better than passengers on an airline
Speaker 2: these days.
Speaker 5: Or.
Speaker 6: Being dragged down the aisle broken nose and concussion of
Speaker 6: whatever happened. Yeah, as I give you an idea of
Speaker 6: just how far this has to go in order to
Speaker 6: to create a statement that will.
Speaker 2: To stick out in this crowd as a bad guy
Speaker 2: making things bad for people, you got to be bad
Speaker 2: at least, or.
Speaker 6: At least just the statement of what happens if you
Speaker 6: commit I mean, that's the standout part.
Speaker 5: To give you some idea of.
Speaker 6: Like, this is more complex, right, So it's easy. It's
Speaker 6: easy for us to vilify George McKenzie, and it is
Speaker 6: absolutely worth remembering the one man's terrorist is another man's champion.
Speaker 5: That's true, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: So according went to I haven't done it for search
Speaker 6: myself is what I get from a colleague of mine.
Speaker 6: He points out that George McKenzie wrote early treatises, and
Speaker 6: bear in mind this is we're going back to the
Speaker 6: late sixteen hundreds, right, so this is really really progressive.
Speaker 6: George mackenzie writes early Treatises on the notion that because
Speaker 6: essentially just opposite the cominators, prison used to be like
Speaker 6: a bedlo play, a bedloin place, a place for people
Speaker 6: who are mentally ill, for people who are committing crime stuff.
Speaker 6: At this they we we at various stages. It transformed
Speaker 6: it's face into various things over there. So like at
Speaker 6: the time, prevailing notion was if you were in these places,
Speaker 6: it was because that was essentially your destiny, right, that's
Speaker 6: the kind of person you were.
Speaker 5: And people born into poverty are there because they're.
Speaker 6: Because they're worth nothing, right, they're they're they're mentally deficient whatever,
Speaker 6: they're not as they're not as smart, they're not as godly,
Speaker 6: they're not as wonderful as as the people in the
Speaker 6: upper classes. And here is this exactly right, And here
Speaker 6: is this man, who is this person who is writing
Speaker 6: a treatise at the time from position of authority so
Speaker 6: extrawdinary authority in the capital city, suggesting the notion and
Speaker 6: I'm not just positing it but actually doing the best
Speaker 6: to fight its corner that if you ended up, say,
Speaker 6: like criminals, things like this, maybe they're there as a
Speaker 6: product of society, of their upbringing, of the choices presented
Speaker 6: to them, and they could be educated out of it.
Speaker 2: The nature versus never progressive.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, exactly, right through the late sixteen hundreds. That
Speaker 6: is mind blowing. And yet this same man is also
Speaker 6: in a position where he is left with these the
Speaker 6: four hundred and twelve hundred people, he will committed treason,
Speaker 6: and regardless of how he feels about it, regardless of
Speaker 6: how much we have vilified him in following years. He
Speaker 6: took his twelve hundred people of Point, people who were
Speaker 6: essentially here, rose to the locals and to much of Scotland,
Speaker 6: and he's got to make a spectacle of them that
Speaker 6: will deter any and all treason or substitute all the
Speaker 6: rest of his stuff in perpetuity. In a world, in
Speaker 6: a place, in a tiny city where we regularly turn
Speaker 6: our thoughts to a whole bunch of cruel, dramatic, bloodthirsty
Speaker 6: things living inches deep in sewage. Right, this is this
Speaker 6: is what he's going to contend with. So this man
Speaker 6: he comes, he takes these people, and he places him
Speaker 6: in the space at the back of the graveyard. And
Speaker 6: it's not consecrated, it's not burial ground at this point.
Speaker 6: It's the last piece to be given to the to
Speaker 6: the graveyard. After this he lines him up. Now the
Speaker 6: space of it. Let me think how far it might be.
Speaker 6: Describe to you. I'm rubbish to estimate in distance. Let's
Speaker 6: say it is. Let's say it to a couple of
Speaker 6: hundred feet, Okay, I suspect the information is there online
Speaker 6: as part of the graveyard's documents.
Speaker 5: These days.
Speaker 6: If you were to walk up to the gates and
Speaker 6: look down into this narrow strip, okay, you see a
Speaker 6: space that is maybe twenty feet in width, lined on
Speaker 6: either side back from there with these gorgeous mausoleums. And
Speaker 6: they're lovely, right, they're they're beautiful, they're foreboding, but they
Speaker 6: are also places that speak of the history of lineage,
Speaker 6: of all sorts of amazing things. I mean, it's such
Speaker 6: a place for us. Do we even have a plaque
Speaker 6: erected in memory of James Hutting, the father of modern geology? Okay,
Speaker 6: so it's not just a place that is squirreled off.
Speaker 6: It's a place that is even now fairly freshen memory,
Speaker 6: because it's quite a fresh plaque, even though nobody's inburied
Speaker 6: in the graveyard for over one hundred years. Because it is,
Speaker 6: it is, and if you can imagine this for a moment,
Speaker 6: they can carry this. This graveyard is full quite literally
Speaker 6: to bursting point. So you did, and that is how
Speaker 6: it gets its name exactly. Yes, So down we gooful
Speaker 6: wars Liams on the side and maybe a couple of
Speaker 6: hundred feet in length. And these four hundred and twelve
Speaker 6: hundred people are taken into this area, lined up from
Speaker 6: the back. They're forced kicked down into the ground, and
Speaker 6: they're forced to lie there through five months of a
Speaker 6: brutal Scottish winter. Right now, we give them only the food,
Speaker 6: water and shelter required just to really prolong this suffering
Speaker 6: and just to really drag it out, so that as
Speaker 6: many people as possible can endure five months of this.
Speaker 6: So here they lie, right, I mean they're really I
Speaker 6: mean they're suffering. Is quite extraordinary. They are, yeah, I
Speaker 6: mean if they moved or complained, they're taken out and
Speaker 6: shots allegedly by muskets. There are still holes in the
Speaker 6: wall outside from where the musket balls like puncturing their
Speaker 6: bodies and shatter their rocks behind. It is it is
Speaker 6: quite extraordinary now, they said it.
Speaker 5: For the five months.
Speaker 6: If anybody moves or can play, it said, they're taken
Speaker 6: out to the front and executed. If they try to escape,
Speaker 6: soldiers positioned around the wall just shot them. Very few
Speaker 6: of these common a something here is the thing, these
Speaker 6: common answers, these people who support their things through prisoners here,
Speaker 6: they were officially free to leave any time that they
Speaker 6: wished to do so, Okay, all they had to do
Speaker 6: is to swear fealty to the king worship in his style,
Speaker 6: and very few of them did. Now, there may be
Speaker 6: a whole bunch of reasons for this. Some of them, well,
Speaker 6: what life is them? Is there for them outside of
Speaker 6: those walls if they go back to their families, their friends,
Speaker 6: their loved ones, having renounced their faith, their beliefs, and gone.
Speaker 5: Against everything they stood for. HM. Part of it is
Speaker 5: they I.
Speaker 6: Mean they were willing to die already, they were willing
Speaker 6: to join an army sign up, and quite willing to
Speaker 6: accept their fate for their beliefs.
Speaker 1: Anyway, we can see why why George McKenzie is known
Speaker 1: as Bloody George.
Speaker 6: Yes, he's got a head of a reputation, and part
Speaker 6: of that is are justified. And I think I've already
Speaker 6: given you an indication that the story is much more
Speaker 6: complex than this, and part of this notion of joined
Speaker 6: the easy narrative and then it gets lost in history
Speaker 6: as well. It's quite prevalent, I think, in quite an interesting,
Speaker 6: quite interesting phenomenon.
Speaker 2: So we'll we'll have to put I mean, we'll put
Speaker 2: links to some some of the research about McKenzie and
Speaker 2: the history of this on the website. Obviously people could
Speaker 2: just google it. But I guess we wouldn't be talking
Speaker 2: about this story if there wasn't a supernatural or monstrous
Speaker 2: aspect to it. Now, the nature of this is somewhat
Speaker 2: monstrous in general, but this falls into an interesting category
Speaker 2: because on Monster Talk we talk about ghosts sometimes, and
Speaker 2: we've talked about poultry geist. But you know, I'd always
Speaker 2: heard about the Greyfriar Kirkyard as just that I heard
Speaker 2: it called the Gray Friar Kirkyard Ghost, and it wasn't
Speaker 2: until I talked to Alison I realized that it was
Speaker 2: being known as the Mackenzie poultrgeist. And so let's talk
Speaker 2: about that a little bit if you don't mind. Of course,
Speaker 2: where where does the supernatural aspect come into this? Like,
Speaker 2: where where does it become a scary story and not
Speaker 2: just a pretty graveyard?
Speaker 5: Sure so Mackenzie's tomb itself lies maybe seventy feet from
Speaker 5: this portion of the graveyard. Now, for a very very
Speaker 5: long time, hundreds of years, the nearby school children have
Speaker 5: often run into his tomb, and depending on which version
Speaker 5: you hear, it's usually on the lines of McKenzie, Mackenzie,
Speaker 5: come out and get me. It's been favored that his coffin.
Speaker 5: So we can get to the story in a minute.
Speaker 6: But essentially, the tomb is quite unique. The musleium is
Speaker 6: quite unique in that it exists over a minimum two levels.
Speaker 6: So there is a sub there's sub chamber beneath it
Speaker 6: which contains his coffin, his wife's coffin, and a third
Speaker 6: coffin that belongs to a lady placed in there quite
Speaker 6: some time after the tomb was shut. No one has
Speaker 6: any idea who she is, but there is no record
Speaker 6: of her being placed in there, and yet.
Speaker 5: To be placed in there. She must have been.
Speaker 6: Important, right because this tomb is the grandest mausoleum in
Speaker 6: the graveyard, So it's unusual to his coffin in particular,
Speaker 6: has been his legendary, his legend has it has been
Speaker 6: known to move around ever since his burial there at
Speaker 6: various points throughout the day and night when people walk
Speaker 6: past me, didn't walk past. So in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 6: that stops. In nineteen ninety eight, as the story goes,
Speaker 6: a homeless guy is making his way through Grayfrier's graveyard.
Speaker 6: He he's seeking shelter from the Scottish night in the weather,
Speaker 6: and he breaks in from the back of Mackenzie's too.
Speaker 6: Now there is indeed like a brick that used to
Speaker 6: be there, that was I mean, it's potentially Mackenzie buried there.
Speaker 6: I think it's late, it's only seventeen hundreds. I think
Speaker 6: in particular, mortar is old. It's old, it's rotten, and
Speaker 6: the brick grumbles inside. So his homeless guy squeezes his
Speaker 6: narrow maciated body through, and he notices fairly quickly, as
Speaker 6: you would do if you were to look through the
Speaker 6: gates just now, that there is a metal grill set
Speaker 6: in the floor, and now these days it has been
Speaker 6: sealed properly so that you can't get through because of
Speaker 6: the breakings that they've had in the most recent set
Speaker 6: of years.
Speaker 5: Prior to that, it wasn't even locked.
Speaker 6: And the homeless guy makes his way down this steep
Speaker 6: stone flight of stairs, finds himself in this subchamber and
Speaker 6: proceeds to attempt to hammer into the mint Mackenzie's coughin
Speaker 6: itself with a stone slab that he has procured from
Speaker 6: the floor beneath his feet, But the floor beneath that
Speaker 6: slab is not solid, and he falls into an additional
Speaker 6: burial pit the no one was aware of below it
Speaker 6: now as he freaks out on the hollows and screams
Speaker 6: and shouts, our caretaker Graham, who I have met, is lovely.
Speaker 6: He is making his way through the graveyard, and he
Speaker 6: is categorically not thrilled at the prospect of being outside
Speaker 6: in a typical Scottish night, in a legendary haunted graveyard
Speaker 6: with a loud, crashing noise coming from the legendarily haunted
Speaker 6: tomb of George Bloody Mackenzie right, and as he looks
Speaker 6: in through the door of the mausoleum, he sees that
Speaker 6: this grille in the floor is open for the first
Speaker 6: time in living history. Now that's not an attractive prospect,
Speaker 6: I think for this man, but it's still it's still
Speaker 6: absolutely his job to go and work out what it
Speaker 6: is to cut some of the story short for you.
Speaker 5: So there's something still with people to sign up to
Speaker 5: in a tourist. Uh.
Speaker 6: He gets downstairs to discover to discover that the homeless
Speaker 6: guy is emerging from this undisclosed, formally unknown burial pits beneath,
Speaker 6: shuffling in the dark, making his way towards him, and
Speaker 6: the two share what I think we can describe it
Speaker 6: as a moment. So whatever happens for these two men
Speaker 6: in this place, like, we have no idea, I think
Speaker 6: it's fair to say, like, what what this thing, what
Speaker 6: this comorant is There's lots of thoughts behind it or
Speaker 6: what specifically creates it, So we call it a poltergeist.
Speaker 6: And back when, back when we start, that seemed to
Speaker 6: make sense. It's Certainly, it's much easier for us to
Speaker 6: give you the title of a poltergeist than for us
Speaker 6: to give you all the little details, all the minutiae
Speaker 6: that we've covered in the last nineteen now nineteen years
Speaker 6: of researching this, of taking tour groups, through finding out
Speaker 6: what awful stuff happens to them, and finding some way
Speaker 6: of encouraging them to come back to our office and
Speaker 6: put pen to paper.
Speaker 1: So do all of the stories of paranormal activity go
Speaker 1: back to this incident or do they go back further?
Speaker 6: So like, certainly there are a bunch of theories about this. Right,
Speaker 6: So does I understand it because I only started back
Speaker 6: in the early two thousands. Right, the tomb is desecrated
Speaker 6: in nineteen ninety eight by this homeless guy. And something
Speaker 6: about this place, whether it's a desecration of the burial
Speaker 6: Pipperannie or Mackenzie's two or what these two men share together,
Speaker 6: the graveyard already has a reputation for being a thin place.
Speaker 6: If you look through its history, it is extraordinary how
Speaker 6: much of the fiction that we know of even today
Speaker 6: has been birthed in this particular place.
Speaker 5: It's remarkable.
Speaker 2: Just quickly, I know we've mentioned thin places before. But
Speaker 2: that's could you describe what that means?
Speaker 6: So it's described to me it's just a place where
Speaker 6: the veil between or the place between this world and
Speaker 6: the next is very thin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we sometimes it's also called liminal spaces as well.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 6: Okay, so yeah, that's what so we don't like it
Speaker 6: is easier for us to tell you that it's a
Speaker 6: poltergeist and for people, because people generally have an appreciation
Speaker 6: for what a polter geist is or what it implies,
Speaker 6: then for us to get super technical and described to
Speaker 6: people all the little things that have happened to us
Speaker 6: to believe this thing is truly unique. There is nothing
Speaker 6: else like this on the planet. And we've been doing
Speaker 6: this for a long long time. And because we have
Speaker 6: sole access with permission from the Council to go into
Speaker 6: this location, if anything happens to people in there, it
Speaker 6: happens to people on our tours.
Speaker 5: Now. A lot of stuff goes unmentioned for a variety
Speaker 5: of reasons because maybe they feel awkward, a bit embarrassed
Speaker 5: about their experience, maybe they dismiss it as being psychosomatic,
Speaker 5: maybe they just maybe they quite often they're pretty jarred
Speaker 5: by the experience. I don't really know what to make
Speaker 5: of it until quite some time later.
Speaker 1: So do you get people to sign Sorry to interrupt,
Speaker 1: but do you get people to sign disclaimers when they
Speaker 1: attend the tours to let them know that anything can happen?
Speaker 5: There's no disclaimer.
Speaker 6: It quite clearly says on our web pages, and it
Speaker 6: quite clearly says on our sign and we make a
Speaker 6: disclaimer at the beginning of each of our tours. Are
Speaker 6: the kind of things that have happened, regardless people's belief systems,
Speaker 6: to people on our tours, and that the tours can
Speaker 6: cause genuine mental distress, and.
Speaker 5: They can, they really can.
Speaker 6: People often ask me what the most terrifying thing is
Speaker 6: that I've seen or experienced than my tours, And it's
Speaker 6: not what you might think. In fact, it was terrifying
Speaker 6: precisely because it didn't happen to me on two occasions
Speaker 6: my tours.
Speaker 5: And this is very rare. This is two occasions in
Speaker 5: over ten years.
Speaker 6: Okay, I've had females on my tour room and my
Speaker 6: tour who have a couple of minutes in maybe five
Speaker 6: seven minutes in collapsed. Now that's not unusual that happens
Speaker 6: every now and again on our tours. But once they collapsed,
Speaker 6: they started well, they were unconscious when they came round,
Speaker 6: they started convulsing, and that will they last for maybe
Speaker 6: sort of a minute and a half two minutes, and
Speaker 6: then they go unconscious again and that maybe last for
Speaker 6: a minute and a half or so.
Speaker 5: Then they come around start compassing again.
Speaker 6: This like, we got them out of the graveyard as
Speaker 6: best I could whilst they were like myself and some
Speaker 6: people of the tour, we encourage them out of the
Speaker 6: graveyard once we got to the gates of the prison itself,
Speaker 6: which is very unusual normally if people experience something untowards
Speaker 6: or uncomfortable once they leave the gate of the pretty
Speaker 6: the mores of the Black Mares Alium, which I think,
Speaker 6: for Clarity's sake, I should make clear here that McKenzie's
Speaker 6: tomb is not the.
Speaker 5: Black Mares Alium.
Speaker 6: Over the last over the last couple of years, there
Speaker 6: have been a number of tour groups starting up who
Speaker 6: have just been on our tour once stolen our stuff
Speaker 6: and then and then and then just just yeah, just
Speaker 6: just made up the rest right and keep saying nonsense,
Speaker 6: which which is I don't know, I guess how how
Speaker 6: history has always happened. I suspect, right, it's just find
Speaker 6: it curious that it's happening now when the authorities are
Speaker 6: still here.
Speaker 5: We're the authorities.
Speaker 6: So so the Black Moors liam exists within the Cobinants Prison.
Speaker 6: It's about halfway down the left hand side in one
Speaker 6: of the early tombs some mausoleums that are in fact
Speaker 6: fully enclosed. That appears to be where this thing has
Speaker 6: made its nest for the last So nineteen ninety nine
Speaker 6: was when it was when it's sort of really focused
Speaker 6: in their one particular area. So that makes it nineteen years,
Speaker 6: I doesn't it? Yes, Okay, so last nineteen.
Speaker 5: Years inditionally around the place.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it initially moved around the place from to tomb
Speaker 6: in there, but really it has really started to focus
Speaker 6: in the last fifteen odd years, most definitely in that
Speaker 6: particular two McKenzie's tomb lines around one hundred feet away
Speaker 6: from the entrance.
Speaker 5: His tomb. Rarely anything happens there, very very rarely.
Speaker 6: In fact, I was in the habit of saying that
Speaker 6: nothing happens there at all anymore. But in fact, on
Speaker 6: one of my tours about three months ago, we had
Speaker 6: a group of six customers, myself just looking ato Mackenzie's tomb,
Speaker 6: and what is thing is that each of us experienced
Speaker 6: the very cold pressure of like a like a cold
Speaker 6: finger sideways on something like this, pressing against the back
Speaker 6: of our necks, right at the base of them. Now,
Speaker 6: what's interesting is like, yeah, we all got this sensation
Speaker 6: without anybody mentioning it, you know, like we all went
Speaker 6: through it and then said, man, that was weird. I
Speaker 6: had this cold sensation. Yes, me too, Yes, me too,
Speaker 6: that was weird. All right, very very cool. So where
Speaker 6: were we bake? That's right, And we're the worst thing
Speaker 6: that's happened to me, these two guys.
Speaker 5: We're getting past the gage.
Speaker 2: Well quickly, I just want to clarify. So you're saying
Speaker 2: the black mausoleum is not McKenzie's tomb. Exactly whose tomb is?
Speaker 5: It belongs to the Dundas family, that.
Speaker 2: Is So it's like so right, it's all over the
Speaker 2: internet like that they think it's the same thing. That's
Speaker 2: so interesting, Okay, yes, yeah.
Speaker 5: So you have the scoop right here.
Speaker 6: This is not the same thing, and yeah, it's it's
Speaker 6: just it's really interesting that there have been other tour
Speaker 6: companies coming by who have rewritten history, even even as
Speaker 6: it's even if it's happening, it's being rewritten.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, let's be honest, Google could rewrite history
Speaker 2: if they sit, They could completely change when people believe,
Speaker 2: way faster than the classes of America, right, all the all.
Speaker 1: Absolutely exactly.
Speaker 6: Yes, So yeah, it's just really and I've just cast
Speaker 6: my mind back. This is what I love about the
Speaker 6: tour is the things that it teaches us about ourselves,
Speaker 6: what it is to be human in society and culture.
Speaker 5: Things like this, we.
Speaker 6: Look back, who's to say that what we have now
Speaker 6: is our appreciation of history was not rewritten as it
Speaker 6: happened as well.
Speaker 5: I mean, like here we still have things that are.
Speaker 6: Like there's so much knowledge available, information available, at least
Speaker 6: you can if you have the mind to make an
Speaker 6: informed decision, whereas even back one hundred years, that's not really.
Speaker 5: You know, that's not really a thing that happens.
Speaker 6: If you think about the gold standards of things like
Speaker 6: the Encyclopedia Britannica, that's still one persons or like a
Speaker 6: collection of people's idea as to what happened. They've just
Speaker 6: made they put together a narrative for us, they said,
Speaker 6: here you go. So I find it really interesting that
Speaker 6: we still face these same problems, and it it puts
Speaker 6: into perspective our history as a storytellers, as history keepers,
Speaker 6: as humans.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I guess they used to say, what a
Speaker 2: history is written by the winners, and I think now
Speaker 2: history is written by the church engine, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the people who shout the louder, the loudest, that's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyway, did he rail the conversation?
Speaker 6: Remember where we are, So once you reach a gate
Speaker 6: to the prison, these two women start to come rounds
Speaker 6: and we and we get them out of the gradeyard.
Speaker 6: I'm not getting any kind of statement from them, right,
Speaker 6: you just have to take it on the authority of
Speaker 6: meet I guess, because there's no way I'm encouraging someone
Speaker 6: to sit down and write out their experience given what
Speaker 6: they've just been through. And there is nothing like we
Speaker 6: have trained them first aid, right, but there is there
Speaker 6: is very little in my first aid training that can't
Speaker 6: prepare one for something like this. And there's nothing quite
Speaker 6: like that sense of powerlessness on the unknown, and it
Speaker 6: happening extemporaneously. I mean, you say it's you can say
Speaker 6: it's psychosomatic. Well that's possible, but it's not me that
Speaker 6: suggested it, right, it's not a power of suggestion that's
Speaker 6: got there, not from me anyways, There's there was nothing
Speaker 6: in our tool literature that would encourage such a thing.
Speaker 6: It's yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just surprising and very very cool,
Speaker 6: I guess.
Speaker 1: And so they were okay in the end, because I'd
Speaker 1: be worried that that had an epileptic fad or.
Speaker 6: Something I have not seen anyone experienced like that before
Speaker 6: or since. Does not experience of epilepsy or seizures, and
Speaker 6: maybe it does something more more trainers have more experience.
Speaker 6: But once they're outside, they find there was no gnashing
Speaker 6: of the teeth, there was no they yeah, and they
Speaker 6: walked out of the graveyard. So to my knowledge, they
Speaker 6: had an experience and left right having had quite an experience,
Speaker 6: but they left physics.
Speaker 1: Does it seem like all of the paranormal activity cases
Speaker 1: or experiences that people have had are attributed to George
Speaker 1: Bloody mackenzie or are there other reputed posts on the grounds?
Speaker 5: I mean there are there are. There are occasionally infrequently
Speaker 5: sightings of various things like like the new typical spectral
Speaker 5: white lady going around the place, and children as well.
Speaker 5: They're not so common. They're not so common. This stuff
Speaker 5: largely happens inside of this one particular tumb at this point.
Speaker 2: So why is it called the black Mausoleum.
Speaker 6: It's so because I wasn't there to start. I can
Speaker 6: give you a hearsay for that one. It allegedly starts
Speaker 6: before the tours even begin, like just because of what
Speaker 6: was going on when you when you get there, come
Speaker 6: on a tour, when you get to stand outside of
Speaker 6: it too, it's immediately obvious it is a small dark
Speaker 6: to a small dark mausoleum.
Speaker 5: It's not particularly large. It will hold maybe one hundred
Speaker 5: something people if you're pushed in. It's about it the light,
Speaker 5: Like it's something about the quality of the light in there.
Speaker 5: It just it just seems like dark. I describe if
Speaker 5: you better than that, I'm afraid it just seems.
Speaker 2: Do you actually go inside it during the tours, yes.
Speaker 6: Sir, indeed, yeah, okay, So that's how that's how we
Speaker 6: experience it, and that's how we know that the stuff
Speaker 6: that happens in this click of the Black Mausoleum happens
Speaker 6: not tours. We do our best to keep accounts acknowledgments
Speaker 6: of also all the stuff that happens within and around it.
Speaker 1: So you say sorry, didn't you say to to us
Speaker 1: just when we were communicating with you? Well, to begin with,
Speaker 1: you said that there have been over five hundred documented
Speaker 1: cases or experience.
Speaker 5: So it's curious.
Speaker 6: I mean, that's an easy number to claim. The answer
Speaker 6: is there have been substantially more than that. We were
Speaker 6: claiming over four hundred shortly after I started being a
Speaker 6: tour guide, and that was over ten years ago, So
Speaker 6: for at least eight years we've had a well and
Speaker 6: excess of that.
Speaker 2: How many tours do you run a week At the moment, we.
Speaker 5: Run about five a night.
Speaker 6: One of those does not go through the graveyard, though
Speaker 6: it goes specifically through the south Bridge bolts themselves got it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but the three out of three of the five
Speaker 5: of them end up inside is Black mausoleum.
Speaker 6: And like, I wish we could claim a higher rate
Speaker 6: than this of violent attacks, but in fact, I don't
Speaker 6: think we'd be able to get it past our health
Speaker 6: and safety.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want anybody to get hurt, I mean,
Speaker 2: but I mean, you're doing what thirty five a week
Speaker 2: times fifty two, that's a lot tour. How many people
Speaker 2: go on a tour?
Speaker 6: Oh, so the current tour cap set where the council
Speaker 6: is thirty five, and we'll run with a minimum of
Speaker 6: a roundabout sort of somewhere between two and eight, depending
Speaker 6: on the composition of the group and the time of
Speaker 6: the tour.
Speaker 2: Interesting, So, I know this is your primary job is
Speaker 2: to take people on tours, not to do statistics. But
Speaker 2: I was curious, do you keep track of how many
Speaker 2: people report versus how many don't report having incidents to
Speaker 2: get some sort of statistical information about what percentage people
Speaker 2: experience weird things.
Speaker 6: The answer is that we unfortunately have nothing formal in place,
Speaker 6: so we have a book of accounts at the end
Speaker 6: of people are welcome to come and fill out. Of
Speaker 6: course they're welcome to do so, and if somebody experiences
Speaker 6: something we will endeavor. We will encourage them to fill
Speaker 6: this book out with their experience sign date. It give
Speaker 6: us some way of contact in them, so that so
Speaker 6: that everyone knows that we're not cheating.
Speaker 5: Sure, because it's important to us. Did it comes of
Speaker 5: somebody else?
Speaker 6: But if we can make if we can make this
Speaker 6: stuff up I'm pretty sure we would be hilarious.
Speaker 2: But you know, I mean, to be fair, it's injuries
Speaker 2: and and you've got pictures of people, you know, posting
Speaker 2: scratches in what looked like stuff. So yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: for all the I mean, it's interesting from a paranormal perspective,
Speaker 2: but somebody they're being injured, right, So yeah, it's curious
Speaker 2: and somewhat scary.
Speaker 6: So there are a bunch of ways that we find
Speaker 6: it tricky, because so we have this book as a
Speaker 6: way of keeping track of things. Formally, quite often the
Speaker 6: guides will be approached by people after the tour of
Speaker 6: people who say, hey, this really weird thing happened, or hey,
Speaker 6: look at these scratches, or I felt this cold sensation
Speaker 6: or I felt like I was being pushed or choked
Speaker 6: or punched or kicked, or like a burning sensation or scratching.
Speaker 5: Whatever, whatever it is, right, whole bunch of things.
Speaker 6: And oftentimes that's just the words in the ear of
Speaker 6: the guide at the end, and we we tell each other.
Speaker 6: But because it's quite a solitary job, as you can imagine,
Speaker 6: we have a little a little office in the in
Speaker 6: the graveyard full of full of the books, of actually
Speaker 6: pretty cool stuff I think, as well as well as
Speaker 6: some nonsense like old scary movies.
Speaker 1: We love that we've got to come and visit.
Speaker 2: Yeah along, well.
Speaker 5: Yeah it'd be great one day.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I mean, like the actual communication between us
Speaker 6: doesn't doesn't happen very much. We we've been doing it
Speaker 6: for so long and these things happened so regularly that
Speaker 6: we just just don't pass the information on.
Speaker 2: What about your guides themselves, I mean, you guys seems
Speaker 2: like you would be exposed to this more than anybody
Speaker 2: if you guys had any trouble.
Speaker 6: We have a bunch of trouble happening, right, So, I
Speaker 6: mean in terms of our experience there, like some of
Speaker 6: my colleagues have been just gets randomly strangled by their scars.
Speaker 6: They somehow when the when the gate was being replaced
Speaker 6: and there was a different kind of door and lock
Speaker 6: and there two of them got locked in somehow from
Speaker 6: the gate the locks on the outside. Right, we get
Speaker 6: show my scars, like I've walked out of there with
Speaker 6: these three gouges down my chest, experienced the cold spots.
Speaker 6: Well it's the guy's experience something. They'll just feel really
Speaker 6: really uncomfortable but we just take it in our stride.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's part part of the job is what
Speaker 6: keeps us coming back. You're either like, if you don't
Speaker 6: like it, don't do the job.
Speaker 2: Right. Have you had anybody quit out of fear?
Speaker 5: No? No is the answer.
Speaker 2: It's almost like it's self selecting you. People wouldn't take
Speaker 2: the job if they're afraid, right, I.
Speaker 6: Mean, yeah, exactly, yes. I mean you've got to be
Speaker 6: a bit pretty quirky. I'm curious to take this kind
Speaker 6: of thing up. The bits where we do have concerns
Speaker 6: is that previously, up until gosh, I don't you know,
Speaker 6: for an official picku, I'm going to say ten years
Speaker 6: for arguments, say ten years ago. So the gates were
Speaker 6: closed at night the graveyard itself, which meant it was
Speaker 6: relatively safe. Now the council refuses to have the gates close.
Speaker 6: What that means is that sometimes they're unfortunately repurposed for
Speaker 6: illegal activities. And also Edinburgh has, okay, it has a
Speaker 6: homeless problems, as many many cities and places do, and
Speaker 6: the tombs, when they're left open and thride an opportunity
Speaker 6: for someone who really needs some kind of shelter to
Speaker 6: get a break, and sometimes that comes with a commensurate
Speaker 6: with mental health concerns, And oftentimes the most dangerous thing
Speaker 6: in the graveyard is not what lies in the prison
Speaker 6: itself in the Black Marsleum, but comes from the human factor.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, you do you so? Uh sorry, caring you
Speaker 2: go sorry.
Speaker 5: If you have a question.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I mean we're kind of coming to drawing
Speaker 1: to a close soon, So I was just going to
Speaker 1: ask a change topic just slightly, just to say that
Speaker 1: has got quite a few famous residents, but one of
Speaker 1: the most famous residents is a dog. So could you
Speaker 1: toss a little bit about the break fries Bobby? And
Speaker 1: is he believed to haunt the cemetery?
Speaker 5: Oh my goodness, So do you know what The answer is? No,
Speaker 5: not until recently when a tour company started telling people
Speaker 5: that he was.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so's he's not believed to haunt the place.
Speaker 6: My manager is an extraordinary woman instrument. She does so
Speaker 6: much of the primary research. It's so interesting, especially given
Speaker 6: I think your chat with Alison last time round and
Speaker 6: people just kind of reading blogs and stuff like this
Speaker 6: and taking things at face value. She and she goes
Speaker 6: right and she loves nothing more than getting into the
Speaker 6: archives and pulling out bundles of stuff that are hundreds
Speaker 6: of years old and no one's looked at since they
Speaker 6: were first written or done up in a beautiful little ribbon,
Speaker 6: and opening them up and finding out what people thought
Speaker 6: in the seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 5: Things like this. Really interesting stuff comes out of it.
Speaker 6: And one of the things she's been looking up researching
Speaker 6: is the history of Bobby now Greyfriars. Bobby used to
Speaker 6: be the reason why Grayfriars was famous, and people traveled
Speaker 6: on a near pilgrimage from the entire globe to pay
Speaker 6: their respects to him. So if you come in through
Speaker 6: the main gate of Grayfriars, it's a little cobbled entrance,
Speaker 6: a little bit of tarmac, and then directly between you
Speaker 6: and the kirk is it opens up. The graveyard spreads
Speaker 6: out to the sides, but you're directly in front of you.
Speaker 6: In between you and the kirk is a shiny new
Speaker 6: headstone dedicated to Bobby, erected by the American Dog Love
Speaker 6: and Dog Lovers, I think American Lovers and Bobby's Society,
Speaker 6: something like this, I forget. So it's placed there, He's
Speaker 6: not buried there, it's been believed that he was buried
Speaker 6: just outside the walls in the streets, because dogs are
Speaker 6: still not allowed in a human graveyard.
Speaker 5: Man, I think the answers reasons for that are are
Speaker 5: pretty self evident.
Speaker 2: It's because nobody's to walk them.
Speaker 5: Is that I love the bones so in there. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So, in fact, the documentation, like the original document of
Speaker 6: the newspaper ports things like this, showed that he was
Speaker 6: buried in a flower pot, a flower bed, sorry, and
Speaker 6: a flower bed somewhere very close to that side of
Speaker 6: the graveyard. So it's highly likely that he in fact existed.
Speaker 6: He was noted in the papers before his death, before
Speaker 6: he got super famous, and it's not that he was. Yeah,
Speaker 6: he was buried in a flower bed near the church.
Speaker 2: What was he famous for?
Speaker 6: So he was famous for a living on his master's
Speaker 6: grave for fourteen years the premises his master turns up.
Speaker 5: And let me preface it with this.
Speaker 6: There are as many different stories of Bobby as there
Speaker 6: are people writing stories.
Speaker 5: About Bobby, right.
Speaker 1: There are a few stories like this across the globe too,
Speaker 1: of similar stories.
Speaker 5: Yeah indeed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but I mean it's just been like everybody who
Speaker 6: has a book to write about Bobby comes out with
Speaker 6: a new set of facts and then rewrites the story
Speaker 6: of Bobby. So in one version he's owned by a
Speaker 6: policeman and another version he's owned by a shepherd.
Speaker 5: Is it's a bit all over the shop.
Speaker 6: So yeah, Like the story is that he lives in
Speaker 6: his master's grave for fourteen years, such as his loyalty
Speaker 6: and devotion from a puppy through to very very old age,
Speaker 6: and the people of Edinburgh they love him, for sure,
Speaker 6: they absolutely love him. The legend goes that he's given
Speaker 6: the keys to the city for his loyalty and devotion,
Speaker 6: never mind that he's got no posable thumb to use
Speaker 6: it with. Also, apparently that means we gave the right
Speaker 6: to vote to a dog, like some considerable time before
Speaker 6: we would give it to a woman.
Speaker 5: It's really pe juliar.
Speaker 1: So this was the nineteenth century when he died.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's one of these dogs that's alleged to have
Speaker 2: come to the grave of his master after his master dies, stays.
Speaker 6: There, right, he's so loyal and devoted exactly, Yes, yes,
Speaker 6: I mean it is like various different stories say that
Speaker 6: maybe he was replaced at some point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like Skippy the Kangaroo.
Speaker 2: Ah, yes, yes, I'm especially fine to that. There's an
Speaker 2: incident a variant of this in the Discworld series by
Speaker 2: Terry Pratchett, where basically the whole thing is the dog's
Speaker 2: loyal but he's not that loyal, but they put the
Speaker 2: tombstone down on his tail so he can't leave.
Speaker 1: That explained. It's a charming story anyway.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so he used me where the graveyard is famous
Speaker 6: and now, which turns out that the bulk of tourism
Speaker 6: is because.
Speaker 5: Of Harry Potter.
Speaker 2: Harry Potter, Yeah indeed, yeah, why why.
Speaker 5: So I sent a bit of a Harry Potter.
Speaker 2: Fan in you a bit, a bit a bit. Just
Speaker 2: don't muggle me. I'm just saying.
Speaker 5: So.
Speaker 6: The behind the school, behind the Coveinages prison, the portion
Speaker 6: of the graveyard is a large castle like school called
Speaker 6: Harriet's Believes, been inspiration for Hogwarts round in the rear,
Speaker 6: the westernmost portion of the graveyard lies the tomb of Sorry,
Speaker 6: the headstone and burial place of he should not be.
Speaker 5: Named Thomas Riddle. There we go. Really wow, Moody is
Speaker 5: also in.
Speaker 6: There, somewhere along the flodden wall. William McGonagall, officially the
Speaker 6: world's worst poet he is also got a bath from there,
Speaker 6: along with a piece of his extraordinary poetry that you'll
Speaker 6: never get out of your brain once you've read it.
Speaker 2: Wow. So does the Hogwarts Express have a stop at Edinburgh.
Speaker 5: That I do not know?
Speaker 1: Gosh, it's famous for lots of different reasons.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, indeed, so can I bring us to this?
Speaker 5: So earlier on you asked about skepticism in your skepticisms
Speaker 5: in your name here as well. I find it very interesting.
Speaker 5: So for example this, people often ask me if I
Speaker 5: believe in.
Speaker 6: A paranormal, in ghosts, things like this, especially given the
Speaker 6: nature of what I do, and I find it a
Speaker 6: tricky question to answer.
Speaker 5: What I've observed is this that.
Speaker 6: When people experience something, either in the south Bridgeables or
Speaker 6: in the Black Mausoleum inside of this prison area, they
Speaker 6: really experienced something. What you attribute it to is entirely
Speaker 6: like a separate matter. They really experienced something. And I
Speaker 6: think people can be remarkably unkind and disingenuous when they
Speaker 6: say to people, well, you're talking nonsense, because there's no
Speaker 6: such things, so it must be in your head, right,
Speaker 6: These people have genuinely experienced something. These people were making
Speaker 6: no effort to find out what that experience was, and
Speaker 6: no effort to find out what the mechanism behind it is.
Speaker 6: Really dismissive, I think, is what I'm looking for and
Speaker 6: what happens people when they have their belief systems challenged,
Speaker 6: and when they have their experience dismissed. We'll lose a
Speaker 6: little piece of ourselves in the process, lose our sense
Speaker 6: of self when we feel diminished like that, and it
Speaker 6: immediately gets our backup right immediately. It just creates some distance.
Speaker 6: People get all hostile about it, and I think, like
Speaker 6: the guy I've been studying, this wonderful hypnotist from the
Speaker 6: last century, Dave Dobson, fascinating man. Here's what a wonderful
Speaker 6: way of talking about belief systems. He says, you can
Speaker 6: tell a belief system, but when you bump up against it,
Speaker 6: I think a courser experience. If anyone who's paid attention
Speaker 6: outside of themselves will appreciate that sentiment, Especially if you're
Speaker 6: in the business of talking to people about the paranormal.
Speaker 5: And like that, people just clamp down and stuff. The
Speaker 5: same thing goes for.
Speaker 6: People from the other side, people who are believers when
Speaker 6: they experience something weird in these places and they say, oh,
Speaker 6: it's a ghost or para poulter geist or whatever. They're
Speaker 6: blaming it on right, without any notion of the mechanism
Speaker 6: of how it happens, without any any evidence, and that's
Speaker 6: what's happening.
Speaker 5: Does that make sense to you?
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like if they've got sprens of a table here,
Speaker 6: then then all they've done is just again stated a
Speaker 6: belief system and they've asked everybody else to take it
Speaker 6: on faith, and like it might still be something truly
Speaker 6: bizarre and paranormal. But now we have no room for
Speaker 6: a discussion because we've got two groups of people who
Speaker 6: are just stating how they feel about something and they believes,
Speaker 6: and all this rich space in the middle for discussion. Like,
Speaker 6: from what I appreciate, I think might've listened to your
Speaker 6: right that you're doing your best to inhabit right there
Speaker 6: in the middle. That for me is lost when these
Speaker 6: two camps of people just come straight at it with
Speaker 6: with the blanket statement it was this without any any
Speaker 6: any foundation to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've set up shopping a mindfield. It's not really why.
Speaker 5: I think it's a great place to be.
Speaker 6: I think like when did feel uncomfortable end up being
Speaker 6: so bad, right, Like, it's going to be uncomfortable if
Speaker 6: you don't know stuff people. I think we've already discussed
Speaker 6: this that people love the easy narrative. It seems so
Speaker 6: humand because it's tricky for us to hold these competing
Speaker 6: notions in our body and in our mind.
Speaker 5: But that's that's where real value is. That's where we
Speaker 5: get to learn new stuff.
Speaker 6: That's where progress and growth are, right, And it's going
Speaker 6: to feel uncomfortable, of course it is. Yeah, that we
Speaker 6: certainly nature progress and growth.
Speaker 2: It's the whole thing that we call it the search
Speaker 2: for cognitive closure. Right you want to like put a
Speaker 2: put a button on it, or you just sort I
Speaker 2: know it's this and I'm comfortable, but I you know,
Speaker 2: maybe you know there's there's. It's tough because so much
Speaker 2: of the human experience is dependent on our psycho and
Speaker 2: we're not very good at evaluating what's real and what's
Speaker 2: not real. So you know, our goal is yeah, so
Speaker 2: our goal is to try to like see what science
Speaker 2: can tell us, but we're really interested in the human experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, we love the stories, we love folklore and history,
Speaker 1: and we just try to keep open minds and.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there about it.
Speaker 1: We certainly enjoyed hearing the stories you've been telling us
Speaker 1: and about your own experiences as well, and it's just
Speaker 1: such an incredible place.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I I don't know. I have to
Speaker 2: write the intro and the outro to this, and it's like,
Speaker 2: I part of me says, well, you know, there's a
Speaker 2: Wiseman once told me that the priming one receives prior
Speaker 2: to experiencing something can have a huge impact on how
Speaker 2: one perceives it. Right. That Wiseman was Richard Wiseman. But
Speaker 2: the point is, you know, looking at psychology and all
Speaker 2: these other things, you know, it's hard to say, but
Speaker 2: you've got real people experiencing really strange things and it's, uh,
Speaker 2: it's it's interesting and regardless. I mean, we could say,
Speaker 2: oh no, it's it's all about priming, or oh no,
Speaker 2: these people are misinterpreting it, but the people are still
Speaker 2: experiencing something unusual and weird, and we wanted to talk
Speaker 2: about it. And we really appreciate your time.
Speaker 5: Very welcome, Thanks very much for having me on. It's
Speaker 5: been really good. I should probably put a plug in
Speaker 5: there about Hawaii parakon I will be there given some
Speaker 5: talks talking about Mackenzie, Poltry guys talking about the attacks
Speaker 5: with a list of them, and.
Speaker 2: Oh no, your job makes you go to Hawaii, how terrible.
Speaker 1: Jealous? We do have a final question. We always like
Speaker 1: to ask our guests, what's your favorite monster?
Speaker 7: This?
Speaker 5: This is an interesting question for me and I I
Speaker 5: don't know if this it's a bit too high brow.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure here it goes right. So every night
Speaker 5: I've been working, I've been walking past Mackenzie's tomb McKenzie's
Speaker 5: too unless you get real up close to it. And
Speaker 5: in Edinburgh during.
Speaker 6: The winter months it is dark for much of a day,
Speaker 6: for like four hours of a day. There's some sun
Speaker 6: through the clouds if that, and the rest of the
Speaker 6: time it's pitch black, and Mackenzie's tomb just swallows up
Speaker 6: the light swallows it up, and it's imposing. If you
Speaker 6: look at the Hawaiian paracn website you'll see a picture
Speaker 6: of it there right as Mackenzie's too. And when I
Speaker 6: walk past it. For years, I've had the habit of
Speaker 6: asking myself, I wonder, I wonder what would scare me
Speaker 6: inside of there? I wonder what that experience inside of
Speaker 6: there would be that would genuinely get to me and
Speaker 6: really free me out. And my mind just brings something
Speaker 6: up right, whether it's an image of something or a
Speaker 6: little video or eyes or I can a sound or
Speaker 6: some kind of experience, or just a sense inside of
Speaker 6: me of something there, it really gets to me.
Speaker 5: And it's this.
Speaker 6: I think it's this nature of I'm a firm believer
Speaker 6: in that all hypnosis are self hypnosis. I think a
Speaker 6: couple of cursory thought experiments would demonstrate that to be accurate.
Speaker 6: And people when they ask themselves some questions like this,
Speaker 6: and maybe they're not even aware of asking themselves this,
Speaker 6: it conjures up exactly the kind of stuff that's going
Speaker 6: to get to them. And I think for me, like this,
Speaker 6: this custom made monster that I couldn't possibly explain to
Speaker 6: you and would almost certainly not be the same kind
Speaker 6: of monster that would inhabit inside somewhere for you to
Speaker 6: ask yourselves the same question.
Speaker 5: This.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like this, this is a bit that really gets me.
Speaker 6: And it's it's quite it's quite thrilling, it's quite exciting
Speaker 6: to titillate oneself like that.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting.
Speaker 1: This has been so much fun hearing about this story.
Speaker 2: My god, I wish we could take a tour, right Karen,
Speaker 2: I mean like yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, as I said one day someday.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got to get a passport.
Speaker 1: You don't have a passport.
Speaker 2: I'm a typical American. I don't go anywhere.
Speaker 1: Anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, with the Navy, that's not really the same as it, right.
Speaker 1: It still need a possible that you mean you need
Speaker 1: to renew.
Speaker 2: It or you know, they give you a military passport.
Speaker 2: It's totally different. Yeah, you go, Yeah, you get a
Speaker 2: Navy passport. When you leave the Navy, you have to
Speaker 2: forfeit it. So I don't have a civilian passport. So
Speaker 2: not important. I don't have the money to travel right
Speaker 2: now anyway, but I would love to come to the
Speaker 2: UK and travel, make it to Scotland, Ireland, the Al
Speaker 2: of Sky, the Isle of Man. I've got so many
Speaker 2: paranormal oriented sites I want to go see.
Speaker 5: So coming on to tours, my guest, both of you.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, we totally will. Yeah, maybe we'll crowd fund.
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you so much for your time and absolutely
Speaker 1: short notice as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you both. It's it's been real nice.
Speaker 2: You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
Speaker 4: I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 2: You just heard an interview with City of the Dead
Speaker 2: tour guide Fred Fogerty. As I mentioned in the introduction,
Speaker 2: Fred Carrot and I continued our discussion via email after
Speaker 2: we ran out of time for the full set of
Speaker 2: questions that we'd prepared. It wouldn't be Monster Talk if
Speaker 2: we didn't at least remind folks of our stance on
Speaker 2: ghost phenomena that when you're faced with potential paranormal situations,
Speaker 2: we believe you should look at the individual aspects and
Speaker 2: not group everything together to explain it as a haunting.
Speaker 2: The skeptic of me always wants to know what are
Speaker 2: the testable, falsifiable aspects of such stories. So, thinking about this,
Speaker 2: I wrote Fred with a few questions. The first thing
Speaker 2: I noticed was that online there's many many versions of
Speaker 2: the story about the homeless guy breaking into Mackenzie's tomb.
Speaker 2: What I wanted to know was did this event really happen,
Speaker 2: and if so, what evidence do we have because at
Speaker 2: this point it has definitely been corrupted by word of
Speaker 2: mouth retelling. So first, here's Fred's response about that incident.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to attempt Fred's accent the man Graham.
Speaker 2: He exists. The event really happened, though not exactly as
Speaker 2: described on our tours and almost guaranteed to be very
Speaker 2: different to any other tour company's efforts. Currently, ghost tours
Speaker 2: is very competitive in Edinburgh and companies are keen to
Speaker 2: carve out their niche and justify how come they're not
Speaker 2: going into the prison itself.
Speaker 5: I know he exists.
Speaker 2: He came to one of our tours and enjoyed it thoroughly,
Speaker 2: and I met him at the end in quizd him
Speaker 2: on the actual events. Since the police were called, I'm
Speaker 2: assuming there would be a police record of it, though
Speaker 2: I don't know how much is or was recorded. The
Speaker 2: date the homeless guy was said to have broken into
Speaker 2: Mackenzie's tomb as nineteen ninety eight, as there's been quite
Speaker 2: a number of homeless people seeking refuge in various tombs
Speaker 2: and Greatfriars, and the police assigned to the case might
Speaker 2: not have specifically recorded or even known which tomb it was.
Speaker 2: I don't know how easy it would be to find
Speaker 2: the specific record of it with the police themselves. Fred
Speaker 2: did link to another ghost investigation site which was allowed
Speaker 2: to go into Mackenzie's tomb. We can't post those photos,
Speaker 2: but I'll put a link to the article in the
Speaker 2: show notes and you can scroll down to the photos
Speaker 2: and read the notes yourself. It certainly does look as
Speaker 2: though there are a lot of old bones under Mackenzie's coffin,
Speaker 2: and the flooring around it was perilous, but may have
Speaker 2: since been repaired. Those photos are from quite a while back,
Speaker 2: much closer to the time of the original break in story.
Speaker 2: The grating has been replaced and is permanently closed, and
Speaker 2: no tours were allowed in Mackenzie's tomb. Fred wanted me
Speaker 2: to make it clear that while people call the accompanying
Speaker 2: phenomena of the Mackenzie poltergeist, this is not widely believed
Speaker 2: to be the ghost of Mackenzie by most ghost researchers,
Speaker 2: but rather a phenomena associated with this tomb. As time
Speaker 2: has passed, the stories have moved to the Black Mausoleum,
Speaker 2: which is also on the tour, and you actually go
Speaker 2: inside it on the tour. I think you'll find that
Speaker 2: there's variants of these stories surrounding the tours, but this
Speaker 2: is normal for lore of this type. The stories of
Speaker 2: tour participants passing out and having seizures is interesting to me.
Speaker 2: I have family members with epilepsy, and this doesn't sound
Speaker 2: like what I've seen, but it does sound familiar to
Speaker 2: me from my research into demon possession cases. Before you
Speaker 2: call me up and ask me to turn my skeptics car,
Speaker 2: I'm talking about the topic from a skeptical perspective. I
Speaker 2: was not there, and I didn't see what these people
Speaker 2: went through, but the symptoms do sound quite a bit
Speaker 2: like the stuff I've seen with Bob Larson's exorcist ministry,
Speaker 2: which I could only describe as elaborate role playing. I
Speaker 2: can't be sure that's what happened here. I wasn't there,
Speaker 2: and even if I had been, I'm not medically qualified
Speaker 2: to diagnose anyone. What I can say is that the
Speaker 2: phenomenal claims would make for an interesting skeptical investigation. It
Speaker 2: would be hard to test, I think, but the first
Speaker 2: thing that comes to mind would be to build some
Speaker 2: tour groups composed of volunteers who would let you photograph
Speaker 2: their arms and legs prior to the tour, and then
Speaker 2: video of the tour, and then afterwards see if anyone
Speaker 2: reports injuries that aren't captured on video or film. That's
Speaker 2: very rough thinking, and a good experiment would need a
Speaker 2: lot more design than that and a lot of prep work.
Speaker 2: I haven't had enough time to think about it, and
Speaker 2: I don't even know if anyone's interested in looking into
Speaker 2: this to that level. But it's very easy for skeptical
Speaker 2: people to say, oh, this is just a post talk
Speaker 2: rationalization of pre existing injuries as components of a haunting.
Speaker 2: But I think that falls into the kind of thinking
Speaker 2: which get skeptics accused of being armchair researchers. And I'd
Speaker 2: love to look at from a more statistical and practical
Speaker 2: approach and to see more about the natures of the injuries.
Speaker 2: Right this minute, that's financially impossible for caring to myself,
Speaker 2: but maybe some of our UK listeners can have a look.
Speaker 2: At any rate, it sounds like you'd have a fun
Speaker 2: and historically interesting tour of a fascinating site, and if
Speaker 2: thread's any indication, you'll certainly be entertained, even if you
Speaker 2: don't solve the mystery or encounter in any oddities. Monster
Speaker 2: Talk is an official podcast of Skeptic magazine. The views
Speaker 2: expressed on this show or those of myself and my guests,
Speaker 2: and don't necessarily reflect the opinions of Skeptic Magazine or
Speaker 2: the Skeptic Society.
Speaker 8: We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Each
Speaker 8: episode we strive to bring you the best in monster
Speaker 8: related content, with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into
Speaker 8: the conversation. If you enjoy Monster Talk, we now have
Speaker 8: a variety of ways to support the show, all with
Speaker 8: convenient links at monster talk dot org forge slash support.
Speaker 8: That's monster talk dot org forge slash Support. There we
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Speaker 7: Save the data for a colossal Psicon twenty eighteen. Bigger venue,
Speaker 7: biggest stars, bigger ideas, bigger fun, Las Vegas, October eighteenth
Speaker 7: to the twenty first, twenty eighteen. Sikon is already one
Speaker 7: of the planet's premiere skeptical conferences, where hundreds of critical
Speaker 7: thinkers come to Las Vegas, the City of Illusions, to
Speaker 7: hear from the leading lights of science and skepticism. For
Speaker 7: twenty eighteen, we want Sikon to be bigger than ever.
Speaker 7: We've even booked a bigger hotel. Come to Las Vegas
Speaker 7: at the Westgate Resort and Casino to see the brilliant
Speaker 7: and hilarious Stephen Frye on stage with Richard Dawkins, an
Speaker 7: opening night talk by Stephen Pinker on the ideas behind
Speaker 7: his new book Enlightenment Now the triumphant return of James
Speaker 7: the Amazing Randy, plus New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer,
Speaker 7: psychologist and mimetics expert Susan Blackmore, the Cybabe, Yvette Dontemnt,
Speaker 7: virologist and advocate for science based medicine, Paul Offert, and
Speaker 7: many many more, along with comic musician George Rubb serving
Speaker 7: as master of Ceremonies, a magic show from Banachek, author
Speaker 7: book signings, and of course a Halloween costume party. It's
Speaker 7: true conspiracy theorists, quax peddling, fake medicine, and the deniers
Speaker 7: of evolution, climate change, and vaccine science are bigger threats
Speaker 7: than ever. With saikon twenty eighteen, Let's show them that
Speaker 7: they have just met their match. We'll see you in
Speaker 7: Las Vegas. For more information and to book your tickets,
Speaker 7: visit csiconference dot org. That Psyconference dot org.
Speaker 2: Master talk theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys. As always,
Speaker 2: thanks for listing.
Speaker 9: Want to stay abreast of the latest from Skeptic magazine
Speaker 9: and the Skeptic Society. Want cutting edge skeptical articles delivered
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Speaker 2: To sign up right.
Speaker 6: We give them only the food, water, and shelter acquad
Speaker 6: just to really prolong this suffering and just to really
Speaker 6: drag it out so that as many people as possible
Speaker 6: can endure five months of this.
Speaker 2: So like one hogis for every five people that kind
Speaker 2: of thing that was terrible. Right, you've been listening to
Speaker 2: Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
Speaker 4: I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 2: You just heard an interview with City of the Dead
Speaker 2: tour guide Fred Fogerty. As I mentioned in the introduction,
Speaker 2: Fred Carrot and I continued our discussion via email after
Speaker 2: we ran out of time for the full set of
Speaker 2: questions that we'd prepared. It wouldn't be Monster Talk if
Speaker 2: we didn't at least remind folks of our stance on
Speaker 2: ghost phenomena that when you're faced with potential paranormal situations,
Speaker 2: we believe you should look at the end visual aspects
Speaker 2: and not group everything together to explain it as a haunting.
Speaker 2: The skeptic of me always wants to know what are
Speaker 2: the testable, falsifiable aspects of such stories. So, thinking about this,
Speaker 2: I wrote Fred with a few questions. The first thing
Speaker 2: I noticed was that online there's many many versions of
Speaker 2: the story about the homeless guy breaking into Mackenzie's tomb.
Speaker 2: What I wanted to know was did this event really
Speaker 2: happen and if so, what evidence do we have? Because
Speaker 2: this point has definitely been corrupted by word of mouth retelling.
Speaker 2: So first, here's Fred's response about that incident. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to attempt Fred's accent. The man's name is Graham.
Speaker 2: He exists. The event really happened, though not exactly as
Speaker 2: described on our tours, and almost guaranteed to be very
Speaker 2: different to any other tour company's efforts. Currently, ghost tours
Speaker 2: is very competitive in Edinburgh and companies are keen to
Speaker 2: carve out their niche and justify how come they're not
Speaker 2: going into the prison itself.
Speaker 5: I know he exists.
Speaker 2: He came to one of our tours and enjoyed it thoroughly,
Speaker 2: and I met him at the end in quisdom on
Speaker 2: the actual events. Since the police were called, I'm assuming
Speaker 2: there would be a police record of it, though I
Speaker 2: don't know how much is or was recorded. The date
Speaker 2: the homeless guy was said to have broken into Mackenzie's
Speaker 2: tomb as nineteen ninety eight, as there's been quite a
Speaker 2: number of homeless people seeking refuge in various tombs in Greyfriars,
Speaker 2: and the police assigned to the case might not have
Speaker 2: specifically recorded or even known which tomb it was. I
Speaker 2: don't know how easy it would be to find the
Speaker 2: specific record of it with the police themselves. Fred did
Speaker 2: link to another ghost investigation site which was allowed to
Speaker 2: go into Mackenzie's tomb. We can't post those photos, but
Speaker 2: I'll put a link to the article in the show
Speaker 2: notes and you can scroll down to the photos and
Speaker 2: read the notes yourself. It certainly does look as though
Speaker 2: there are a lot of old bones under Mackenzie's coffin,
Speaker 2: and the flooring around it was perilous but may have
Speaker 2: since been repaired. Those photos are from quite a while back,
Speaker 2: much closer to the time of the original break in story.
Speaker 2: The grating has been replaced, it is permanently closed and
Speaker 2: no tours are allowed in Mackenzie's tomb. Fred wanted me
Speaker 2: to make it clear that while people call the accompanying
Speaker 2: phenomena of the Mackenzie Poultergeist, this is not widely believe
Speaker 2: to be the ghost of Mackenzie and by most ghost researchers,
Speaker 2: but rather a phenomena associated with this tomb. As time
Speaker 2: has passed, the stories have moved to the Black Mausoleum,
Speaker 2: which is also on the tour, and you actually go
Speaker 2: inside it on the tour, I think you'll find that
Speaker 2: there's variants of these stories surrounding the tours, but this
Speaker 2: is normal for lore of this type. The stories of
Speaker 2: tour participants passing out and having seizures is interesting to me.
Speaker 2: I have family members with epilepsy, and this doesn't sound
Speaker 2: like what I've seen, but it does sound familiar to
Speaker 2: me from my research into demon possession cases. Before you
Speaker 2: call me up and ask me to turn in my
Speaker 2: skeptics card, I'm talking about the topic from a skeptical perspective.
Speaker 2: I was not there, and I didn't see what these
Speaker 2: people went through, but the symptoms do sound quite a
Speaker 2: bit like the stuff I've seen with Bob Larson's exorcist ministry,
Speaker 2: which I could only describe as elaborate role playing. I
Speaker 2: can't be sure that's what happened here. I wasn't there,
Speaker 2: and even if I had been, I'm not medically qualified
Speaker 2: to diagnose anyone. What I can say is that the
Speaker 2: phenomenal claims would make for an interesting skeptical investigation. It
Speaker 2: would be hard to test think, but the first thing
Speaker 2: that comes to mind would be to build some tour
Speaker 2: groups composed of volunteers who would let you photograph their
Speaker 2: arms and legs prior to the tour, and then video
Speaker 2: of the tour and then afterwards see if anyone reports
Speaker 2: injuries that aren't captured on video or film. That's very
Speaker 2: rough thinking, and a good experiment would need a lot
Speaker 2: more design than that and a lot of prep work.
Speaker 2: I haven't had enough time to think about it, and
Speaker 2: I don't even know if anyone's interested in looking into
Speaker 2: this to that level. But it's very easy for skeptical
Speaker 2: people to say, oh, this is just a post talk
Speaker 2: rationalization of pre existing injuries as components of a haunting.
Speaker 2: But I think that falls into the kind of thinking
Speaker 2: which gets skeptics accused of being armchair researchers. And I'd
Speaker 2: love to look at from a more statistical and practical
Speaker 2: approach and to see more about the natures of the injuries.
Speaker 2: Right this minute, that's financially impossible for caring to myself,
Speaker 2: but maybe some of our UK listeners can have a look.
Speaker 2: At any rate, it sounds like you'd have a fun
Speaker 2: and historically interesting tour of a fascinating site, and if
Speaker 2: thread's any indication, you'll certainly be entertained even if you
Speaker 2: don't solve the mystery. Orn't counter in Any Oddities is
Speaker 2: an official podcast of Skeptic Magazine. The views expressed on
Speaker 2: this show or those of myself and my guests, and
Speaker 2: don't necessarily reflect the opinions of Skeptic Magazine or the
Speaker 2: Skeptic Society.
Speaker 8: We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Each
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Speaker 8: related content, with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into
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Speaker 7: Save the data for a colossal Siicon twenty eighteen. Bigger venue,
Speaker 7: bigger stars, bigger ideas, bigger fun. Las Vegas, October eighteenth
Speaker 7: to the twenty first. Twenty eighteen Siicon is already one
Speaker 7: of the planet's premiere skeptical conferences, where hundreds of critical
Speaker 7: thinkers come to Las Vegas, the City of Illusions, to
Speaker 7: hear from the leading lights of science and skepticism. For
Speaker 7: twenty eighteen, we want Sichon to be bigger than ever.
Speaker 7: We've even booked a bigger hotel. Come to Las Vegas
Speaker 7: at the Westgate Resort and Casino to see the brilliant
Speaker 7: and hilarious Stephen Frye on stage with Richard Dawkins. An
Speaker 7: opening night talk by Stephen Piner on the ideas behind
Speaker 7: his new book, Enlightenment Now, the triumphant return of James,
Speaker 7: the Amazing Randy, plus New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer,
Speaker 7: psychologist and mimetics expert, Susan Blackmore, the Cybabe, Yvette Dontemont,
Speaker 7: virologist and advocate for science based medicine, Paul Offert, and
Speaker 7: many many more, along with comic musician George Rubb serving
Speaker 7: as master of ceremonies, a magic show from Banachek, author
Speaker 7: book signings, and of course a Halloween costume party. It's
Speaker 7: true conspiracy theorists, quax peddling, fake medicine, and the deniers
Speaker 7: of evolution, climate change, and vaccine science are bigger threat.
Speaker 7: It's than ever With psikon twenty eighteen, Let's show them
Speaker 7: that they have just met their match. We'll see you
Speaker 7: in Las Vegas. For more information and to book your tickets,
Speaker 7: visit csiconference dot org that Psyconference dot org.
Speaker 2: Monster Talk. The music is by Peat Stealing Monkeys. As always,
Speaker 2: thanks for listening.
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Speaker 6: We give them only the food, water, and shelter required,
Speaker 6: just to really prolong this suffering, just to really drag
Speaker 6: it out, so that as many people as possible can
Speaker 6: endure five months of this.
Speaker 2: So like one Hoggis for every five people, that kind
Speaker 2: of thing that was terrible, right,