Offsite Adventure - Stirling Ghostwalk

#Ghostwalk

Ghost walks in Stirling and surrounding cities are a popular tourist attractions and an entertaining way to discover and learn about the historical aspects of a city and it's very reasonably priced with an additional discount for being a student. 

The city of Stirling has a ghost tour that has been operating for over 20 years. Each group is led by our tour guide, the Happy Hangman, who is dressed and in character to provide ghoulish tales as you learn about the historic context of why the environment being explored is now considered haunted. Happy Hangman is crass, sarcastic, and funny! He tailors his tales for his audience so that everyone is included and understands what is being explained. 

The tour itself was quite beautiful - though I'm sure that the intention was meant to be creepy. Because the sun literally sets around 11pm in the summer in Scotland, the Auld Kirkyard graveyard where a majority of the tour took place did not have an eerie unidentified feeling to it, but rather an appreciative tour of art. The sun setting on gravestones cascading rainbows after a light rain storm could hardly be classified as spooky on the tour and our entire group seemed to share that mentality. 

The graveyard is filled with stories passed down from generation to generation. Such tales include eye witness accounts of souls battling Satan, luminescent and trapped spirits the locals see on certain holidays, and explanations of clash encounters with spirits. 

My personal favorite was about a woman named Mary Witherspoon whose grave was robbed and body stolen for the purpose of a profit to universities for their medical students. The grave robbers were arrested but never confessed to where her remains were. The arrest was also short lived for the robbers as one fled the country and the other was released because there was no evidence to prove their guilt. Even better!! The robber that fled returned back to Scotland 33 years later avoiding prosecution because of large financial accumulation and connections that ignored any of his wrong doing. It is said that Witherspoon still haunts Auld Kirkyard searching for her body. Many locals have sworn to seeing her - searching for her body. So many so that funds were set aside from local government to provide her with an "official" burial plot built decades after her death in and effort to provide her with a final resting place. The graveyard is said to sometimes have an overwhelming powerful smell of roses - proof that Lady Witherspoon is still searching for her body. 

Our tour group was quite large, meeting people from various walks. Studying abroad can be a realization of how big the world can be followed by the eerily conception of six degrees of separation. I met a couple that lived thirty minutes from where I currently am, a student that lives in the hometown I grew up in as a child, and someone who attended the middle school I grew up with in Texas. Who knew? :-) 

Not only did I have the opportunity to make friends extending past this trip but our Happy Hangman turned out to be quite the hidden resource as well. As the tour concluded and our group dispersed the local couple I met and myself stayed behind to talk to him about his ventures being a guide for such tours. We found him to be just as funny in person outside of character. Our 10 minute walk back to the bus stop ended up being an in depth tour of the city of Stirling - so in depth (almost 2 hours) that I missed the last bus back to the university. Conversation in between laughter and banter included things, that as American's we don't necessarily consider - like David (Happy Hangman) asking us to seriously rate our interpretation of his American accent that he's been practicing for almost 6 months. I don't think I consider people "practicing" an accent that comes naturally to us but behind closed doors, I have to confess that I've been trying out my Scottish conversation piece horribly so it was quite amusing when we received a glimpse of an American, Boston, New York, and Southern accent with a Scottish "twang" behind it. Or the fact that David was really, sincerely, placing an effort for the accent so that when he travels to the states, he can blend in. Personal stories of his ghostly encounters, his best crowds, impressing diplomatics, and how he is able to tailor his stories by reading crowds ended our night at almost 1a.m. (the tour is over at 9p by the way) Yet another solo encounter as an older student that I thoroughly enjoyed. If you want to see more about his services, you can visit Stirling Ghostwalk on his Facebook page. 

Happy Traveling!