Original subtitles

There may be close to 450,000 bodies

buried in Greyfriars Graveyard,

most of them without coffins.

When you go in there, you are literally standing on

a mountain of dead people.

There's a legend about the king's advocate of Charles II,

George Mackenzie.

He condemned hundreds of men, women, and children to death.

He died in 1691.

But it's said that he haunts Greyfriars Graveyard

because of the atrocities he committed when he was alive.

In the 1700s, 1800s,

children from Heriot's School next door used to come into

the graveyard and dare each other

to go up to the door of the mausoleum.

INDISTINCT CHILDREN'S CHATTER

The question of whether I am a sceptic

or whether I wholeheartedly believe

the evidence put before me,

it's more difficult than you might think.

Inherently in me, I'm a complete sceptic.

And yet, just the things I've seen...

..the overwhelming volume of evidence that we collected...

..it's pretty hard to ignore.

I'd been living in Edinburgh for many years,

when I heard a story that changed my entire life.

This was a story that was told to me

by a caretaker at the church of Greyfriars Graveyard.

WIND WHIPS

It was a horrendous winter.

A homeless man came into the graveyard,

looking for somewhere to shelter.

HE COUGHS

And he spotted a large mausoleum...

..which was George Mackenzie's tomb.

And he fell through into a chamber underneath.

It was a huge pile of decomposed bodies.

A dog walker, who was taking his dog at night through the graveyard...

SCREAMING

DOG BARKS

Terrified, they both ran for it.

Seemed like that was the end of the incident, really.

But I began to hear rumours

there was something in the graveyard.

They had woken something up.

I moved to Edinburgh and did a degree in philosophy

and English literature.

I had a real passion for history, as well.

I love history. It's fascinating.

And slowly, I got to know the Edinburgh that I know now.

It's got a history.

This place stayed medieval long after the rest of Europe

had cleaned up its act.

So, it's not just a long and rich history,

but it's also an incredibly brutal and savage one, as well.

As soon as I heard the story of the homeless man,

I thought to myself,

"There's a real opportunity here.

"I could do something in this graveyard with this story."

I decided to set up a ghost tour company.

We hired four or five guides

who we thought would be good at what they did.

However, it soon transpired

that we didn't have to make up ghost stories.

After a few weeks, I was doing a tour.

I'm talking away.

And suddenly...

..this man, he just went down...

..onto the concrete floor.

A whole bunch of things went through my mind.

But the first ones had nothing to do with the supernatural.

It was like, "Should I call an ambulance"?

He went down like somebody had hit him with a baseball bat.

The rest of the tour was different.

The people inside the mausoleum were scared, properly scared.

And then, it happened again.

Two or three days later, exactly the same thing.

The guides themselves,

they struggled with the things that they were seeing, as well.

One of the guides came in and said to me,

"I saw the scratches appear on someone's face".

Like, they wasn't there,

and then, suddenly they were.

After that, his whole demeanour changed.

When he would finish a tour,

he wasn't happy and joking about it any more.

He was disturbed by what he was doing.

The year was 1999,

and I had just started out on my first proper journalism job

at the Edinburgh Evening News.

And this is my big break.

I worked with a particularly brilliant news editor

who'd seen a placard on the street

advertising ghost tours.

And I think there was some kind of claim about attacks or,

you know, this kind of vengeful ghost.

And he'd come back and pulled me aside and said,

"I definitely think this would be a great piece.

"Why don't you go along and cover it,

"and write a feature on it?"

It's a difficult subject, isn't it?

Because people are open-minded sometimes.

Sometimes people are complete believers.

Sometimes people think it's a whole lot of guff.

But I was a journalist,

and I was going along there with an open mind.

The night that I went along to cover the tour for the paper,

you know, it was an Edinburgh winter's night.

So, it was cold, raining, a bit windy.

It's pitch-black.

But you did think, "What's around that corner"?

You know, sort of crumbling old buildings and things,

with all the stories behind it.

Part of the tour was to go down into this mausoleum.

And it was cold and damp.

It was very atmospheric.

And then, everyone came back out.

And Jan had locked it back up again.

And it was after then that a few people started saying

that they had felt something.

One woman said that she'd felt this kind of chill go through her.

Someone said that they felt someone grab them.

A woman also said that she felt quite unwell.

People were really, genuinely frightened.

They were very much of the opinion that something that

they couldn't explain had happened to them down in that mausoleum.

I went back to the office.

I wrote up the piece.

It got a really good position in the paper.

It was a big-selling paper at that time.

A lot of people read it.

And the fact that people were talking about their experiences

obviously resonated with other people who'd been in the graveyard.

This was the days before social media, so,

to kind of react to something you read in the paper

was quite a big thing.

PHONE RINGS

We'd got phone calls from people who'd had similar experiences,

MULTIPLE PHONES RINGING

People writing letters, people sending in photos,

people coming into the offices, into the reception,

and wanting to talk to me about their experiences.

There was a woman that showed,

it looked like a kind of burn mark was sort of around her neck,

that she said hadn't been there

before she'd gone into the mausoleum.

And then, she'd come out and felt this burning sensation.

Someone else sent in pictures of

a kind of hand-grasping mark on her wrist.

I didn't realise really how much

this story would grow arms and legs,

because there were people all over the world that would come

to Edinburgh and have this experience.

So, it was getting bigger and bigger, and bigger.

Now, to a somewhat puzzling story in Edinburgh -

where investigations are under way into a spate

of attacks in the city centre.

So far, they've been isolated to one small area,

but it seems there's little hope of finding the culprit.

Well, to explain everything,

we can cross live to the capital and our reporter, Martin Geissler.

Martin?

Over the last eight months,

49 separate paranormal experiences are reported to have taken place

in this graveyard - the most serious of which came just last week,

when a 28-year-old college lecturer from Edinburgh noticed

she suffered serious bruising to the side of her face.

In the beginning, we were just writing down the things

that had happened to people.

But when the cuts and the scratches,

and the bites became really severe, we started to record them,

and people would send us stuff.

This one I remember.

She began screaming that something was holding on to her,

and that she couldn't get away from it.

And then, the next day, we got that picture from her.

To begin with, I simply didn't believe it was true.

I didn't believe any of these things were happening.

But then, as the months went on,

my opinion began to shift.

When the weight of evidence became so huge that

I couldn't ignore it any longer,

I had to accept that, whatever this thing was,

I didn't have a good, rational explanation for it.

All I knew what it was doing,

and that was hurting people.

It's quite severe.

Yeah, that one particularly - that looks like, you know,

that's deep.

I thought, "How are we going to justify it to ourselves

"if it kills somebody"?

Poltergeist is a term. It just means "noisy spirit".

Most paranormal experiences are harmless.

It's very rare to be harmed in any way.

So, this is an unusual case.

The fact that the tomb was broken into does tie into

a long-running sort of theme, or trope in the paranormal

that there has to be some kind of trigger.

Why is there a disturbance?

Why do things start to happen?

It's because they're... well, in this instance,

a tomb was desecrated.

And what's more likely to anger or make a spirit unquiet

than their resting place disturbed?

And it's not just anyone's tomb.

It's this controversial figure in Scottish history,

Sir George Mackenzie, who was responsible for

the persecution of essentially the majority of Scottish

religious people for decades during the 1600s.

He was the lord advocate.

He was responsible for enforcing the King's laws in Scotland,

trying to interfere in the religion of Scotland.

Which meant that the people that would not agree were basically

treasonous and tried as such.

And the worst offenders were executed.

So, Mackenzie had blood on his hands.

I'm an investigator with the Scottish Society

for Psychical Research.

We investigate the paranormal in a scientific manner.

This one's fairly typical.

"On entering the mausoleum, I heard what can only describe

"as scraping steps to the right-hand side of me,

"though I was alone in the tomb.

"When I sat down, I took my jacket off.

"My mate asked me what the mark was on my neck.

"I looked in the mirror and saw

"what I can only describe as a red burn mark,

"like a big blotch.

"It looked like I had three fingermarks on my throat."

Not only is this quite a severe bruise,

but it's basically somewhere you'd presumably definitely notice,

if pressure was applied to your neck.

That seems to be really quite hard to explain.

However, as a responsible investigator,

I have to investigate things scientifically.

These might be psychosomatic.

Once primed to know that these sorts of things happen in this location,

essentially, you hypnotise yourself,

and your body creates these effects.

We know, from loads of psychological studies,

that expectancy can have a tremendous reality-warping effect.

The mind is extremely potent.

It has this ability to create physical sensations,

even physical injuries,

even though it's your mind over your own matter.

But if it is paranormal,

why would George McKenzie be attacking people?

I was fortunate enough to be able to rent

a flat in Candlemaker Row.

And it was overlooking Greyfriars Graveyard.

So, that became our office,

as well as where I lived.

At this point, I wanted to write a book

about the Mackenzie poltergeist.

I had all of this information.

I had collected all of these eyewitness accounts, photographs.

I pretty much had sole access to all of the information

about the Mackenzie poltergeist.

I was drawn to this thing.

It fascinated me.

I was making my living out of it.

I wanted to write about it. I wanted to study it.

I just couldn't stop.

But it didn't warrant the kind of scrutiny that I was giving it.

It seemed like the only person who couldn't see that was me.

After the initial feature,

the Mackenzie poltergeist story was proving really popular.

We're a newspaper, so we realised that we wanted

to not just report about what people were experiencing,

but do something more ourselves.

I chatted with the news editor,

and we were sort of throwing a few ideas around,

but thought that one of the kind of best things to do would be

to see whether we could get someone to agree to perform

an exorcism in the graveyard,

and kind of almost try and move the poltergeist on, as well,

because there were so many people talking about it that, actually,

we thought it would be, you know,

kind of the next chapter in the story.

It's quite an unusual thing to be asking someone,

even that does exorcisms, you know, to say,

"Can you come to this graveyard and, you know, try and

"sort out this poltergeist"?

So, the first person said, "Absolutely not".

You know, "It's just not something that I want to get involved in."

And then, I rang Colin Grant.

PHONE RINGS

Colin was a Christian spiritualist

and a minister in a local church, as well.

He was a warm, open-minded person,

and very highly regarded.

But Colin wasn't really sure.

He thought about it.

And he agreed to do it, because he thought it would help.

I don't think either of us realised the kind of impact

that it would have.

Claire Gardner approached me first

with the idea of doing an exorcism.

I wasn't particularly keen on the idea.

It was just this feeling with myself and among the guides that,

"Let's not rock the boat any more than we have".

But it wasn't really my place to say, "No, you can't do it".

And I actually went along.

The night of the exorcism,

it was dark, and it was cold, and it was drizzly.

I'd arranged to meet Susan, our photographer,

and Jan and Colin outside the gates.

Colin walked around the graveyard with his old, battered Bible

and some holy water and some candles,

working out where he wanted to work first,

and where he wanted to be.

And it was all just very understated.

You know, you wouldn't think that something life-changing

was about to happen.

He set out a kind of circle of candles...

..put a crucifix in the front,

and a smaller crucifix at the back.

I remember he sort of paced up and down,

and he was sort of chucking holy water in various places,

and reading from the Bible.

There was power in the quietness, I think.

You know, and I was kind of saying to him, "What can you see"?

And he was talking about all these spirits that were trapped,

and wanting him to free them.

It was a very intimate thing, I think, that we were watching,

of him releasing all these souls,

so there was a quietness to it.

LATIN PRAYER ECHOES

LATIN PRAYER CONTINUES

But then, once he'd finished this ritual,

he walked towards the mausoleum and got to the gate.

He staggered a bit.

We kind of all went, "Are you OK, Colin"?

And he said, "I'm absolutely not going down there.

"There's something too powerful for me.

"I don't want to interfere with that."

Obviously, he felt some powerful force that, you know,

even with his experience and with his belief,

he didn't feel that he wanted to take that on.

He said that he feared reprisals, if he started meddling.

Colin did seem really quite kind of wrung out,

did take a lot out of him.

His wife was waiting for him,

so, we kind of said our goodbyes and walking towards the gate.

And again, he staggered a bit.

Behind these gates was an open-air prison.

1,200 prisoners persecuted by Sir George Mackenzie

were kept in that prison.

Only 269 survived.

The human misery and suffering must have been terrible in here.

For spiritualists and spiritualist ministers,

they would view the situation as souls or spirits

being earthbound or trapped...

..like some kind of distilled black ink of human misery

that just sits there.

And people entering the mausoleum are like blotting paper.

They're absorbing these experiences

and taking parts of those experiences away.

From a psychological point of view,

once you start to believe or expect the paranormal,

and that's that cognitive expectation bias.

You start to interpret more and more as being paranormal.

Every time you hear a creak or a tap against the window,

you might start to feel dizzy.

You might start to feel sick.

It becomes paranormal.

I went home after the exorcism.

Obviously, I couldn't sleep.

I sort of sprinted into work the next day to write it all up.

When I had written up the exorcism,

we went through a lot of the photos that were taken from that night.

And the picture editor called me over and said,

"Oh, my God, come and have a look at one that we've got here.

"We just can't work it out."

I'd done a few jobs with Claire, and we worked well together.

And it was just another job, really.

Claire had to interview him, and I had to get a photo.

We got it all set up, got the candle.

And I did have a flash on.

And we kind of took a couple of different shots,

and things like that.

And I didn't develop the stuff until the next day.

We were going through the photos, searching them all,

and working on what we were going to use.

And then, this was when we blew up this one photo.

It kind of described everything - because you've got him,

you've got the candle, you've got the graveyards around him.

It was nicely lit.

And then, this was when we noticed

this shadow in the window.

I kept saying, "It can't be the flash",

because the flash wasn't pointed in that direction.

And, even if it was,

there had to have been something to cause the shadow.

So, I went back that day.

I checked out the window.

I checked the window sill. I checked the area around it.

There's no statue. There's no bust of a head,

or anything like that in that window.

And I went back to my editor and said,

"There is nothing there that could have caused that".

There's literally nothing there.

Who knows what that is?

You could imagine it's somebody peering out the window.

But this is a perfect example of,

just because you don't know what that is,

it does not mean it is unknown.

The story just keeps on going

because people want to believe.

The story continued to generate a lot of interest.

But then, I got a phone call.

And it was Colin's son on the phone.

And he rang and said,

"Colin's dead".

And, yeah, I just had a moment of,

you know, that moment of disbelief,

I think, when you get a call like that, saying, "What"?

You know, "What"?

And he said that he was doing a reading in his shop in Edinburgh,

and was nearing the end of it.

And apparently, he had said to the lady he was doing the reading for,

"I've got no good news left,

"only bad news".

And he had a heart attack and died.

You know, like, all I could think about was the time

that I'd last seen him at the churchyard,

and how he was slightly exhausted,

and how he'd talked so much about how that exorcism

had taken so much out of him.

And, yeah, I just thought, "God, that's just terrible".

And, you know... could the two be related?

When I found out Colin had died,

I-I was sad about that.

And this whole thing worried me,

because finally, somebody had died.

So, what might it do to us?

And it brought it home to some of the guides, especially,

that they were playing with fire.

And, one by one, in the 2-3 weeks after that,

all of the original guides said, "We're leaving".

It's happy just to cut and bite, and scratch you,

but don't push it.

Don't push it too far, because if you do...

..it's capable of so much more than that.

WOMAN REPORTS IN JAPANESE

Colin Grant's death really got the media's attention,

so now, we were getting attention not just from local media,

but from world media, as well.

We had crews coming from different parts of the world

and filming in the graveyard.

The poltergeist knocked out a couple of people.

It cut and scratched a few others.

But, you know, of course, it didn't do the tours any harm.

Everything it does is good for business

if it does something nasty -

which is one of the dichotomies about the Mackenzie poltergeist.

And so, we continued what we were doing.

The really interesting thing about this story of

the Mackenzie poltergeist is it's basically self-perpetuating.

You've got all these hundreds of people,

their skin coming out in scars and bruises,

and sometimes burns and blisters.

You've got the spiritualist minister Colin Grant sadly passing away,

and all of that becomes part of the myth, part of the story.

There has been exorcism attempts in Greyfriars over the years.

One in 1999 by Colin Grant.

He came in and performed an exorcism.

Allegedly a week later, he was doing a private reading

in his residence... bang, his heart stopped.

He dropped dead instantly.

I don't regard this as a particular mystery.

He was 66 years old.

There was a history of heart problems in the family.

The family don't regard it as a mystery.

Some of the cases which seems, on the face of it,

to have the most impressive evidence often have the biggest

question marks over them, in terms of motives.

And certainly, this case ticks a lot of boxes,

because it's a commercial enterprise.

For me personally, I still haven't made my mind up.

It could be paranormal.

And, as a paranormal investigator who's open to the possibility

of the paranormal, I would say,

"Let sleeping ghosts lie".

Because sometimes, you know,

unpleasant or unwelcome things can happen.

The story of the Mackenzie poltergeist may be

the equivalent of basically people

sticking their head in a wasp's nest and being stung.

You know, don't stick your head in a wasp's nest.

I thought, "I will not be intimidated by something

"that lives in a tomb".

And so, I was still writing a book about the McKenzie poltergeist.

In hindsight, we were just...

..we were ignoring what was right in front of us.

And then, it all came to a head

in the most horrendous way.

I was out, and I got a phone call.

"You'd better get back here right now."

I ran back to my house.

Firefighters were tackling the blaze.

And they eventually managed to put it out.

And I went in.

Everything, I mean, everything I possessed was gone.

I lost everything I'd ever gathered

on the poltergeist up to that point.

My computer was gone.

Two years' worth of notes on the Mackenzie poltergeist was gone.

The hard drive that I used to back up to, burned to a cinder.

Everything was gone.

And my home.

And yet, none of the other flats were touched.

Not even singed.

The one above me, the one below me, on either side - nothing.

It was simply my flat.

The firemen said it looked like a flash fire that had

just gone straight through and destroyed everything.

Insurance investigators looked at the place, as well.

They could not find a reason why the fire had started.

I could've chalked it up to coincidence.

And I still - there's a part of me that doesn't want to believe

it was anything other than...

..just a, yeah, coincidence.

Part of me does not want to believe that an entity got back at me

because I was too nosy about it.

But it certainly looks like that.

When the flat burned down,

I stopped being a tour guide myself,

cos I...my heart wasn't in it.

I started the tours because I'd heard reports

of something attacking people

in Greyfriars Graveyard.

I didn't expect to find anything real.

I've made peace with the fact that I'll never know

what I'm dealing with, not the full extent of it.

The Mackenzie poltergeist, for me, for over the last 20 years,

has simply been a succession of unanswered questions.

And so, in some way, I have given up asking.

I am now on the absolute other side of the world.

I live in Brisbane, in Australia, in Queensland -

so almost directly opposite.

Can't get me now.