In a modern commercially driven world, it can be easy to forget the history that surrounds us, and we can find ourselves relaxing in a pub or casually shopping opposite old sites of death and destruction like the Grassmarket Gallows. But this immersive night walk brings this tension between horror and reality, past and present to life. Pointing out marks on walls, aspects of architecture, and vents people normally just walk over without a second thought, it hauntingly reframes the Old Town of Edinburgh making quiet echoes of the past eerily loud.
Starting from the Milkman coffee shop on Cockburn Street, deserted at night from the usual tourist bustle, Cardiff and Miller’s Night Walk for Edinburgh offers a 50-minute unique journey with the help of a pair of headphones and an unsettling video which brings to life poetry, performance, strange sounds, murder mystery and historic tales. The video shows the exact setting you are walking in, adding instructions, chilling whispers such as a phantom laugh and actors including a reoccurring woman in a red coat. Memorably it visits two men in a pub discussing the ethics of murdering one’s brother, the video stopping for an extended moment to capture this intimate conversation. It later focuses on the iconic St Giles Cathedral altering reality through haunting choral music, contrasting this with realistic moments like an interaction with a crowd of rowdy drunk men.
Perhaps one of the most unsettling parts of this experience was the power the narrator had, as the disembodied voice reminded me I could leave at any time but the augmented reality created such an intense vision that even once the experience had finished and I started the walk back to my flat in Marchmont, I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that something was lurking in the shadows. Walking around a place you have been many times and realising you have never really seen it leaves an odd surreal feeling, alongside the realisation that in a city as old as Edinburgh there is an endless past we can never fully understand.
“edinburgh night sessions” by sonder3 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.