The day I first arrived in Edinburgh two years ago, the mist hung low over the city. Castle Rock sat shrouded in a cloak of fog, and the spires of New College loomed eerily through the gloom. As an incoming English literature student, I was well aware of the city’s literary obsession with the gothic, ghosts, and the supernatural, and being greeted with this decidedly gothic wall of fog seemed like a fitting introduction.
All it takes is one twilight-lit wander through Greyfriars’s Kirkyard to understand this city’s obsession with hauntings. I’m sure many have heard the stories surrounding the infamous Black Mausoleum – the eerily secluded, gothic-looking structure nestled in the back of the kirkyard. Tales of terrifying hauntings and mysterious cuts and scrapes occurring around this building would make most think twice about entering the graveyard after dark.
Literature draws from life, and there’s plenty of opportunity for this in Edinburgh. During the 19th century, the Old Town was a rabbit warren of closes and wynds, a hotbed for criminal activity that has understandably sparked the imagination of many writers. The infamous murderers Burke and Hare have been inspiration for many novels and, in more recent years, writers have jumped on a trend of sinisterly feminist speculation about their wives’ involvement in the murders.
Perhaps the most famous book to be born of this gothic literary hub is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written by our very own newspaper alumnus, Robert Louis Stevenson. While his novel is set in London, Stevenson grew up and attended university in Edinburgh in the mid-to-late 19th century, a few decades after Burke and Hare’s reign of terror. It is not hard to see the inspiration for the gothic imagery and themes of this novella. Another novel based on the true and spooky history of the city is Kate Foster’s The Maiden, which draws on the tale of the White Lady of Corstorphine who supposedly murdered her husband. Like Stevenson, Foster is inspired by the city’s natural gothic allure and supernatural aura that inherently incites the imagination.
Whether you love or hate horror, it’s undeniable that the city of Edinburgh is a hotbed of gothic literary inspiration. The lofty tenements and shadowed wynds, Haar blowing in off the North Sea, and the unsavoury history of murders make the city the perfect figurative and literal breeding ground for ghosts and gothic monsters alike.
Illustration via Agatha Shepherd-Jones for The Student