Ghost Tour

by Arlene

A few weeks ago I went on a ghost tour of St Andrews. Don’t worry, it was a private tour with only the members of my household. We complied with all COVID-19 restrictions, and since it was all outside, we were very safe. If you are in St Andrews, I would recommend it as a fun way to see the town.

I was excited. According to the website, “St Andrews has one of the highest concentrations of paranormal activity you will find anywhere”. Okay. The website also claims that there are “…over 200 haunted locations in St Andrews and over 400 ghosts”. Over 400 ghosts! For only £14 per person, this sounds like a bargain. I was beyond excited.

I should say now, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I don’t believe in ghosts. To start with, the Population Reference Bureau estimate that around 107 billion people have ever lived. If only 1% of those people decide to hang around as a ghost, that would mean that a huge 1,070,000,000 (one billion, seventy million) ghosts are kicking about at any given time. Since there are 7 billion people alive on the planet now, that’s one ghost for every group of seven people. Think about that. It certainly makes you think hard about gathering in groups of 6 or more. Are there rules about one of the people in your social bubble being a ghost? Probably.

Seriously though, considering that there are large areas of the planet that are still uninhabited, it is unlikely there will be ghosts in those areas. Logically, the concentration of ghosts will be higher in populated areas, and following that logic there will be more ghosts in areas that have been populated for a longer period of time. St Andrews is perfect! Those 400 ghosts seem likely now.

What this means is that it is fairly likely that we have ghosts around us most of the time. We are, in fact, spending most of our days walking through a kind of ghost soup, and I just don’t buy it. It may explain why I’m cold most of the time, but that could just be because I live in Scotland.

I think my main reservation about accepting the existence of ghosts though, is that you don’t get any modern ones, and that seems unlikely. Did spending your afterlife as a ghostly apparition suddenly become unfashionable after the 1940s? I know that the world changed in many ways after the second world war, but is that really one of the ways? I’m not sure why, but the idea of being haunted by a ghost from the 1880’s is acceptable to me, but the thought of a ghost from the 1980’s is terrifying. The memory of the backcombed fringe, large perm and shoulder pads is disturbing enough without the thought that it also comes in ghost form.

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So why book a ghost tour? Simple: I really want to believe in ghosts. I do. To steal a catchphrase from The X Files, I want to believe. What I needed to justify that belief was an actual ghostly experience. Something that would let me tip from ‘hogwash’ to ‘hell yeah!’ in one 90-minute walk. So I did my research. I had a recommendation from a friend of Amy’s, who had been on a tour and had found it very unsettling. Additionally, the tour was given by the author of four books about ghosts, one book about Fife and the other three about St Andrews. I was sure to get the real deal.

What I got was a walk around the town I work in every day. It was a leisurely walk, in the dark and the rain, stopping at points along the way to not see a ghost, before moving on to the next place to also not see a ghost there either. At the end of the tour I was cold, wet, £42 lighter and I hadn’t seen the faintest glimmer of a single ghost. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. Frankly, if I’m going to go to the effort to turn up, so should they.

Of course, the ghosts were not actually guaranteed. It seems that a childhood watching Rentaghost had left me with some misconceptions about the reliability of ghosts to appear on cue, and now was the time for those misconceptions to be set straight. No ghosts. I did get a little bit of history about St Andrews that I didn’t already know, so the evening wasn’t wasted, and we swapped stories of possible ghostly happenings as we walked, which was fun.

At the end of the evening, the tour guide piqued our curiosity by telling us to go home and have another look at his website. The final picture on his home page contained an actual ghost! What an amazing possibility. Half an hour later, I was pouring over the image looking at every shadow and smudge, but I couldn’t make out a thing. There is a very clear image of a woman in an 80’s anorak, but I’m sure that can’t be it.