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Edinburgh, Scotland. A drizzly Saturday night in February. The bar of Sandy Bell's traditional music pub. Just after paying for two bottles of brew.

"Dearie, ye want tae pour yer drinks intae a glass," the tin whistle player advised us, taking the silvery tube from her mouth only long enough to order another shot of Scotch. "Ye dinnae ken what grotty creatures and slimy things 'ave been crawling o'er the tops of they bottles."

Slimy? Grotty? Ah yes, well now, one mustn't forget that Auld Reekie is a town of eerily juxtaposed layers. The layer we were occupying was a fetching swirl of gauzy blue smoke and Italian pink walls rimmed in shiny black. Chandeliers glinted off banjo strings and nose rings and skimpy sequined tops as the musicians tore from strathspey to jig to reel to hornpipe with reckless speed. But in the cellar below our tapping feet, Scottish worms and millipedes and medieval vermin, fattened by accretions of four millennia of Auld Reekie dirt, dung and decomposed bodies, writhed and crawled over bottles of Beck's ale and Strongbow cider. Yes, surely. We poured our drinks into clean glasses and turned to face the music.

The gale of notes had been blowing hard for six hours. The players had attained thrilling warp speeds of fiddling, whistling, accordion bellows pumping, fluting and bódhran beating. Arriving late into the fray, my friend Jessica got out her fiddle and I got out my whistle and settled into a wee table at the back.

Edinburgh's oldest trad music pub, on Forest Road in the medieval Old Town, has been the watering hole of Scottish music icons like Dick Gaughin, Aly Bain, Cathal McConnell, and Hamish Henderson the bard... and the pawky white-haired lady who was chain smoking into my face. In a tobacco-thickened voice Audrey McClellan bragged that she was 78 years old, had been coming to Sandy's for 40 years, and was on her sixth bodhran. The one she was beating was all patched with tape, and every thump of a reel threatened to burst the old goatskin entirely, until she finally put it down and grabbed my arm for a rumbustious Scottish jig.

Falling winded back into my chair, I gazed up at gig posters for bands like Silly Wizard and The Battlefield Band and The Boys of the Lough. In the midst of all this Celtic gaiety, pasted on the wall beside the framed sheet music for a frisky hornpipe, was a reminder that Edinburgh, with its lurid and glorious, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde history, held layers of epochs, beauties and horrors all happening at once.

"CITY OF THE DEAD haunted graveyard tour," the poster announced.

Oh-ho, the haunted graveyard tour. Every town with a few hoary tombstones to its name has this sort of tourist thing now. Guides in period dress. Flickering candles. Tales unearthed from the crypt of local archives. But the words "Black Mausoleum" and "poltergeist" screamed out from the black ink. And the blurbs: "The most haunted place on the planet." - FOX, or "The most conclusive poltergeist case in history" - Radio Scotland, raised the hairs on my head.

Auld Reekie could be spooky, all right. Even the merriest of Irish jigs took on a ghostly Scottish pallor as musicians keened over bent modal notes with the deathgrip of a banshee. Or so my imagination was wandering...

Over the past few days I'd seen so much of old Edinburgh that it was hard to keep my mind in the 21st century. I'd climbed the wild craggy slopes of Arthur's Seat for a wizard's view of the Firth of Forth. Such a hunk of earth in London would be done up with flowers and gazebos and wrought iron love seats, but in Scotland it was left to nature's tumultuous forces, which were always firing the Scottish imagination. In wandering the Royal Mile, the spine of the medieval Old Town, I had peered into dark wynds and savored names like Fleshmarket Close, Coffin Lane, Blackadder... and Blackfriars.

Right across the road from Sandy Bell's pub, I'd passed captivated hours in the Museum of Scotland, transfixed by the Pictish stone carvings of magical beasts. I'd roamed through Edinburgh Castle, the 11th century fortress built on the towering Castle Rock, a gathering place for stone-age hunters, Bronze Age peoples, and the Gododdin of 4,000 years ago.

At Castlehill I'd gaped at the spot where thousands of witches were put to flames between 1479-1722, when Edinburgh was the witch-burning capital of Europe. I'd been awed by The Stone of Destiny, returned to Scotland in 1996 - after 700 years hostage in London. Finally I'd ventured into Edinburgh's dank netherworldly maze of chambers and vaults.

This subterranean city wasn't exactly like Montreal's Underground, with its snazzy metro stations and bistros and opulent shops. It dripped with fetid water. It smelled of earth and caked blood. It was miserably sunless. In The Town Below the Ground, Jan-Andrew Henderson, who runs the City of the Dead tours, describes life in this crypt-like slum into which Edinburgh's poor crammed for 350 years.

I took a Mercat tour of the hidden underground vaults and was shocked to see the cave-like conditions in which thousands had lived below the horribly crowded city above. It was as quiet as a mummy's tomb. It was hard to believe that double-decker city buses rumbled back and forth on the streets above. Yet my Edinburgh explorations had not taken me to the most haunted site in all of Christendom, nay, the whole planet!!! -according, that is, to the Fox Family Channel. The graveyard that inspired Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, and harbours the world's best-documented poltergeist in history: Greyfriars Kirkyard.

Say "Greyfriars" and most people think of Bobby, the faithful Skye terrier immortalized by Walt Disney. Bobby was still a puppy when his master, the shepherd John Gray, died in 1858. The wee dog spent the rest of his life, the next 14 years, sleeping on his master's grave. A bronze sculpture of Bobby was erected at the top of Candlemaker Row. It's the most photographed statue in Scotland.

Only a dog's walk from the Greyfriars Bobby lies the sinister patch of velvety emerald grass that was once the garden of a Franciscan friary. In 1562 Mary Queen of Scots made it a cemetery to contain the overflow of corpses from St. Giles' graveyard. On February 28, 1638 Edinburgh's Presbyterians gathered here to draw up the National Covenant demanding a free Scottish Parliament and opposing Roman Catholicism in Scotland. Copies were signed in blood. But it would be the warm blood of 1200 Covenanters imprisoned here for five months in a freezing open field, and executed by the King's Advocate George McKenzie, that would stain this cemetery soil. Today the grass in Greyfriars but thinly shrouds the "corpse mountains" of Covenanters and plague victims dumped to rot in unmarked graves.

My young friend Jessica from Montreal is working as a nurse at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary. The hospital overlooks this spooky graveyard. She'd been curious about it since her arrival the year before, and when she saw the poster for the Black Hart Storytellers CITY OF THE DEAD tour, she begged me to go with her.

The following evening, after more tunes at Sandy Bells, we make our way through the dripping rain to the steps of St. Giles Cathedral for the 10 pm rendezvous with our graveyard host. David McPhail projects a bouncy, if darkly funny, enthusiasm for the murky side of Edinburgh. He gloats over how messy, stinky, filthy and scary medieval Edinburgh had been, with slimy rivers of garbage, offal and night soil flowing over the cobbles of wynds and closes. He regales us with witch burnings...and the nightly escapades of the "Resurrection Men," who snatched bodies from fresh graves to sell to Edinburgh's medical dissection rooms...and mass murderers Burke and Hare who smothered their boarding house lodgers and sold their bodies to anatomy professors.

Then David's joking stops as we enter the "black maw with headstones for teeth" - Greyfriars Kirkyard. From here on we are taking the tour at our own risk. The poltergeist associated with George McKenzie, buried in the same graveyard with the Covenanters he executed, is mean. Between December 19 1998 and Feb 3 2002 alone there were180 victims, and 50 people have collapsed inside the Black Mausoleum, in the gated and padlocked Covenanters Prison.

Reverend Colin Grant performed a 20-minute exorcism to rid Greyfriars of its poltergeist and tormented spirits, and nine weeks later dropped dead. There were putrefying smells, strange searingly cold spots, loud rappings, mobile phones going off, and visitors leaving with deep scratches, black eyes, bleeding gouges, claw marks and severe bruises. If we felt a cold spot, we should not run, but slowly step out of it.

We plod over the spongy earth through the black mist. Over the graveyard wall a faint light trickles from Edinburgh Castle and the medieval skyscrapers of The Royal Mile, another reality away. I attempt to amuse myself with the thought that somewhere in this boneyard are the uncelebrated remains of William Topaz McGonagall, the drivel-monger whom the Scottish regard as the "worst poet who ever lived." But smiles fail my twitching lips.

When David unlocks the gate to the Covenanters Prison, Jessica refuses to enter. Now she is being a sensible nurse, afraid of being attacked, of being knocked out inside a cold tomb. For her, the prospect of being alone in the cemetery seems less terrifying than crowding into a black mausoleum with an angry poltergeist. David escorts her out of Greyfriars and settles her in to a pub across the road. I feel badly about not accompanying her, but I want a story.

When David leaves us alone, we all get the jitters. "If we link arms, nothing can get us," we say, forming a human circle against the long minutes. The wind snarls overhead. The gate creaks. I keep glancing over my shoulder... Finally David returns. Holding each other tightly we move crablike into the Black Mausoleum.

In our super-conscious state, the minutes inside the Black Mausoleum drip like hours. I feel the group thinking, 'OK we've done it, now let's get out, before something does happen. Before something does...

YEOW!!!! WHAT WAS THAT BANG? We flap out like a pack of startled ravens. I don't remember walking - or running - out of the graveyard. Only meeting Jessica at the pub, walking back to her flat along the Meadow Walk, agreeing about how truly creepy it all was, and that she was wise not to go in.

But the next day I go back to Greyfriars at dusk, alone. I want to see it by day. I walk to the far southwest corner of the cemetery and peer through the chained gates of the Covenanters Prison. My eyes wander down the shadowy green canyon between the tombs. Just as my eyes settle on the Black Mausoleum, a flash of bright light strikes the wrought iron gates. I leap back, startled and spins my head around looking for a tourist with a camera. But I am alone. I stalk out fast, pausing only to grab a digital shot of McKenzie's huge black tomb. Camera opens. Telephoto lens pops out. Then the message: BATTERIES DEPLETED.

A few days later I meet the mastermind of these graveyard tours, Jan-Andrew Henderson. He works in St. Giles Cathedral and lives nearby, in a little tower overlooking the graveyard, where he hears bumps and crying noises. Over coffee, we discuss his strange business, and his book documenting the MacKenzie Poltergeist The Ghost That Haunted Itself .

It's not like any other kind of tourist business. "That's an understatement!"

"I mean, if I were taking a group of hikers up a mountain and said to them there's a real chance you could fall, then some might say, "Well, I'm not going then." But if you say there's a chance that the poltergeist will attack you, they say, "Yeah, ok" and they go. But if something happens they are really upset. We carry lots of insurance."

"But these guides, going in there night after night. How can they do it?"

Most of them have got other jobs and are moonlighting. Call it "the graveyard shift." Many started out thinking in would be fun, but do it now because we've got something that seems to defy conventional science and they're fascinated by that. So many ghost and poltergeist stories have been debunked and exposed as hoaxes. It is not often that you get to be involved with something that really does defy explanation."

"But what about the the negative energy of going in there every night...?"

"I've had three guides leave in two years. One guide quit right away after he got scratched."

This business is very odd, I think. Twisted adventure travel. Not like rafting, where you risk getting dunked. Or heli-skiing, where you might get buried in snow. Jan-Andrew is oddly jovial about it all. Like an amusement park owner. He invites me to take the tour again tonight with a different guide, and hands me a sheaf of press releases and testimonies from "victims." I laugh. Uneasily.

That evening I'm back at Sandy Bell's sipping a glass of Strongbow and reading through press releases on the City of the Dead tour while waiting to leave for the 8:30 tour.

"Aug 20, 1999 Siobhan Reuse from Australia complains of feeling very cold just outside the Black Mausoleum. She calls to say that the next day she woke up with severe bruising to her face. Her doctor confirmed the marks were consistent with a physical attack."

"April 13, 2001: Mandy Burgen from Cornwall sees scratches rise on her chest in the car after the tour. The same thing happens to Carol Weir from Edinburgh."

"April 15, 2001 Kate Luskin from the US feels something "touching her ankle" in the B.M. The spot on her leg stayed cold for two days. Lines resembling claw marks remain on her leg and will not tan."

At the thought of claw marks, I dig my tin whistle out of my bag. [8:15] It's not that I'm afraid to press my luck...[8:29] After all, I do have travel insurance. And well now, more than enough material to write a story. [8:44] Oh! They're playing "The Lilting Banshee" jig. I simply must join in on that tune.

Like the Irish say about the fairies down in County Kerry, "Ah wisha, I don't believe in them! But they're there..."

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