My Encounter with the Ghost of Glasgow Necropolis
I may have run away in fright, but the important thing is that I went back to investigate...
On the 9th of August 2017, I saw a ghost in Glasgow Necropolis. Which is quite a claim coming from a sceptic who investigates the paranormal. For those not in the know, that’s what I do - investigate people’s strange experiences to find rational causes for them. Here’s the story of my ghost sighting and why you can’t ever trust your eyes - you’ll want to read to the end...
In 2017, I visited Glasgow for a few days while delivering talks about ghost research for both the Glasgow Skeptics and Edinburgh Skeptics societies. While there, I decided that I should fit in as much being-a-tourist as I could and spent a whole day exploring Glasgow. I was walking around the city with no clue about what I might discover, and found the beautiful Glasgow Necropolis - a very prominent Victorian cemetery which sits on a hill and offers amazing views of the surrounding city, including the nearby Cathedral.
There are approximately 50,000 people buried in the Necropolis and it is deceptively big (it feels compact as it sits on a hill at various different levels.) I visited on a sunny-yet-cloudy day and the Necropolis had a lot of people wandering around it. The area which sits at the very “top” of the hill only had a couple of people walking around. I visited around lunchtime and took a very slow stroll around, taking a lot of photos of tombs, gravestones, and memorials. As I strolled between the vast rows of gravestones and tombs at the top of the hill, I didn’t bump into other people at all and it felt very surreal to be in the middle of a busy city, on top of a hill, surrounded by the dead, and not able to see or hear anybody.
At one point, I stopped to read the carvings of a particularly stunning, large stone monument which sits at the end of a long row of gravestones and monuments. It is tall and made of dark stone and as I studied it I decided that I wanted to take a photograph and took a couple of steps backwards and to my right, raised my phone, and took a photo. It was at this moment that I suddenly became aware of a pale face peering around from behind the monument at me. The ol’ Fight or Flight instinct kicked in and, feeling quite alarmed at the sudden presence of somebody that I hadn’t seen or heard approaching, who seemed to just appear from nowhere, I... *ahem*... moved away from the monument with haste.
My gut instinct wasn’t “that’s a ghost”, but it definitely spooked me enough for my automatic reaction to be “see ya” and move away and back towards where there were people, but before I could reach the path which led back down the hill I stopped and had a word with myself. I’m a scientific paranormal investigator! People ask me to solve their mysterious experiences! How can I have a strange experience of my own and not at least try to solve it, even if I seem to be all alone at the top of a Necropolis?
So I went back to see if I could work out what I had seen. Only a few seconds had passed at this point and nobody had come or gone from the area at all, so if it was a person then they would still be lurking behind the memorial... and they were. Only, they weren’t a person - “they” were a gravestone and the sun was illuminating just the top of it in a way that made that part more obvious than the rest.
I just hadn’t seen it because the position I had approached from and came to stand in meant that the stone in question was completely obscured from view by the bigger one that had all of my attention. It was only as I stepped back and to the side slightly that the gravestone behind the one I viewing was visible from the corner of my eye, and in that split second it seemed as though a figure had been lurking just out of my view the whole time.
I suspect that the slightly creepy location and setting influenced the way I interpreted what I was seeing. Just goes to show that you really cannot trust your own eyes and it’s always worth reexamining what you thought you saw.