Most people I meet in Edinburgh book the wrong ghost tour by accident. They want the Ghost Bus, hop on whatever cobbled-street walking tour the hostel sold them, and end up on a Vaults crawl, ducking through 200-year-old bridge arches in the dark. Different vibe. Different price point. Different tolerance for damp and small spaces. This guide sorts the two out and gets you onto the actual Ghost Bus, which is the comedy horror tour on a black 1960s Routemaster.
- In a Hurry? My Top 3 Picks
- The mistake to stop making first
- What you actually get for the 75 minutes
- Will you be scared, and is it OK for kids?
- Pricing and how booking actually works
- The three tours worth booking
- 1. Comedy Horror Ghost Bus Tour, around
- 2. Old Town and Underground Ghost Tour, around
- 3. Witches Old Town Walking Tour and Underground Vault, around
- The dark history the conductor is actually selling you
- Practical things the marketing doesn’t mention
- How the Ghost Bus compares to other gothic Edinburgh nights
- Where the Ghost Bus fits in a wider Edinburgh trip
- If you’ve done all of London’s ghost cousins already
- Worth a night, not a holiday
In a Hurry? My Top 3 Picks
- Comedy Horror Ghost Bus Tour, around $28: the actual black double-decker. 75 minutes, kids handle it. Book on GetYourGuide.
- Old Town and Underground Ghost Tour, around $22: if you want vaults instead of a bus. One hour, on foot, goes below ground. Book on GetYourGuide.
- Witches Old Town Walking Tour and Underground Vault, around $24: guides in costume, witch trials angle, ends in a vault. 75 minutes. Book on GetYourGuide.
The mistake to stop making first
Edinburgh has roughly a dozen ghost-themed tours running on any given night. The two people most often confuse are the Comedy Horror Ghost Bus Tour and the underground vault ghost tour. They share half a marketing vocabulary and almost nothing else.
The Ghost Bus is on board a vintage double-decker. You sit. It drives. A costumed conductor in Victorian undertaker garb tells stories at you for 75 minutes while the bus loops past Greyfriars Kirkyard, the Old Town, the castle rock, and Holyrood. It’s dry. It’s heated. The roof stays on. Kids cope with it. Phones work.
The Vaults tour goes under the South Bridge, into the actual sealed chambers carved beneath the bridge arches in 1788. You walk. You duck. The temperature drops about ten degrees once you’re below ground. Phone signal dies. If you’re claustrophobic, that one isn’t for you, and I cover the differences in detail in our guide to booking the Edinburgh Vaults tour.
So before you book anything: bus or below ground? Pick one. They’re not interchangeable.
What you actually get for the 75 minutes
The bus leaves around dusk most nights of the year, with a second slot on busier evenings. The exact pickup point is on your confirmation email and shifts a little by season, but it’s usually outside Deacon Brodie’s Tavern at the top of the Royal Mile, or just down the hill at George IV Bridge near the Central Library. Show up 15 minutes early. There are no allocated seats, and the front row of the upper deck is the prize.
Your conductor is the show. Mine was called Tommy Terror. Yours might be Mortimer or Lady Grim or whatever character is on shift. They run the entire tour solo, in costume, and they’re better than the script. The driver plays the hapless ex-convict who keeps almost crashing into low bridges. It’s all bit, but the timing is sharp and the script is full of real local history.
Stops include the witch trials site at Castlehill, the Royal Mile from the bus, the Cowgate, the Grassmarket where the public executions happened, and one walk-off at Greyfriars Kirkyard. The graveyard stop is the highlight. You’re out for maybe ten minutes among the tombs while the conductor unloads the Burke and Hare body-snatching story, the saved-by-the-bell coffin alarms, and a few mid-grade jump scares.
The bus itself is a running gag. The conductor will tell you it’s haunted by a woman who died in a fire on board, and that you’re sitting in her seat. There’s a perfunctory exorcism near the end. It is not subtle. That’s the point.
Will you be scared, and is it OK for kids?
No, you won’t be scared. The marketing leans hard on horror but the actual delivery is comedy first. Think pantomime, not haunted house. The conductor is doing a tongue-in-cheek Victorian undertaker bit and the jokes land more often than the jolts.
That makes it the right call for families with kids aged about 8 and up. Younger than that, the noise and the dark stretches around Greyfriars can tip into too much, and the official minimum age is 5. Sensitive adults sometimes find the comedy too silly, oddly enough, more than they find the horror too scary. If you want a properly atmospheric night out, the Edinburgh Vaults tour below ground hits harder.
Pricing and how booking actually works
Adult tickets sit around $28 per person on GetYourGuide and through the operator direct, with kid tickets a few quid cheaper. Concessions for students and over-60s exist. Family tickets are sometimes cheaper than four individual adult fares, sometimes not, so do the maths on your dates.
I’d book through GetYourGuide unless you have a reason not to. The free 24-hour cancellation cushion matters in Edinburgh because the weather can flip a planned tour evening into a stay-indoors evening with no warning. The official site sells the same seat for the same price most of the time, but locks you in earlier.
It sells out on Edinburgh Festival weekends in August and across the run-up to Halloween. From mid-October the next four weekends usually fill four to six days out. In low season, January through late March, you can often walk up the morning of and grab a seat for that night. Summer Saturdays without a festival are usually fine 24 hours ahead.
The three tours worth booking
Here’s how I’d choose between the three Edinburgh ghost experiences I’d actually point a friend at. The bus is the one I’d start with. The other two are what to do on a second night if you’ve caught the bug.
1. Comedy Horror Ghost Bus Tour, around $28
Pick this if you want the easiest entry point into Edinburgh’s gothic side, especially with kids or a mixed group who don’t all want to walk up the Royal Mile in the dark. The full review covers the minimum age, weather caveats, and which seats to grab. It’s the highest-volume Edinburgh ghost tour for a reason: it works.
2. Old Town and Underground Ghost Tour, around $22
Pick this if you want the vault experience without committing to the longer Mary King’s Close or Real Mercat tours. The full review walks through the route and the meet point near St Giles. The price-to-time ratio on this one is the best of the three. It’s a proper supplement to the bus rather than a substitute.
3. Witches Old Town Walking Tour and Underground Vault, around $24
Pick this if you care more about the history than the jump scares, and especially if the witch-trial angle is what got you onto Edinburgh ghost tours in the first place. The full review covers the underground portion, which is shorter than on the Mercat vault tours but still proper. The 75-minute length is a sweet spot.
The dark history the conductor is actually selling you
The script reads like a comedy but the underlying history is brutal. Edinburgh executed an estimated 300 to 400 women for witchcraft between 1563 and 1736, more per capita than almost anywhere else in Europe. The North Berwick trials of 1590 alone produced about 70 named accused, with King James VI personally interrogating them. The Witches’ Well on the Esplanade is the only public memorial.
Burke and Hare are the other main characters. They murdered 16 people in 1828 and sold the bodies to Dr Robert Knox at the Edinburgh Medical School for anatomy lectures. The bus drives past Tanner’s Close where they took lodgers, the West Port where the bodies were carted, and the medical school site itself. Burke was hanged in 1829 and his skeleton is still on display at the Surgeons’ Hall museum, which is around a ten-minute walk south from the bus stop and well worth a separate visit.
The graveyard story is real too. Greyfriars Kirkyard saw a wave of body snatching in the early 19th century because the medical school was always short on cadavers. Mortsafes (iron cages locked over fresh graves) were the workaround. You can still see them in the kirkyard today. The bus conductor will name about half a dozen of the more famous Greyfriars residents, including the lawyer Sir George “Bloody” Mackenzie, whose tomb the locals will tell you is haunted.
Practical things the marketing doesn’t mention
A few things I wish I’d known before my first booking.
Weather: The bus runs in the rain and the wind, but the upper deck gets cold fast in winter. Take a layer. Locals do January in jeans and a t-shirt indoors and a heavy coat the second they step outside, and the Ghost Bus is no exception. October to March, dress like you’re going up Arthur’s Seat, even though you’re sitting down.
Bag size: No specific limit, but the aisle is narrow and the upper-deck seats have basically no legroom for a backpack. Day-pack maximum. Anything bigger goes between your feet and ruins your view at Greyfriars.
Toilet: No on-board toilet. Use the pubs along the Royal Mile before you board. Deacon Brodie’s, the World’s End, and the Albanach are all right there.
Food and drink: Allowed on the bus within reason. No takeaway pizza. A coffee from Black Medicine on Nicolson Street or a pasty from Oink on Victoria Street is fine.
Accessibility: The Routemaster has steep stairs to the upper deck and tight clearance. There is a small downstairs deck which can take a folded wheelchair, but check with the operator a day or two ahead because the actor space and the storage compete. The walk-off at Greyfriars involves uneven ground.
How the Ghost Bus compares to other gothic Edinburgh nights
The other big-ticket gothic Edinburgh experience is the Edinburgh Dungeon, near the bottom of the Royal Mile at Market Street. Different beast entirely. The Dungeon is an indoor immersive theatre walk-through with actors in scene rooms, animatronics, and a small drop ride. It runs about 80 minutes and costs roughly $30 to $40 depending on the day. It’s louder and more interactive than the Ghost Bus, with more jump scares and proper darkness. Kids under about 10 sometimes find it too much. Our Edinburgh Dungeon guide goes through which slots to avoid (school holiday Saturdays) and where to queue.
If you’ve also got Friday and Saturday in town, the Dark Secrets walking tour is the calmer historical sibling, and it runs about two hours through the Old Town and Old Calton Cemetery. Read our take if the Castle plus a walk fits your evening better than a bus.
And if you genuinely speak Italian or are travelling with someone who does, the Italian-language ghost walk is the only one in town and the guide on my friend’s tour was excellent. It’s two hours, on foot, $20.
Where the Ghost Bus fits in a wider Edinburgh trip
I’d treat the Ghost Bus as the gateway, not the main event. Do it on your first or second night. It hands you the geography of dark Edinburgh in 75 minutes and gives you the names you’ll then keep hearing the whole trip. You’ll know where the Cowgate is. You’ll recognise Greyfriars. You’ll have a sense of Burke and Hare’s territory.
From there, go on foot. The Edinburgh Vaults tour takes the underground geography you only glimpsed from the bus and puts you inside it. The Edinburgh Castle day visit makes more sense once you know which sieges and which executions you’re standing on. The Harry Potter walking tour overlaps with the Ghost Bus route a surprising amount: J.K. Rowling pulled half her name list from Greyfriars Kirkyard headstones, including Tom Riddell.
For a fuller Edinburgh evening, the whisky tasting tours pair well with the Ghost Bus on the same night because the bus finishes around 9pm and a tasting often runs the next 90 minutes. Gothic to glass, in one walk down the Royal Mile.
If you’ve done all of London’s ghost cousins already
This part is for repeat ghost-tour people. Edinburgh’s Ghost Bus is run by the same operator as London’s Night Bus tour and the script structure is the same: vintage bus, costumed conductor, mid-tour walk-off in a cemetery, exorcism gag at the end. If you’ve done London, the format won’t surprise you. The Edinburgh stories are different and arguably better. Burke and Hare beat Spring-Heeled Jack as a centrepiece, in my opinion.
The Jack the Ripper walks in Whitechapel are the closer cousin in feel: walking, on-foot, no bus. They lean more crime-and-history than horror-and-comedy, so if you preferred the historical end of the Ghost Bus you’ll like a Ripper walk. And the historic pub walking tours in London Bridge are a different angle on the same body-snatchers and grave-robbers material the Ghost Bus uses, with pub stops built in.
Worth a night, not a holiday
The Ghost Bus is a good 75-minute slot, not a centrepiece of an Edinburgh trip. The right way to use it: book it for night two of your stay, after a Castle day and before whatever you want to do on foot in the Old Town. Pair it with a vault tour for context. Don’t pair it with the Dungeon back-to-back unless your group really wants three hours of horror theatre in one night, because the formats overlap and one will dilute the other.
If you only have one ghost-themed night and you’ve got kids, this is the booking. If you want something properly atmospheric and have already done it once, swap to the Vaults on round two.