New Ghosts in Old Town: The Intertemporal Translation of Edinburgh’s South Bridge

Edinburg is famous for its ghosts. An important part of the tourism in the city is based on historical tours. Among the most well-known are the ghost tours, especially the ones that lead visitors beneath the surface to the abandoned vaults of the South Bridge. Underground ghost tours reveal old, hidden, and long forgotten places and practices and recreate the life once lived there with its muggy, enclosed, creepy space, and allegedly haunted people. Historical tours usually focus on places central to the history of a region and associated with some of its main characters. Edinburg ghost tours, on the other hand, focus on a more or less untouched space and take visitors into a (meta)physical experience of forgotten lives. The tours transform the underground vaults of the South Bridge into liminal temporal spaces and a medium for intertemporal translation, making the past strange and distant and, at the same time, touchable and present; vivid, and filled with unspoken futures. This quality of materiality to imbibe and transcend time is what we are interested in this paper.