Last Candle Tours

Last Candle Studios

In-app purchases

About this app

Edinburgh has more ghosts per square mile than anywhere in Britain, and most of them have an address.

Last Candle Tours is a walking tour you listen to. Stand where it happened, press play, and hear the story told straight: the legend as the city tells it, with the history underneath it.

THE OLD TOWN, IN FIVE WALKS
Sixty-eight stories and about six and a half hours of narration, from the Castle Esplanade down the Royal Mile to Holyrood.

• The Stake on Castlehill. Witches burned beneath the castle guns, the lost piper, the headless drummer.
• Half-Hangit. Maggie Dickson, Major Weir, Deacon Brodie and the mob that hanged Captain Porteous.
• Spit on the Heart. Prison, plague and the beheading machine, all within a hundred yards of the Heart of Midlothian.
• Under the Bridges. The buried streets beneath the Old Town: vaults, chimney sweeps, a banshee, and the poltergeist in the kirkyard.
• The Cannibal and the Queen. The Canongate to Holyrood: a cannibal earl, Rizzio's murder and the royal vault.

Six stories are free to try. Each pack is £2.99, or get the whole Old Town for £9.99. Pay once and it is yours: no subscription, no account, no adverts.

HOW IT WORKS
• A map with every stop, numbered in walking order.
• Stories start as you arrive, or play any of them from the list, anywhere.
• Download a pack before you go and it plays with no signal and no data.
• Distances in miles or kilometres.

WRITTEN, NOT SCRAPED
Every story is researched from court records, chronicles, newspaper archives and the folklore collections, then written to be listened to on a wet pavement in the dark. Where a tale is a legend, we tell it as the city tells it.

STREET LEVEL
Every walk stays on public streets and in public kirkyards. Where a story goes underground, into the vaults or a pub's back rooms, we tell you what is down there and leave the visiting to you.

MORE TO COME
Fifteen more Edinburgh packs are written and recorded, from Leith and the shore to the villages beyond the bypass. They arrive in the app as they are released, with no update needed.

Turn the sound up. Mind the cobbles.

What’s new

First release on Google Play. Ghost stories and dark history, told where they happened: five walks through Edinburgh's Old Town and the first walk in York. Follow the map from stop to stop, or listen anywhere. Download a walk before you go and it plays with no signal. The first stories are free.