It's often described as Edinburgh's most haunted location - and yet it was stumbled upon by accident.
Back in the 1980s, Scotland rugby internationalist Norrie Rowan discovered a tunnel leading to a series of vaults under South Bridge that had been concealed for well over 100 years.
Norrie had been doing work on his pub, the Tron Tavern, at the time and couldn't quite believe what he had found. The rooms were filled with all manner of debris, much of which had lain undisturbed since the mid-19th century.
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Dating from the completion of South Bridge in 1788, these vaults occupied each of the historic bridge's 19 arches and had originally been used as storage space for the shopping street above. They also housed a handful of local workshops and taverns.
The space later became a magnet for the city's homeless population, and illegal activity, including illicit drinking and gambling dens and bordellos. Some even say the vaults were used to store fresh corpses during the bodysnatchers era.
Much of the vaults suffered from poor air quality and water ingress, however, rendering them largely unusable. The decision was made by the city authorities to seal and abandon them in the 1860s.
In 1989, not long after Norrie's rediscovery of the vaults, the secret passageways were put to good use in providing an escape route for Romanian rugby player Christian Raducanu, who had been seeking political asylum in the week's before Romania's revolution.
Raducanu was able to dodge the Romanian secret police thanks to Norrie ushering him into the tunnels underneath the Tron Tavern.
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Norrie later explained to The Scotsman: "There was a back door which led down to the bottom of the Old Town. Cristian popped out in Niddry Street and asked a passing bobby for political asylum, which must have made for an interesting diversion from the usual police business of Saturday round about midnight!”
The vaults were properly excavated in the 1990s by Norrie and his son Norman Rowan, with the pair removing bag loads of rubble by hand in the process. They also uncovered various fascinating artefacts, including a great number of oyster shells, toys, medicine bottles, and broken crockery - evidence of people having lived in the vaults at one time or another.
Norrie Rowan and his family continue to run a number of popular establishments within the former vaults, including the Caves and the Rowantree.
The South Bridge vaults have also proved to be a popular tourist attraction, with many leading paranormal researchers claiming the Georgian basements are haunted due to the high number of reported ghostly goings-on that have been reported there.
In the 2000s the vaults attracted the attentions of TV producers, appearing twice on Yvette Fielding's Most Haunted series. The show described them as being home to a "myriad of supernatural occurrence that defy explanation". Other TV shows, including Ghost Adventures and Joe Swash Believes in Ghosts, have also taken an interest.
Last year, Norrie Rowan announced he was standing as an independent candidate for Edinburgh's city centre ward in the 2022 council elections.
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