What did your primary school do for school trips? The zoo? Local museum? Panto with Biggins? We went to a plague pit. An enclosed, abandoned, full-of-children’s-bones plague pit. And you can too! Mary King’s Close is open every day to the public and, since I was in primary school, has levelled up with a café and gift shop.

Edinburgh is absolutely heaving with ghosts. There is nary a street in the place which doesn’t have a sinister origin story involving a murder, a curse or a pact with the devil. Growing up in a city that regularly tops the lists of ‘most haunted locations in the world!!!’, I feel cheated that, as of yet, I have not seen a single ghost. Not one. Nada. Zilch. And even though I’m not sure I even believe in them, I’m yet to have an ‘experience I can’t explain’. I spent much of my childhood and adolescence longing for a paranormal encounter.

Reading about and connecting to Edinburgh’s past was a way for me to escape my present. Unhappy in school, feeling generally misunderstood for being too ginger, too ‘English’ and too nerdy, it was a welcome escape to learn about Scotland’s gruesome past and bloody battles.

Because what truly terrified me was social interaction. Real people scared me much more than ‘Annie’ the ghost girl who supposedly haunts Mary King’s Close, or Bluidy MacKenzie, the Greyfriars poltergeist. Edinburgh’s old streets became, in my head, a fantasy land of cobbles and wynds where spooks and demons lurked and phantom carriages rode. It was the Edinburgh of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and Margaret Oliphant, not the Edinburgh of The Mission nightclub and failing to get off with anyone, again, at Cramond beach.

Now, as an adult and a comedian, Edinburgh can scare me in different ways. The housing crisis scares me. The over-tourism scares me. The Fringe, as much as I love it, scares me. What lurks in Edinburgh’s vaults and cellars now are comedians, and some of them are much more frightening to experience as an 18-year-old comic or a young flyerer than a ghost ever would be.

So next time you look into the window of an abandoned old Edinburgh tenement, ask yourself: is it really a spooky haunted house? Or, more terrifyingly, has it been left deliberately empty so it can be rented out for £5k during the Fringe?

Eleanor Morton: Haunted House, Monkey Barrel, 31 July–25 August, 12.05pm; main picture: Trudy Stade.