Edinburgh Tours Team

One of the leading anatomists, surgeons and medical lecturers of his day Dr Robert Knox was born in Edinburgh in 1793.

However in the early nineteenth-century Scotland’s capital was still a deeply conservative place, the burgh council only supplied the medical school with four cadavers a year for the purposes of medical research. Therefore medical lecturers like Knox had to resort to less than savoury methods. They paid men known as bodysnatchers to dig up freshly buried bodies and bring them to the university. Knox notoriously didn’t ask many questions about where they came from, to the extent that he took corpses from two charming Irishmen named Burke and Hare who didn’t bother using shovels!

Doctor Knox is now one of our most experienced guides; with characteristic surgical precision he provides top-notch scares on a nightly basis with an effortlessly dry humour. For a man of some 224 years he is surprisingly nimble when ambling through the Old Town’s steep and narrow closes. A word of warning though, if you feel severely unwell on one of Knox’s tours and require surgery, don’t let him perform it! Surgeons like Knox were taught that blood on his apron was a sign of surgical skill rather than a potentially life threatening source of bacteria.

Tours Mastered: Old Town and Underground, Famous Ghost Tour, Tour of the Undead, Real Fear Tour, Extreme Paranormal Tour.

In the late eighteenth century Deacon Brodie was one of Edinburgh’s most respected and well connected citizens.

He was a locksmith, cabinet maker, businessman and town Councillor. By night though he behaved completely differently; a compulsive gambler Brodie ran up huge debts and had to do certain things that there were less than honourable to pay them off. Brodie used his highly honed locksmith skills to expertly rob his wealthy clients and he got away with these thefts for many years.

However a botched attempt to rob the city tax office led finally to his arrest, trial and execution in October 1788.

Now though Deacon Brodie is very much a reformed man and takes charge of our ticket office throughout most of the week. Having been a ghost tour guide with our company since the beginning the deacon knows first hand what our guides, our tours and our underground have to offer. So please to book tickets or request more information give us a call, Deacon Brodie is always happy to recommend who he thinks is the second best tour guide working on a particular day.