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5 Best Things to Do in Edinburgh During Halloween
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The Samhuinn Fire Festival returns to Calton Hill on Saturday 31 October 2026, and it reshapes the best things to do in Edinburgh during Halloween far more than most visitors expect. Beltane Fire Society, the volunteer organisation behind it, has confirmed both the date and the hill. In 2025 the gates opened at 18:30, the Neid Fire was lit around 20:00, and every ticket sold out at between £8.88 and £10.48. Tickets for 2026, at £16.38 standard, sold out by late September, and Citizen Ticket, the official box office, runs a waiting list. The festival owns the evening. This guide is about the other fourteen hours.
Five picks, ordered outward-in: Rosslyn Chapel, 11 km south in the village of Roslin; Craigmillar Castle, the ruin Mary, Queen of Scots retreated to in 1566; Surgeons' Hall Museums on Nicolson Street; The Real Mary King's Close beneath the City Chambers; and the Blair Street Underground Vaults, which finish a fifteen-minute walk from the bonfire. You start furthest out while the sun is up and tighten toward Calton Hill as it goes, because on 31 October 2026 the sun sets at 16:39 and the clocks went back the Sunday before.
Every entry below carries an exact address with postcode, the nearest bus or rail stop, distance from the centre, and a specific hour to turn up. Rosslyn Chapel and Craigmillar Castle both sit south of the city and work as one morning-to-mid-afternoon run on Lothian Buses; Surgeons' Hall Museums, The Real Mary King's Close and the Blair Street Underground Vaults sit inside a 900-metre triangle of the Old Town, each within twelve minutes' walk of the next. An adult single on Lothian Buses is £2.40 and a City DAYticket £6.00, so board more than twice and the day ticket wins. Rosslyn and Craigmillar are the two that a wet afternoon can ruin, since both involve open ground and a bus leg, so check Edinburgh weather the evening before and keep the Old Town trio as the indoor fallback. Visitors extending the trip usually add Glasgow or run south to London, both under five hours by rail. The hotels in Edinburgh inside the Old Town put three of these five within a twelve-minute walk and remove the last-bus problem from your evenings entirely.
1Rosslyn Chapel - Get Out of Town Before the Old Town Fills Up
Sir William St Clair founded this collegiate church in 1446 and died in 1484 without finishing it, which is why the building you walk into is only the choir of a far larger design. What did get built is carved to an obsessive degree. More than 110 Green Men, human faces sprouting leaves from their mouths, watch you from the vaulting and the capitals. That is genuine pre-Christian harvest imagery, not gift-shop spookiness, which makes Rosslyn Chapel the most thematically honest stop on this list and the one almost nobody books for Halloween.
Roslin sits about 11 km south of the city, and that distance is the whole point. While Edinburgh's Old Town compresses into one long ticket queue in the last week of October, the chapel runs its ordinary timetable: Monday to Saturday 09:00 to 17:00, Sunday from 12:00. Admission is £12 for adults, £10 concession, and under-18s in a family group go free. A short talk by chapel staff is included and runs several times a day.
The honest downside is the return leg. Lothian Buses service 37 takes 45 to 60 minutes each way and the chapel closes at 17:00, so a visit here eats most of your daylight on a day when the sun is gone by 16:39. If you want to be on Calton Hill for gates at 18:30, treat Rosslyn as a morning and nothing else. Visitor numbers peaked near 159,000 in 2007-08 on the back of The Da Vinci Code and have settled well below that since.
Pro Tip: Board service 37 at North Bridge rather than Princes Street, and check the destination blind reads Penicuik/Deanburn via Roslin before you step on, because other 37 workings do not pass the chapel. Be on a bus before 10:00 and you are back at Edinburgh Waverley by early afternoon with the light still up.
2Craigmillar Castle - The Ruin That Shuts at 16:00 and Nobody Queues For
The Preston family began building here in the late 14th century and had the four-storey tower house standing by 1425. It measures 15.8 by 11.6 metres, with walls up to 3.3 metres thick, and unlike most Scottish ruins you can climb through nearly all of it: kitchens, a vaulted great hall, a prison pit and a wall-walk with a clear sightline back to the city. Mary, Queen of Scots stayed from 20 November to 7 December 1566, recovering from illness while her nobles drew up the Craigmillar Bond, the pact to be rid of her husband Lord Darnley.
For a Halloween trip the appeal is arithmetic: almost nobody comes. Craigmillar Castle has been in state care since 1946 and is run by Historic Environment Scotland as a conservation site rather than a marketed attraction, so on the last weekend of October you can have a 15th-century courtyard largely to yourself at the same hour The Real Mary King's Close is turning walk-ups away.
Be realistic about the hours. From 1 October the winter timetable applies, opening at 10:00 with last entry at 15:30 and gates shut at 16:00, so there is no dusk visit here and no atmospheric torchlit finish. Tickets are £7.50 for adults booked online against £8.50 at the gate, £4.50 for children aged 7 to 15 online, and £6.00 concession. One more caveat: the Northwest Gilmour Tower is currently closed as a precaution, so part of the upper circuit is off limits.
Pro Tip: Get off at the Craigmillar Castle Road stop on Peffermill Road and walk up through Little France Park rather than along Craigmillar Castle Road itself, which has no pavement. Allow 12 to 15 minutes, buy the £7.50 online rate the night before, and arrive by 14:00 to get a full hour inside before last entry at 15:30.
3Surgeons' Hall Museums - Burke's Death Mask, and No Timed Ticket Needed
Everything else on this list sells you atmosphere. Surgeons' Hall Museums sells you the evidence. William Burke's death mask is here, alongside a pocketbook made from his skin, kept by the college after his execution and public dissection in 1829. The building is William Henry Playfair's, opened in 1832 and category A listed, and the anatomical collections inside run to thousands of specimens; the Barclay collection alone contributed roughly 2,500. Joseph Bell, who taught here, later wrote to his former student Arthur Conan Doyle that it was most certainly to Doyle that he owed Sherlock Holmes.
Its Halloween value is procedural rather than theatrical. The museum sells no timed slots and takes no pre-bookings for standard visits, so you buy at the Level 3 reception on arrival. On 31 October, when Edinburgh's ghost tours have been sold out for weeks, this is the one dark-history site in the city you can simply walk into. Adult entry is £10, concession £6.50, children aged 5 to 15 pay £5.50, and two adults with two children costs £25. A £4.2 million refit in 2015, £2.7 million of it from the Heritage Lottery Fund, rebuilt the displays.
Two things will catch people out. It closes at 17:00 with last entry at 16:30, which makes it strictly a pre-festival visit, and the recommended minimum age is 10. The human remains on display are not staged props, and the museum says plainly that some visitors find them distressing. If you were counting on this as the family slot before Samhuinn, check the ages first.
Pro Tip: Arrive between 10:00 and 11:30 on 31 October and you will have the upper galleries close to yourself; from mid-afternoon the place fills with people burning an hour before an evening tour slot. The entrance is on Nicolson Street, five minutes from the South Bridge bus stops, and you buy on the door at the Level 3 desk.
4The Real Mary King's Close - Book the October Lantern Tour or Skip It
Underneath the City Chambers there is a 17th-century street that was never demolished, only built over. The Royal Exchange went up on top of it in 1753 and the closes below were capped, floored and forgotten. The last resident, Andrew Chesney, was bought out for £400 under a compulsory purchase order and left in 1902. What survives is a run of stone-flagged lanes and rooms sitting roughly at the level Edinburgh stood at four hundred years ago, and the guided walk through it takes about an hour.
October is when the site changes character. Alongside the year-round Signature Guided Tour at £24.95 adult and £18.25 child, operator Continuum Attractions runs Lantern Led Tours through October 2026: the same underground route with the electric lights off and a lantern in your hand, at £31.50 adult and £26.00 child, in evening slots from around 18:00. On selected dates it pairs the tour with a seven-course tasting menu at £86.50 a head.
That £6.55 difference buys a genuinely different hour underground, and it is the reason to come here during Halloween rather than in March. It is also why the evening slots empty first. Children under 5 are not admitted for safety reasons, the passages are narrow and uneven, and check-in closes ten minutes before your slot, which the staff enforce. If the lantern tours are gone by the time you look, the daytime Signature tour is the same route with the lights on, and honestly the weaker version.
Pro Tip: Book a Lantern Led slot by the first week of October and take 18:15 or 18:30 on a night other than 31 October itself. Warriston's Close is 400 metres from North Bridge, which is the route most of the Samhuinn crowd walks toward Calton Hill from about 17:45, and you do not want to be pushing against it.
5Blair Street Underground Vaults - The Last Stop Before the Hill
South Bridge was begun on 1 August 1785, opened to foot traffic on 19 November 1786 and completed in 1788. It has nineteen arches and you can see exactly one of them, because tenements were built flush against both sides. The chambers inside those arches, roughly 120 of them ranging from two to forty square metres, were let as workshops and storage. They started emptying as early as 1795 and the businesses had gone by the 1820s. The vaults stayed sealed until the 1980s, when Norrie Rowan, a former Scotland rugby internationalist, found a tunnel into them; he and his son cleared hundreds of tonnes of rubble by hand.
Mercat Tours holds exclusive access to the Blair Street section. Its year-round Haunted Underground tour runs daily from £27 adult, £21 child and £24 concession, lasting 60 to 75 minutes. For 2026 the operator adds a dedicated Halloween Underground tour running Friday 23 October to Saturday 31 October, about an hour long, opening at the Mercat Cross on the High Street with the folklore of Samhuinn itself before the descent.
The overlap with The Real Mary King's Close is real, so be deliberate. If you can only afford one underground hour, they are not interchangeable: the Close is a preserved street with furniture and rooms, the vaults are unlit brick chambers with almost nothing in them, which is either the point or the disappointment depending on what you came for. Children over 5 are admitted, though the Halloween edition leans harder into ghost material than the standard tour.
Pro Tip: On 31 October take an afternoon departure, not an evening one. The tour finishes near Hunter's Square, a 15-minute walk from the Calton Hill gates, and Samhuinn gates opened at 18:30 in 2025 with last entry at 21:00. A start after 17:00 puts you underground at precisely the hour you should be climbing the hill.
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CEO and co-founder
Tomas is the co-founder and director of trip1, an European company specializing in reservation services. He launched the company in 2025 with a focus on building scalable, efficient operations.
5 Best Things to Do in Edinburgh During Halloween - FAQ
Yes. The centrepiece is the Samhuinn Fire Festival on Calton Hill on Saturday 31 October 2026. In the week before, Mercat Tours runs a special Halloween Underground tour of the Blair Street vaults from 23 to 31 October, The Real Mary King's Close runs lantern-lit tours through October, and dark-history sites such as Surgeons' Hall Museums stay open by day.
Samhuinn is the Scottish Gaelic name for Samhain, the Celtic festival marking the end of summer and the start of winter, from which Halloween grew. In Edinburgh, the Beltane Fire Society, a volunteer arts charity, revives it every 31 October on Calton Hill, with hundreds of performers, fire, drumming and acrobatics telling the story of summer's death and winter's arrival.
Not a street parade. Samhuinn takes place on Calton Hill itself: on 31 October 2026 the gates open at 18:30, last entry is 21:00 and the performance finishes by 22:30, with performers spread across the hilltop. Under-16s must come with an adult who has a ticket, and the organisers warn that the show contains semi-nudity.
Tickets for 2026 cost £16.38 standard and £13.16 for under-16s or on the low-income rate, but they sold out by late September. They are sold only through Citizen Ticket, which runs a waiting list, and refunds requested by 28 October go to people on that list. Edinburgh's ghost tours and museums don't need a Samhuinn ticket.
The Blair Street Underground Vaults and The Real Mary King's Close take you into the city's buried chambers and streets. Surgeons' Hall Museums holds William Burke's death mask and a pocketbook made from his skin, Craigmillar Castle is the ruin where Mary, Queen of Scots stayed in 1566, and Rosslyn Chapel, 11 km south, is carved with more than 110 Green Men. For free, try Canongate Kirkyard or Old Calton Burial Ground.
Mercat Tours runs a dedicated Halloween Underground tour of the Blair Street vaults from Friday 23 to Saturday 31 October 2026, starting at the Mercat Cross on the High Street, alongside its year-round Haunted Underground tour from £27. The Real Mary King's Close runs Lantern Led Tours through October at £31.50 for adults, with no under-5s admitted. Both sell timed slots, so book evening ones early.
