The trouble with inviting me to an overnight ghost hunt in the Edinburgh vaults is that not only do I not believe in ghosts, I'm also a bit of a dick about it. I'm that person who can't resist loudly letting the whole room know they don't believe in horoscopes if even the most tangential mention arises. So not an ideal overnight ghost hunting candidate. I also don't like staying up late. As I write, I note it's coming up on 8, which is the designated acceptable time to put pyjamas on.

But I do like doing weird things for the sake of it. So off I went, with Sam (naturally, she also wrote a blog about it Kris (the organiser) and a group of strangers off the Internet. I already knew Sam and Kris, but the strangers off the Internet were really doing that one thing you're warned not to do ever - meet strangers off the Internet at midnight in a dark secluded underground vault. The Internet strangers themselves were a friendly bunch though.

Before doing this, I was 100% sure ghosts did not exist. After doing this, I'm somehow 110% sure ghosts don't exist.

Our Ouija board was not a roaring success. This was perhaps in part because the people who believed in spirits refused to do it. So it was left to 4 of us who were very clearly just here for the larks. We did manage to summon WILJB from the 6th century, and HOG from time unknown. HOG was good fun, even if he didn't have a lot to say.

Kris brought some ghost detecting equipment and credit to the Ghostometer, it did not once flash. So that does tie in with my own experience. 10/10 for the Ghostometer.

We did do a weird thing where we sat in total darkness in a circle in the spookiest room for a bit. I'm not keen on total darkness, as it turns out. But neither were the ghosts apparently, because they resolutely refused to make an appearance. Possibly they prefer to party it up in Banshee Labyrinth next door. If I were a ghost, I'd pick that over the vaults. Much warmer. Better music. There were some mumblings after our darkness circle about footsteps, a story that I'm certain over time will be greatly embellished. But both I and the Ghostometer report no ghostly findings.

Our last activity was Hide and Seek. We took a sort of tag approach, where when the seeker finds someone, they then become the seeker. It only occurred to us the next day that we can't know for sure if the last person is still down there. What a crap way to become a ghost.

As an aside 'ghost hunting' is an odd term. We weren't hunting them. That would be rude.