Do you believe in Ghosts?

At the Stirling Ghostwalk we're not sure. We're not even sure what a ghost is. Is it a memory, imprinted upon a place by high emotion, stress or passion. Is it a restless or playful spirit, unable or unwilling to pass along the Crow Road from this life to... well...whatever it is lies beyond? Are they fictions, or is the supernatural something else that science will one day be able to explain as just plain natural?

It occurs to us that the only way to answer any of those questions is to see a ghost or be a ghost and, pardon me, but there's no hurry to do either not just yet, anyway.

Whether the tales we bring to life (re-animate?) on the Stirling Ghostwalk are true or simply yarns told by a winter fireside we wouldn't like to say.

Certainly some of the stories enjoyed by audiences over the past two decades exist in many forms (we know at least three very different Secret Origins of our most famous phantom, the Green Lady).

Others are the results of generation after generation of storytellers, each adding twists and turns until the tale bears no relation to the original story (18th-century town drunk Alexander Lyon becoming, Temperance champion and Devil-wrestler, Blind Alick). But ˜Truth' isn't really the point. All a good ghost story really needs to be is entertaining. If it chills your blood, makes you smile or better still makes you think, then it has succeeded in it's task.

If we've learned anything in our years of hosting the Stirling Ghost Walk it's this: never, ever, let a little thing like the Truth get in the way of a good story.

So if you find yourself being asked "what should we do tonight in Stirling?", take a step out the door and see if you can find some answers to deeper questions that few dare to answer.