Visit the Halloween Garden... if you dare

One of Scotland’s spookiest Halloween houses is attracting brave visitors from miles around with an array of ghosts, ghouls, mummies, vampires, flying witches… and chess playing skeletons.

Ruth Williamson, 70, and sibling Ian Briars, 56, have spent thousands of pounds adding hundreds of gruesome props for the garden in North Gyle Terrace, in Corstorphine.

It has taken them a month to arrange the property into a Halloween spectacular to spook families on the scariest night of the year.

Visitors are met with a sign reading “No trespassing, we’re tired of hiding the bodies”.

But carer Ruth, who uses the annual display to raise money for a Fife cat rescue centre close to her heart, insisted that everyone is welcome.

Families have already travelled from as far as East Lothian to get a fearsome fix. Some stop just to wind down a window and take a picture, but visitors brave enough to enter walk into a graveyard scene rising out of a mist of dry ice, with a real coffin and spooky lifesize Dracula.

In “Creepy Crescent”, Witches on broomsticks, flying ghosts and skeletons are designed to give guisers the heebie-jeebies while they watch out for hairy spiders hiding in trees and bushes.

The display also includes mannequin characters from The Addams Family, Ghostbusters and Harry Potter, the three witches from Macbeth and the Bride and Groom of Frankenstein. Elsewhere, a pair of skeletons play chess at a table.

Ruth, whose six real cats add to the creepy atmosphere, leaves a collection box for Sunny Harbour Cat and Kitten Rescue Centre in Lochgelly, Fife.

She said: “I love doing the Halloween garden every year. We’ve spent thousands of pounds – I don’t want to think how much exactly — but it’s all worth it to see the smiles on children’s faces.

“There must be hundreds of props and we add more every year. We started putting it all together at the beginning of October, so it’s taken a month, but there’s nothing else like it in the area.

“Families come from everywhere – all over Edinburgh and beyond – to see it. It’s become part of their Halloween tradition.

“And it’s all for a good cause as I collect donations for the Sunny Harbour Cat and Kitten Rescue Centre.”

The display will remain in place until Saturday.

Photo Alan Simpson