10 Film & TV Locations That Attracted The WRONG Sort Of Attention
6. Harry Potter And The Grave Of Tom Riddell
The City of Edinburgh has a rich history, culturally and scientifically. It’s the home of the World’s biggest arts festival and the home of the opportunistic murderers Burke and Hare. A city of contradictions where the underbelly is barely hidden beneath the surface.
These days however, the city appears to put much of its stock in the magical world of Harry Potter and Hogwarts. Take a walk through the south side of the city and you’ll find that every second coffee shop claims that JK Rowling once wrote a paragraph or two of The Philosopher’s Stone right here. A walk through the historic closes and past the grand private schools certainly give you a sense of where she got her inspiration for Diagon Alley and Hogwarts.
She also pulled many character names from her strolls around the historic Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, and it is here that many fans visit to pay their respects to people who unwittingly passed their names on to the Potterverse - people who’ve been dead for hundreds of years.
The most popular is the grave of Thomas Riddell Esq and his son who both died in the 1800s. The Riddell name inspired the tragic Tom Riddle, the young wizard who would become the villainous Voldemort. Fans flock to the kirkyard to pay their respects to this unfortunate fictional character via their real-life namesake.
Which is all a bit Dark Arts, if you ask me.