Edinburgh in late October has no shortage of ways to spend Halloween. Most of them involve LED pumpkins, ticketed ghost tours and a queue. The Scottish International Storytelling Festival, which closes on Saturday 31 October with a Samhuinn night in the Old Town, is doing something older and considerably less tidy, and it has been doing it since 1989, when 700 people turned up to the first one. By 2022, according to Forever Edinburgh, that number had reached 39,862. The audience grew because the festival is genuinely good, not because it got louder.
The 2026 edition runs from Wednesday 21 to Saturday 31 October, based at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, 43, 45 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1SR, on the Royal Mile. The centre, which opened on 1 June 2006 and is described as the world’s first purpose-built centre for oral storytelling, turns twenty this year. Its Netherbow Theatre seats 99 and is accessible via lift. Partner venues across the city include the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the National Library of Scotland, and Museums & Galleries Edinburgh. The 2026 theme is ‘Bird and Beast’, pulling on the traditional and contemporary ties between humans, birds and the animal world, folk material that runs deep enough in most cultures to keep a festival busy for a fortnight.
International programme The festival brings in guest storytellers from Italy, Türkiye, Canada, England and Ireland alongside Scottish performers. The programme covers performances, workshops, outdoor events and a family strand. Events extend well beyond Edinburgh, reaching Shetland, Dumfries and Galloway, the Western Isles and Aberdeenshire, though the main action is on the Royal Mile.
Children’s workshops, 13, 15 October For families arriving during the Scottish school holidays, storytellers Sarah Wedderburn-Ogilvy and Ailsa Dixon run a three-day Aesop fable series aimed at ages 7, 10, teaching through games and movement. Each session takes a different fable: The Crow and the Pitcher on the 13th, The Ant and the Grasshopper on the 14th, and The Birds, the Beasts and the Bat on the 15th. These run ahead of the main festival dates, which matters if you are planning travel around school term.
Festival Pass A Storytelling Festival Pass is available through the official ticketing portal. Pass holders get a 10% discount in the Storytelling Centre bookshop and café throughout SISF 2026 and an invitation to the Festival Opening Reception on 21 October. Worth picking up if you are staying for more than a couple of events.
Samhuinn, 31 October This is the one to build the trip around. Storyteller, illustrator and printmaker Morvern Graham closes the festival with a Samhuinn event on Halloween night: her Folkloria! exhibition on the walls, mask-making workshops, and then a parade into Edinburgh’s Old Town. Halloween costumes are encouraged. The festival is not claiming a war with the ghost-tour industry, that is our reading, but the contrast is hard to miss. A 99-seat theatre, hand-made masks, a practising artist leading a crowd through the medieval streets under a theme drawn from the oldest animal stories in the tradition. Phones will not improve it.
