Amelia Showalter was debating whether asking a stranger to join her on a ghost tour was a mad idea.
She was sitting in a crowded bar in Edinburgh’s Old Town, the last dregs of a glass of scotch in front of her.
Also in front of her: Lucas Demaria. An Argentinian DJ she’d just met.
He was a fellow tourist and a self-confessed “big nerd”. And he was someone Amelia was “very much liking talking with”.
Amelia swallowed the last of her drink and in turn swallowed her reservations.
She wanted to carry on her conversation with Lucas. And she was in a city she’d never visited before. If he said no, it didn’t matter. What did she have to lose?
“I’m heading on this ghost tour soon,” Amelia said at the time. “Do you want to come? It’s supposed to be spooky.”
“Sure,” Lucas said with a laugh. “Why not.”
The next thing they knew, Amelia and Lucas were walking, shoulder-to-shoulder, down Edinburgh’s cobbled streets. Dusk was falling and the city, with its stone spired buildings and hills and crags in the distance, had a dreamy atmosphere.
The ghost tour focused on the city’s bloody history, with the guide recounting the chilling tale of grave robbers Burke and Hare, stories of plague and taking the group into the eerie Blair St underground vaults — a series of abandoned chambers beneath the city’s South Bridge.
“You’d think it wouldn’t be very romantic,” Amelia tells CNN Travel today. “But it was, because you’re kind of pretending to be scared.”
Amelia and Lucas stood closer and closer as the tour progressed. Their hands brushed against each other but didn’t quite touch.
And then, tour over, the two ducked into a bar. They sat together, drinking and chatting into the night.
“And at some point I was like, ‘We should make out’,” Amelia says.
“And I was like, ‘Yes’,” Lucas says.
“I feel like at that point we were both like, ‘Come on, we’re going to kiss’,” Amelia says.
“It was going that way for sure,” Lucas agrees.
One day in Edinburgh
Amelia and Lucas went on the spontaneous ghost tour on June 4, 2018 — Amelia’s 35th birthday.
Amelia lived and worked in Washington DC, running a political data consultancy. She had previously worked on Barack Obama’s campaign to become president in 2012.
At times Amelia’s work led to interesting travel opportunities — and that’s how she ended up visiting the UK in June 2018. She was invited to speak at a conference in London and decided to tack on some extra days exploring the UK.
“I was like, ‘When I turn 35, I should do something fun — I should go celebrate somehow’,” Amelia says.
Amelia decided to attend a Game Of Thrones convention in Manchester, in the north of England, before heading to Scotland to squeeze in a day of solo travel in Edinburgh.
“I just had the one day there so I went to the National Museum of Scotland, I ate some haggis, and then I wanted to have some scotch,” she says.
Amelia thought it would be fitting to sample a 35-year-old Scottish whisky on her 35th birthday.
She googled Edinburgh’s best whisky bars and ended up at Edinburgh institution Bow Bar, on the city’s colourful, winding Victoria St.
She’d just started sipping her drink when she spotted Lucas. He caught her eye because he was — unlike almost everyone else inside Bow Bar — drinking a beer.
“I just thought it was so strange that this person was drinking a beer in a whisky bar,” Amelia says.
“I really wanted to know, ‘What beer is so good that you’re doing that instead of drinking some whisky?’.”
Without really thinking twice, Amelia turned to the stranger and asked the question.
Connecting over whisky
In June 2018, Lucas Demaria was 36 and starting to “give up on trying to find the one”.
Disillusioned with romance, Lucas decided to focus on exploring the world.
He arrived in Edinburgh for the first time on the morning of June 4, 2018.
“I had in my mind eating haggis, so I dropped the bag in the hostel, started walking, ate haggis, and then I told myself, ‘OK I need to drink some scotch’ but I’m very into beer and I know really nothing about scotch,” he says.
Lucas stumbled across the Bow Bar while walking around.
It looked like the place to satisfy his whisky quest but, once inside, the range of options was pretty intimidating so Lucas ordered a beer while he mulled over the whisky options.
While it was Amelia who struck up conversation by questioning his drink choice, Lucas says he had actually been debating how to start a conversation with her.
He says he noticed her almost right away “sitting at the end of the bar, a beautiful lady”.
Drink orders explained, the conversation moved on. Lucas was wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and Amelia commented on it, saying she was also a fan.
“I showed her my Star Wars tattoos,” Lucas says.
Amelia was into cosplay and showed Lucas some photos of her hand-sewn Star Wars costumes.
“It was a nerd meeting,” Lucas says with a laugh.
The two talked a bit about their impressions of the UK, realising they shared the same favourite British band: The Beatles.
The conversation flowed in a way that surprised them both — neither Lucas nor Amelia usually spoke to strangers in bars.
“It’s not in my nature but I would do that while travelling,” Lucas says.
“Yeah, I would never just go start talking to a random person in a bar in DC … but when I travel I’m just a much more open-minded person,” Amelia agrees.
It was this outlook that prompted Amelia to invite Lucas to join her on the ghost tour — and prompted Lucas to say yes.
After the evening of whisky drinking, ghost stories and growing closer, Amelia and Lucas had to say their goodbyes. Amelia was heading to London for her conference, while Lucas still had a few more days exploring Edinburgh.
They exchanged contact details and started communicating via messaging app WhatsApp.
“First it was just text, for a couple of weeks, with some photos,” Amelia says.
And then, one day when she was back home in Washington DC, Amelia saw a voice recording from Lucas pop up on her phone.
Voice notes are pretty commonplace now but in 2018 Amelia had never come across the concept. In contrast, Lucas regularly sent voice notes to his friends in Argentina.
Amelia clicked play, and Lucas’ voice echoed around her bedroom. Her heart started racing.
“To hear his voice and everything, I was just so excited and it made me realise, ‘Oh, I really like this guy’,” she says.
“Because when I was hearing his voice again, it was just so wonderful.”
Before long, Amelia and Lucas were video calling regularly.
“We’d be talking for an hour, a couple of hours,” Amelia says.
“Several times a week,” Lucas says.
Statistics of love
Amelia is a data scientist by trade and, even while caught up in the heady emotions of falling for Lucas, she tried to think things through logically.
“When we met, I started making a little spreadsheet of how certain I felt that he was the love of my life,” Amelia says.
“I wasn’t being overly romantic — the first entry was 10 per cent, a 10 per cent chance Lucas was the love of my life. Which is actually really high if you think about it, just because what are the odds that any person is the love of your life?”
As she spent more and more time WhatsApping Lucas, Amelia added more data to the spreadsheet.
“It went up to 20 per cent. I kept plotting it out.”
But Amelia knew the only way of securing a higher score would be to see Lucas again.
The prospect had been raised on their video calls but they had to figure out the logistics.
Amelia considered visiting Lucas, and Lucas debated visiting Amelia, but ultimately they decided meeting in a third country was the best plan.
“So, in October of 2018, we scheduled a 10-day trip to Peru together — our second date,” Amelia says.
“I think my biggest fear, going to Peru, was what if I get there and all of a sudden it just feels wrong? Like I’ve built this whole thing up in my head.
“Because you can kind of do that with long distance.”
But as soon as Amelia saw Lucas, her fears dissolved.
“Immediately, I was like, ‘Oh, no, this is great’,” Amelia says.
“Within the first two days, when we were walking around Lima, it was like, ‘This feels really serious.’ And it felt good.”
In between hiking the Inca Trail, marvelling at Machu Picchu and eating mountains of delicious Peruvian food, Amelia and Lucas started talking about marriage.
“By the end of the trip, we were not exactly engaged but we were sort of engaged to be engaged,” Amelia says.
She updated her spreadsheet: the percentage was steadily climbing.
The idea of marrying someone you’d only met twice seemed bizarre but both Amelia and Lucas felt calm and excited when they considered their future together — with just a dash of surprise at the whole thing.
“I never thought about getting married either until I met her, basically,” Lucas says.
Amelia echoes this, saying: “I had really gotten fine with the idea of being single. I was like, ‘Well, maybe I’m just going to be one of those people that doesn’t meet anybody’. And that’s OK. I’m just going to have a life on my own.”
The future suddenly looked very different for both of them.
In February 2019, Lucas visited Amelia in DC. He met her parents, friends and loved ones. Not long after, Amelia visited Lucas in Argentina.
During that trip the couple officially become engaged.
“It was just definitely a strange thing to explain to people,” Amelia reflects today, recalling how she initially told friends: “I met this guy in Scotland but he’s from Argentina. And I think we might get married.”
Getting married
Amelia and Lucas were married at a small courthouse ceremony in Washington DC in 2019 before throwing a big celebration for family and friends a few months later.
The couple wanted the evening to feel like “a night at the bar with all your friends”.
DJ Lucas mixed the music in advance, while Amelia made her own wedding dress using the sewing skills she’d perfected from her years of cosplay. And when she was planning her speech, Amelia dug out the spreadsheets she’d compiled when she first met Lucas.
“I printed signs with the graphs I made,” she says. “Everyone thought it was very funny.”
Meanwhile Lucas’ best friend from Argentina made a speech in which he recounted the moment Lucas first told him he’d met Amelia — and how he’d known she was someone special based on the excited, heartfelt tone of Lucas’ voice.
The wedding also noted Amelia and Lucas’ first conversation in Bow Bar about their shared love of Star Wars — midway through their first dance, to The Beatles’ In My Life, they stopped for a lightsabre battle.
“Secretly, we had hidden some lightsabres with a couple of our friends so halfway through the dance, we did a little lightsabre action,” Amelia says.
“You wouldn’t think that lightsabres would work with the Beatles — when I say it out loud, it sounds like a really weird combination, but it was really fun.”
A month or so later, Lucas and Amelia relocated from DC to Seattle, Washington, where Amelia had grown up and where her parents still lived.
For Lucas, serendipitously, Seattle happened to be a perfect fit: He loved grunge music (“I was a kid in the ‘90s”), IPA beers and black coffee. He was instantly “so happy” there.
Life in Seattle
Cut to today and Lucas and Amelia still live in Seattle. Lucas set up his own successful Seattle-based DJ business, while Amelia is still working in political data analysis.
The couple are also kept busy by their three-year-old son, Jude.
He is named, of course, after The Beatles song, Hey Jude.
“It’s so funny because those things — the fact we both love Star Wars and The Beatles — it mattered a lot at the beginning because it was like, ‘Oh, we have these things in common’,” Amelia says.
“And now I don’t think about them so much, because we just have a whole life together.”
“I think shared values are, in the end, way more important than a shared taste for movies,” Lucas agrees.
It’s their similar approach to life, Lucas suggests, that’s led him and Amelia to the happiness they continue to enjoy today.
But their tastes do occasionally diverge. Amelia loves a Broadway musical, for example, which isn’t Lucas’ vibe. Meanwhile Amelia has never quite got her head around Lucas’ passion for heavy metal.
The pandemic, and then the birth of Jude, put a pause on Lucas and Amelia’s desire to travel the world together post-wedding. But in 2023, the couple embarked on a long-awaited “amazing” honeymoon to Japan, leaving Jude in the care of his grandparents.
Also on the travel agenda is one day returning to Edinburgh, this time with Jude in tow. Amelia and Lucas want to show their son where they met and retrace the steps of their first evening together.
“We’re going to take Jude to the bar,” Lucas says.
“Put him on the bar and say, ‘This is your fault’,” Amelia adds with a laugh.
Lucas and Amelia still marvel at being so compatible, despite the fact they grew up thousands of miles from each other, and only happened to be in the same bar, in the same city, in the same country by chance.
“It’s so weird, he’s just a random guy in a bar,” Amelia says.
Lucas — who recalls breaking up with someone who lived just 15 minutes away because he felt like they were from “different worlds” — finds it incongruous yet incredible that he ended up marrying someone he met on vacation.
Amelia had thought she’d end up with a fellow Ivy League graduate.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh I must be with that kind of person’ but you just get an idea of this is probably who I will end up with,” she says.
“I never would have assumed it would be a DJ from Argentina.”