Greyfriars Poltergeist

Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636-1691) was Lord Advocate of Scotland from 1677 and the legal instrument of the persecution of the Covenanters, the Presbyterians who refused the episcopal church imposed by the Stuarts. The nickname he is remembered by, Bluidy Mackenzie, was theirs. After the Covenanter defeat at Bothwell Bridge on 22 June 1679, some twelve hundred prisoners were marched to Edinburgh and penned in the open in a field at the southern end of Greyfriars Kirkyard, known ever since as the Covenanters' Prison. They were held there for more than four months, without shelter and on a daily ration of four ounces of bread. In November, two hundred and fifty-seven sentenced to transportation were shipped from Leith; the vessel was wrecked off Orkney and barely fifty survived. Mackenzie died in 1691 and was buried a few steps from that field, in a round mausoleum of darkened stone that the city came to call the Black Mausoleum.

The mausoleum had been shut for centuries when, on a stormy night in December 1998, a homeless man looking for shelter forced the door and fell through into the vault below, among the remains it held. The first frights were reported within days: a woman felt an icy blast throw her back from the entrance. From 1999 the reports became a steady trickle, always of the same kind: sudden cold, scratches and bruises appearing with nobody touching the victim, bites, nausea, the sensation of being gripped, and collapses. Jan-Andrew Henderson, who has kept the tally from the start, counts around three hundred and fifty documented attacks and more than a hundred and forty people who have collapsed. Almost all of it happens inside the enclosure of the Covenanters' Prison or up against the mausoleum, and almost none of it beyond the railings: the phenomenon, whatever it is, does not follow anyone home.

It was Jan-Andrew Henderson who named the phenomenon the Mackenzie Poltergeist, in his book The Ghost that Haunted Itself (2001), and who founded the City of the Dead guided tours in 1999, today the only authorised way into the enclosure. That same year the medium Colin Grant attempted an exorcism in front of local reporters, broke it off halfway saying the thing was beyond him, and died a few weeks later; the detail has circulated ever since as part of the legend rather than as a clinical fact. The council eventually locked the Covenanters' Prison, and its gate stays shut. The result is an unusual case: a haunting that was documented from birth, with dates, names and a tally kept from the first day, even if that tally is kept by the same people who sell the tickets, which is at once its strength and the most obvious objection raised against it.

It is worth separating the case from what has stuck to it. First: this is not the ghost of Major Thomas Weir. Weir was the Wizard of West Bow, executed in Edinburgh in 1670 for witchcraft and incest, and his legend (the staff that walks by itself, the cursed house in the West Bow) is a different one, in a different quarter and with a different dead man; the confusion is common because both are tales of seventeenth-century Edinburgh spectres, but not one source on the poltergeist mentions Weir. Second: the figure of eighteen thousand victims often credited to Mackenzie does not belong to Bothwell Bridge, where the prisoners numbered about twelve hundred, but to a traditional and disputed reckoning of all who suffered during the so-called Killing Time. And third: being the most haunted place in the world is a selling line of the guided tours, not a measurement; what does exist is Henderson's count of incidents, which is a different and far more modest thing.