Edinburgh’s best-known ghost story belongs to a domed tomb in Greyfriars Kirkyard. The man inside it, Sir George Mackenzie, was Lord Advocate of Scotland, and the city remembers him as “Bluidy Mackenzie.” The legend says his spirit attacks the living. The record next to it is worse.
The Horror
On June 22, 1679, a government army defeated a force of Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge on the Clyde. The Covenanters were Presbyterians who rejected the Crown’s control of the Church. About 1,200 prisoners were taken to Edinburgh. The prisons and the castle could not hold them all, so around 400 were kept in a makeshift enclosure in a field south of Greyfriars Kirkyard, bounded by the Flodden Wall, the wall of George Heriot’s School and a guarded picket fence. The name “Covenanters’ Prison” stuck to the place. Many are reported to have died there, but the exact number held and the daily rations are unconfirmed.
The prisoners who would not give up their cause were sentenced to transportation. On November 27, 1679, 257 men sailed from Leith aboard the Crown of London, bound for the American colonies. On December 10 a storm drove the ship onto rocks off Deerness in Orkney. More than 200 of the prisoners drowned while still locked below deck. About 50 escaped, together with the captain and crew. Some of the survivors are said by local accounts to have been recaptured, or to have settled on Orkney.
The man who prosecuted the Covenanters was George Mackenzie, Lord Advocate from 1677. He was a lawyer and a writer who founded the Advocates’ Library, and he remarked that confessions in witch trials were produced by torture. In 1678 he also wrote a book defending judicial torture as lawful in Scotland, adding that it was seldom used. He is held responsible for the government’s persecution of the Covenanters, which included executions and many deaths in custody. He died at Westminster on May 8, 1691, and was buried in Greyfriars, in a domed tomb designed by James Smith and modelled on Bramante’s Tempietto. The nickname “Bluidy Mackenzie” is known from Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818). Whether it was used in his own lifetime is unclear.
The Legend
The haunting is a modern story built on an old reputation. According to the tale, a homeless man broke into the tomb in the late 1990s looking for shelter and fell through into a pit of plague remains. From then on, visitors reported scratches, bruises, sudden cold and fainting near the tomb. Hundreds of such claims are now attached to it, and local tradition says Mackenzie’s spirit can find no rest. These are reports. No physical evidence for a poltergeist has been established, and the date, the man and the first reports are unconfirmed.
One incident is documented. Two teenagers got into the lower vault through a ventilation slot, broke open coffins and stole a skull. The incident is dated to 2003 by Wikipedia, with the newspaper report from April 2004. They avoided jail on a charge of violating sepulchres.
The Modern Relic
Greyfriars Kirkyard is open. Mackenzie’s tomb stands there, beside the site of the old prison enclosure. The area was open to the public until about 1990, when the council locked it after vandalism and drug use. It can now be visited by guided tour, by day through Greyfriars Kirk or at night on a ghost tour. The burial vaults inside the enclosure date from about 1700, so they were not part of the prison the Covenanters knew.
On Orkney, the Covenanters Memorial at Deerness is a 40-foot obelisk made of stone quarried on the beach, overlooking the wreck site. It was proposed in 1886 and unveiled on August 22, 1888, with more than 500 people present.
