Greyfriars Kirkyard

Greyfriars Kirk opened in 1620, the first church built in Edinburgh after the Reformation, on land that had belonged to a Franciscan friary. Its kirkyard was already in use as the city's burial ground and became one of the most crowded in Scotland. In 1638 the National Covenant, the pledge by Scottish Presbyterians to defend their form of worship against the king's interference, was signed before the pulpit here, and copies were carried out to be signed across the country.

That act of defiance led, two generations later, to the kirkyard's darkest chapter. In June 1679 government troops crushed a Covenanter army at Bothwell Brig, and around 1,200 prisoners were marched to Edinburgh and penned in an open field at the southern edge of the kirkyard, with little food or shelter, for months. Many died; others were executed or transported. The field is now enclosed within the kirkyard as the Covenanters' Prison, a walled avenue of tombs behind a locked gate. The Lord Advocate who led the prosecutions was Sir George Mackenzie, remembered by the Covenanters as "Bluidy Mackenzie". A brilliant lawyer and a founder of the Advocates' Library, he died in 1691 and was buried in a grand domed mausoleum a few dozen yards from the prison, now known as the Black Mausoleum. The Martyrs' Monument, raised in 1709, commemorates the Covenanters killed in the 1600s.

The kirkyard's gentler fame came later. John Gray, an Edinburgh policeman, died of tuberculosis on 15 February 1858 and was buried here; his Skye terrier, Bobby, reportedly stayed at or near the grave until his own death in 1872, and was buried just inside the gate. Historians note that Bobby was fed and looked after by locals and that Victorian newspapers shaped the story considerably, but the little dog's headstone still draws more visitors than any tomb in the yard.

The Mackenzie Poltergeist has been reported in remarkable volume since the late 1990s. City of the Dead Tours, which has led nightly walks into the Covenanters' Prison since 1999, documents visitor reports and has shared photographs of the resulting scratches and bruises on social media; Henderson's book records 24 people knocked unconscious in the first two years alone, and the company's running tally now stands at over 900 "attacks" and around 180 collapses. Reports cluster in and around the Black Mausoleum and follow a pattern: sudden cold, nausea, a blow or push, and marks discovered later.

The most sombre episode came early. Colin Grant, a spiritualist minister who ran a clairvoyant shop on St Mary's Street, performed an exorcism in the kirkyard (sources give the date as late 1999 or January 2000) and is reported to have declared the site overwhelmingly evil and to have feared the attempt would kill him. Within weeks he died of a heart attack. The tours do not claim the poltergeist killed him, but the story is now inseparable from the legend.

The sceptical view is not hard to find, and it is built into the title of Henderson's book: a ghost that haunts itself. Visitors enter a walled, dark enclosure at night having just been told, in detail, what happens to people there; they are cold, tightly packed and primed to notice every graze. The 2003 break-in and the vandalism that followed show that the mausoleum's reputation attracts the living as much as the dead. What is not in doubt is the number of people who leave the prison convinced that something touched them.

Greyfriars Kirkyard is in Edinburgh's Old Town, at the top of Candlemaker Row between the Grassmarket and George IV Bridge, a few minutes' walk from the Royal Mile. The kirkyard is free to walk around in daylight, and most visitors come for Bobby's grave and headstone, the Martyrs' Monument and the tombs that inspired some of the names in the Harry Potter books. Greyfriars Kirk itself is open to visitors with a small museum; check its website for current times.

The Covenanters' Prison and the Black Mausoleum are kept behind a locked gate and are normally entered only with City of the Dead Tours, which runs evening ghost walks year round from the Royal Mile and holds sole access to the prison. Tours are researched and scripted by Jan-Andrew Henderson, last around 75 to 90 minutes and are not recommended for young children or the faint-hearted; book ahead in summer and at Halloween. The kirkyard has gravel paths and some slopes, and there is no parking on site. There is no accommodation in the kirkyard, but the Grassmarket directly below has hotels, hostels and pubs, and the whole of the Old Town is within walking distance.