Wizards, Burkers and Holy Water

During my PhD fieldwork I was told a fantastic story - apparently true - of an evil laird in Barra by the name of Ferguson; he returned to haunt the islanders in a black phantom coach accompanied by his equally fiendish doctor friend. In life they were Resurrectionists or Burkers - body-snatchers - but Ferguson and the doc didn't just want to learn about anatomy, they wanted to practice the 'Black Airts' as Stanley Robertson often described witchcraft and devilry!

So, this put me in mind of a local story - Alexander, 16th Laird of Skene, apparently went to Padua University to study necromancy, and returned having made a pact with the Devil himself.


He had the power to reest anyone who annoyed him, in other words, he could either force them to remain rooted to the spot, or bend their will to his own. A local ceilidh got on Skene's nerves so much he cast a spell on the dancers so they kept going until their feet bleed and they cried in agony.

The 'Wizard Laird' as he was known, was always accompanied by crows and ravens, the birds of ill-omen. One night, he instructed his coachman, Kilgour to ride the coach and horses across the Loch of Skene, but not to look around at the laird's passenger.

The loch was frozen, so Kilgour fancied his chances. He waited at the water's edge as his master and the unknown passenger climbed into the huge black coach behind him. He cracked the whip and the two horses trotted onto the sheet ice.

The Loch of Skene

Hearing the low whispers, Kilgour couldn't contain his curiosity, and turned to see Alexander Skene, and Auld Cloven Hoddie, the Earl of Hell himself deep in conversation! The Devil had come to visit his new recruit, and Kilgour suddenly realised he was riding the heavy coach into the middle of the frozen loch. The Evil One turned his gaze on the poor coachman, who froze in terror, letting go the reins - the horses, coach, and all sunk to the bottom of the loch and neither Kilgour, nor the Wizard Laird were seen again.

However, Alexander Skene is afforded a grand tomb in the grounds of his house. His former tenants feared him as much when dead as they did when alive, and every Halloween, as Halloween it had been the night the unfortunate Kilgour had been asked to drive the coach across the loch, every Halloween from then on, the people built bonfires and prayed that the purifying fire would protect them from the Wizard's ghost.

The loch of Skene still exists today on the road to Banchory, and the gate houses of the Skene estate are in a prominent position by the water's edge as they were in Alexander's day. Perhaps due to his nefarious behaviour, his line died out soon after his disappearance, but folk are wary on frosty nights when the loch waters freeze solid!

The Ferguson and Skene stories are very similar, and both could relate to the 'Burkers' Coach' which the travelling people so feared. The 'Burkers' as we know from the original Burke and Hare in Edinburgh soon resorted to murder to get fresh corpses for Dr Knox and the 'noddies' in the medical school, and in rural Aberdeenshire in the nineteenth century, traveller folk often camped in their traditional spots, sitting ducks for these men who snatched children and old people from their bow tents in the middle of the night.


Maggie Stewart, an Aberdeen traveller, had a narrow escape from the Burkers, which she tells Hamish Henderson about in Tocher (vol. 5), the School of Scottish Studies' journal of interview extracts. You can listen to Maggie's tale online here.

She describes the fearful coach:

The Burkers' coach wes like a, the shape of an undertaker's thing, like, it wes aa black covert-in, and thir wir some of them 'at only held three men, and thir some of them held four men, and the chains that wes on them wes, thir wir leather roun aboot it, and the horsefeet wes shod wi rubber, and thir wir rubber roun the wheels. So they niver heard nae noise of horses nor naethin when they wir ganging alang the road, they only cried, "Squeak-squawk, squeak-squawk." And this wes whit frichtent the auld traivlers, ye see, the noise of the coaches...

Aberdeen had its own share of Burking going on; the old Medico-churgical hall, the building behind the Arts Centre, was the site of an anatomy theatre, long before the one at Marischal College (Conveniently next door to Lodge Walk police station which had its own mortuary!). Now someone foolishly allowed their dog to root around in the earth behind the Surgeons' hall, and Rover dug up bones, human bones, well, that's what the terrified owner thought. So ensued a full-scale riot, with people shouting 'Burn the Burking Shop!' and trying to set fire to the hall and the place where the anatomy professor lived.

Medico-Churgical Hall, King St, Aberdeen

This was in 1832, when the Edinburgh resurrectionists were in the middle of their gruesome operations. The Aberdeen riot, and others, were the public response to something in which the authorities would not intervene. Would you believe that stealing a body wasn't a crime? The real crime is breaking into a coffin, (I think!) as did the daft drunk who accidentally broke into the tomb of 'Bloody Mackenzie' in Greyfriar's Kirkyard in Edinburgh! (And that's another story)


The same year, the year of the Reform Bill which allowed many more men the vote than in previous years, the Anatomy Act was passed, the gist of it being, if a body ain't claimed by relatives, then the anatomists can get it! Bodies of murderers used to be supplied - and again this links to another very famous, very silly Aberdeen story, of our city's most useless hangman, Johnny Milne of Tullyskukie. I'll save him for another day, but he was given the job of hanging a man called Andrew Hosack, whom people believed was a murderer, rather than just a thief, for which he was condemned. So, the public were quite happy to intervene and ensure justice was served - Hosack was meat for the anatomists, he deserved no better!

Funny isn't it? One minute they're interfering with hangings - the Hosack case was only a few years before the Burker riot, because Milne died in the early 1830s - next minute they want to burn the doctors at the stake for doing the same thing as they wanted them to do to murderers!

Oh fickle public.

Anyway - the necromancy that attracted people like Alexander Skene and Dr John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's alchemist, and of course, Faustus, was a real medieval practice, the act of summoning the spirits of the dead to learn the secrets of the universe! And churchmen felt they had to learn it to be able to perform exorcisms! The Munich Manual was a famous 'grimoire' or magic book which contained the rules for necromancy, its full title being Forbidden Rites, A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth century.

So the stuff you find in Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling does indeed have a basis in reality.

Just make sure, as the Catholic fishermen in Barra did to ward off the horror vision of Ferguson and his black coach, that you take a bottle of holy water with you any time you're strolling around the Loch of Skene on an October night! The rite of Holy Water is a fantastic church-sanctioned charm against all ills. So convinced was Ruaraidh Cooper, the only Protestant companion of the two Catholics on the boat when they witnessed the black coach, of the effiacy of this 'Popish' charm, that he had what my interviewee described as 'a temporary conversion' and crossed himself with the water. And the coach turned away, but the hoof prints of the ghostly horses are supposedly embedded in the coastal rocks there in the north end of the island to this day.

Nothing like a good prophylactic ritual to keep the bogles at bay!