These 50 Scottish urban legends are the ones I’d tell you on a dark night, and after each one you’ll get the true story behind it. There are Scottish ghost stories from haunted castles, Edinburgh urban legends from under the Royal Mile and Glasgow urban legends that made the newspapers. The rest is creepy Scottish folklore, the Scottish myths and folklore tales that still give names to our caves and lochs.
In Wick, the axeman lived two streets over from my house. Kick his lamppost until its light went out and he’d come for you. So, naturally, we took turns. He never came for me. The nearest we got to danger was the night we picked a lamppost outside the police houses, which ended in a hasty jog up the riverside.
That’s the general pattern behind most the Scottish urban legends on this list. Take a real place and an ancient rule, then see what happens when you test it.
Most lists of Scottish ghost stories give you the spooky half and stop before you find out what happened. Here, every legend ends with the truth as far as the records go, and where you can see the evidence.
I’ve grouped the 50 into haunted houses first, then Edinburgh and Glasgow, then the roads, the crimes, the monsters and my own Wick ghost story. Midnight Society rules apply.
Creepy Myths and Folklore Tales
- The most famous Scottish urban legends are Sawney Bean, the Gorbals Vampire, the Mackenzie Poltergeist and the Flannan Isles Lighthouse.
- Several have hard evidence behind them. You can still see the Arthur’s Seat coffins, the Devil’s card table and a horn cut from a woman’s head in 1671.
- Others fall apart on inspection. Sawney Bean first appears in an 18th-century London crime catalogue, and historians have found no record of him from his own time.
- For one legend you can see with your own eyes, start with the Arthur’s Seat coffins in the National Museum of Scotland.
Contents
What are the most famous Scottish urban legends?
The most famous Scottish urban legends are Sawney Bean, the Ayrshire cave cannibal, the Gorbals Vampire hunted by Glasgow children in 1954, the Mackenzie Poltergeist of Greyfriars Kirkyard and the Flannan Isles keepers who vanished in 1900. Each grew from a real place, and three of the four have records you can still check.
If you only read one, make it the Flannan Isles at number 50. It’s the one I chose to tell on camera, and it’s the best example on this list of a true event that rumour has dressed up as a Scottish urban legend.
Creepy Scottish folklore in haunted castles and houses
Scottish ghost stories cluster around big houses, because big houses kept records, and records give a legend something to cling on to.
1. The House of the Binns and the Devil’s card table
General Tam Dalyell, known as ‘Bluidy Tam’, was said to play cards with the Devil at the House of the Binns in West Lothian. The Devil always won, until Tam propped a mirror behind the table and read his hand. Auld Nick spotted the cheat and threw the heavy marble table at him. It missed, flew outside and sank in the Sergeant’s Pond. Nobody believed a word of it. Then, in the drought of 1878, the pond dried up and there was the table. It’s back in the entrance hall now, with a dark mark on one corner that visitors call the Devil’s hoof print (National Trust for Scotland).
2. The Green Lady of Crathes Castle
Crathes Castle, a 16th-century tower house near Banchory in Aberdeenshire, has a room named after its ghost. The Green Lady crosses the Green Lady’s Room, stops by the fireplace and lifts a baby out of thin air, and Queen Victoria is said to be one of the people who saw her. The detail that keeps this story going came in the 1800s. Workmen lifting the hearthstone found the bones of a child underneath, and some accounts add a woman.
3. The footsteps of Skaill House
Skaill House, on Orkney’s west coast near Skara Brae, was built around 1620 for Bishop George Graham, and part of it stands on an old burial ground. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and dogs barking at nothing. One ghost has been there long enough to earn a name, Ubby. The bones are real. Drainage works at the house uncovered a medieval cemetery, and archaeologists dated the burials to between the 11th and 14th centuries.
4. The haunted room at Castle Stuart
Castle Stuart, near Inverness, was finished around 1625 for the third Earl of Moray, and one turret room had such a reputation that nobody would stay in it. The story goes that four local men agreed to sit a night each for a £20 reward. The minister dreamt of a giant covered in blood. The church elder was found fainted on the floor. The shoemaker saw a dark shape with cloven hooves. Last came Rob Angus, a poacher the size of a door who was scared of nothing. ‘You will find me as I am, or dead,’ he told the servant. In the morning they found him dead beneath the broken window.
5. The Green Lady of Ackergill Tower
Ackergill Tower stands on Sinclair’s Bay, a short drive north of Wick, so this one belongs to my home town. In the 1400s Dugald Keith carried off Helen Gunn, the ‘Beauty of Braemore’, on the eve of her wedding to another man and locked her in the tower. She fell, or jumped, from the top while trying to escape, and the feud between the Keiths and the Gunns grew bloodier from there. She’s still seen as a Green Lady on the battlements. The tower ran as a hotel for years, closed around 2019 and is now a private home, so admire it from the coast. Keep the Keith name in mind. It turns up again at number 29.
6. The Monster of Glamis
Glamis Castle in Angus picked up its monster from Victorian gossip. The story said a secret chamber held a deformed child of the family, an heir the world had been told was dead. Nobody has ever produced the room. Of all 50, this is the one I trust least, because a legend about a hidden room can never be disproved, only repeated.
Edinburgh urban legends
Edinburgh urban legends lean on the old town’s habit of building on top of itself, so a good half of them happen underground or behind locked gates.
7. Annie’s room in Mary King’s Close
The Real Mary King’s Close is a set of 17th-century streets and houses buried under the Royal Mile. In 1992 the Japanese psychic Aiko Gibo, filming a documentary, said a little girl called Annie clutched at her in one room. Annie had been left behind during the plague, Gibo said, and had lost her favourite doll. Gibo bought a doll on the Royal Mile and left it for her, and visitors have been leaving toys in the room ever since. On 17 April 2019 a guide radioed in to say the original doll was gone. The attraction later found it was a tartan-clad Daisy doll designed by Mary Quant.
8. The Mackenzie Poltergeist
Sir George Mackenzie was Lord Advocate when about 1,200 Covenanter prisoners were held in a corner of Greyfriars Kirkyard after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679, and his prosecutions earned him the name ‘Bluidy Mackenzie’. He was later buried a few yards away, in the Black Mausoleum. Generations of Edinburgh children dared each other to shout through the keyhole, ‘Bluidy Mackenzie, come oot if ye daur, lift the sneck and draw the bar!’ In the late 1990s a homeless man broke into the tomb looking for shelter. Since then, people on ghost tours have reported bruises and scratches, and a few have fainted near the mausoleum.
9. The Headless Drummer of Edinburgh Castle
Edinburgh Castle’s drummer is heard more often than he’s seen, a lonely beat on the ramparts when the castle is quiet. When people do see him, he has no head. The usual telling says his drumming warns that the castle is about to be attacked, which makes him one of the few ghosts on this list who’s on your side.
10. Albert of the Edinburgh Playhouse
The Edinburgh Playhouse on Greenside Place opened as a cinema and is now one of the biggest theatres in the UK. Staff talk about Albert, a man in a grey coat who appears on level six with a sudden drop in temperature. He’s said to have been a stagehand killed in an accident or a night watchman who died in the building. In one version, police called to a break-in in the 1950s spoke to an older man called Albert on level six, then learned the next day that Albert had died some time before. The theatre named Albert’s Bar after him.
11. The Arthur’s Seat coffins
In late June 1836, boys hunting rabbits on the north-east slopes of Arthur’s Seat pulled back some slates and found 17 miniature coffins, stacked in two tiers of eight with one more on top. Each held a carved wooden figure. Several were destroyed when the boys threw them at each other, and eight survive in the National Museum of Scotland. Nobody knows who made them or why. The favourite theory ties them to the 17 victims of Burke and Hare, though the surviving figures are all dressed as men and most of the victims were women.
12. The Unicorn Woman’s horn
On 14 May 1671 a surgeon called Arthur Temple cut a horn from the head of a woman named Elizabeth Love, about three inches above her ear. It had been growing for seven years. The horn is in the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum, with a small engraved medallion naming the witnesses to the operation. Doctors call it a cutaneous horn, a hard growth of keratin, the same material as your fingernails.
Glasgow urban legends
Glasgow urban legends are younger than most, and the best of them reached the national newspapers within living memory.
13. The Gorbals Vampire
On the evening of 23 September 1954, police were called to the Southern Necropolis in the Gorbals and found hundreds of children, some as young as four, armed with stakes and kitchen knives. They were hunting a seven-foot vampire with iron teeth that, according to the playground, had eaten two local boys. Nobody was missing. Newspapers blamed American horror comics, and the panic helped pass the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955, which is still law.
The iron teeth are the detail that interests me. They’re older than any comic. A beast with ‘great iron teeth’ appears in the Book of Daniel, and Glasgow schools taught a 19th-century poem about Jenny wi’ the Airn Teeth, a bogeywoman of Glasgow Green. It probably helped that the Dixon’s Blazes ironworks lit the graveyard red every night. A rumour spreads fastest when it borrows a fear people already carry.
14. Cathedral House Hotel
Cathedral House, on Cathedral Square opposite the Necropolis, opened in 1877 as a hostel for prisoners released from Duke Street Prison. Susan Newell was hanged at Duke Street in October 1923 for strangling a newspaper boy, and she remains the last woman executed in Scotland. Guests report an invisible presence brushing past them on the stairs, and children playing on the top floor when there are no children in the building. It’s a boutique hotel now, so you can test the stairs yourself.
15. The girl in the Arches
The space under Glasgow Central station lay derelict until 1990, when it held an exhibition for the city’s year as European City of Culture. Then it became The Arches, an arts venue and nightclub, until it closed in 2015. Staff told of a lost-looking girl in old-fashioned clothes in the lower corridors, so real that people offered to help her before she vanished. In 2009 the cast of an Alien Wars show reported that she screamed and fled whenever they came near. The arches host events again today as Platform.
16. Provan Hall
Provan Hall, in Easterhouse, is a 15th-century hunting lodge built for the bishops of Glasgow and one of the oldest houses in the city. Its darkest story is a soldier who came home after two years away, found his wife with a baby boy, and killed them both in the master bedroom. Mother and son are said to be seen upstairs. Reston Mather, the last private owner, died in the house in 1934 and is said to stand on the staircase. Provan Hall reopened in 2023 after restoration, and paranormal groups queued to get in.
17. Dalmarnock Bridge
Dalmarnock Bridge carries Dalmarnock Road across the Clyde, and there’s been a crossing here since a wooden bridge went up in 1821. The present iron bridge dates from 1889–91. The legend is a man at the rail, staring down into the water. People who stop to help say he leaps, then vanishes before he reaches the river. If that story sits close to home for you, Samaritans are free to call on 116 123, day or night (Samaritans Scotland).
18. The bird, the tree, the bell and the fish
Glasgow’s coat of arms packs four legends of St Mungo onto one shield, and many Glaswegians can still recite the rhyme. ‘Here is the bird that never flew, here is the tree that never grew, here is the bell that never rang, here is the fish that never swam.’ The bird was St Serf’s tame robin, killed by Mungo’s classmates and brought back to life by Mungo. The tree began as frozen hazel branches he set alight to restart a fire. The bell is said to have come from Rome. The fish was a salmon from the Clyde with a lost ring in its mouth, and it saved Queen Languoreth from execution.
19. Overtoun Bridge
Overtoun Bridge, finished in 1895 on the drive to Overtoun House near Dumbarton, has an ugly local nickname, the dog suicide bridge. Since the 1960s, around 50 dogs are reported to have died after leaping the parapet from the same spot, almost all of them long-nosed breeds. In 2010 the canine psychologist David Sands studied the bridge from a dog’s height. He concluded the likeliest lure was the scent of mink in the gorge below, with the drop invisible until it was too late. I walk my dog on the beach most days. Here, I’d keep the lead on.
Scary Scottish folklore on the roads, in the caves and up the mountains
Scary Scottish folklore loves a lonely road and a dark cave, and Scotland has plenty of both.
20. The A75 Kinmount Straight
The A75 Kinmount Straight, a four-mile stretch between Carrutherstown and Annan in Dumfries and Galloway, is called Scotland’s most haunted road. Its best-known night came in 1962, when brothers Derek and Norman Ferguson said a hen flew at their windscreen and vanished on impact. An old woman waving her arms followed it, then a screaming man and a parade of animals. Last, a furniture van came straight at them and disappeared. Later drivers report hitting a figure that runs into the road, then finding no body when they stop.
21. The Ghillie Dhu
The Ghillie Dhu is a shy, wild-haired fairy of the birch woods around Gairloch in Wester Ross, dressed in leaves and moss. He avoids adults but is kind to children. In the best-known story he found a lost girl in the woods and walked her safely home. His reward was a hunting party of five men sent to capture him. They never found him.
22. The Old Man of Storr
The Old Man of Storr is a pinnacle of rock on the Trotternish Ridge of Skye. Legend says a giant lived on the ridge, and when he was buried his thumb was left sticking out of the ground. Stand underneath it on a misty day and the idea gets much easier to believe.
23. MacKinnon’s Cave
MacKinnon’s Cave, under the Gribun cliffs on Mull, is one of the deepest sea caves in the Hebrides, and Dr Johnson and James Boswell measured it in 1773. Abbot MacKinnon is said to have hidden here in the 15th century. The darker story is a piper who walked in with his dog to outplay the fairies. Only the dog came back, terrified and hairless. You can reach the cave only around low tide, so check the tide tables before you set off.
24. Fingal’s Cave
Fingal’s Cave on Staffa is made of six-sided basalt columns, the same rock that forms the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. One legend names it after Fionn mac Cumhaill, the Irish giant also called Finn McCool. The other story is literary. In 1761 James Macpherson published Fingal, an epic he claimed to have translated from ancient Gaelic. When Sir Joseph Banks visited in 1772, at the height of the craze for Macpherson’s poems, the name stuck. Before that, the cave was known in Gaelic as An Uamh Bhinn, the melodious cave, for the way the sea echoes inside it.
25. The Corryvreckan whirlpool
The Gulf of Corryvreckan, between Jura and Scarba, has a whirlpool fierce enough to need two legends. In the first, the Cailleach Bheur, the hag goddess of winter, washes her great plaid in it, and when she lays it out white across the land, winter has arrived. In the second, a Norse prince called Breacan tried to win a princess by mooring his boat by the whirlpool for three days and nights. He brought ropes of wool, hemp and a maiden’s hair, trusting the hair to hold because its owner was pure. All of them snapped, Breacan drowned, and the maiden admitted she wasn’t as pure as she’d claimed.
26. Am Fear Liath Mòr, the Big Grey Man
Ben Macdui, at 1,309 metres the second-highest mountain in Britain, is home to Am Fear Liath Mòr, the Big Grey Man. In 1925 the mountaineer Professor Norman Collie told the Cairngorm Club that, alone near the summit in 1891, he’d heard crunching footsteps behind him, one for every few of his own, and fled down the mountain in terror. Walkers since describe a towering grey figure, or a sudden dread that tells them to leave.
27. The piper of Clanyard Bay
Clanyard Bay, on the Rhins of Galloway near Stranraer, has a twin of the MacKinnon’s Cave story. A piper went into the caves to find the fairies, playing so the people above could follow him. The music grew fainter until it stopped, and his dog ran out hairless. Locals say you can still hear pipes under the fields at night. The same tale turns up under Edinburgh Castle and in caves on Tiree, which tells you how well a good story travels.
28. Machrie Moor and the standing stones
The Calanais Standing Stones on the west coast of Lewis were raised in a rough cross shape about 5,000 years ago, and Orkney’s Ring of Brodgar is a near-perfect circle inside a Neolithic henge. My pick for a legend is Machrie Moor on Arran, where six stone circles stand on open moorland. One double ring is called Fingal’s Cauldron Seat, and the giant Fingal is said to have tied his dog Bran to a stone in the outer ring while he ate (Historic Environment Scotland). Arran is in North Ayrshire, so it’s the closest of the three to my own front door.
True crime behind Scottish urban legends
Some of the best Scottish horror stories started as crime reports, and this is where the psychologist in me does most of the work. For the cases that stayed in the courtroom, my guide to Scottish true crime stories goes further.
29. Three Bloody Strokes
In the legend of the Battle of Barry in Angus, in 1010, a warrior later claimed as the first of the Keiths chased the Danish leader Camus into the hills and killed him. King Malcolm II dipped three fingers in Camus’s blood and drew three red lines down the warrior’s shield. The Keith chiefs still carry those three stripes, and their motto, Veritas Vincit, means ‘truth conquers’. The awkward truth is that the battle may never have happened. An 1881 account suggested it was invented to explain old burials found at the site, and its main source, the chronicler Hector Boece, probably drew on local folklore.
30. Lady Finella the king killer
Kenneth II really was killed at Fettercairn in 995, and the Annals of Ulster say it was ‘by deceit’. Legend names the deceiver as Lady Finella, whose son the king had killed. She lured him to a house where a statue stood in the middle of the room, rigged to hidden crossbows. When the king touched it, the bolts fired from every side. Finella fled to the coast and, cornered by the king’s men, threw herself from the waterfall near St Cyrus still marked on maps as Den Finella.
31. The Burning Bishop of Caithness
This one is from my home county. Adam of Melrose, Bishop of Caithness, raised his butter tax from a span of butter for every 20 cows to one for every 10. The farmers complained to Earl Jon Haraldsson, who ruled Orkney under the King of Norway and Caithness under the King of Scots. Retellings give the earl the line ‘The devil take the bishop and his butter; you may roast him if you please!’ On 11 September 1222, a crowd gathered at the bishop’s house in Halkirk and shouted ‘Roast him alive!’ They dragged him into his kitchen and burned it down with him inside. King Alexander II came north to punish them, and he wasn’t gentle about it.
32. Sawney Bean
Sawney Bean is the goriest of all Scottish horror stories, and it’s set on my adopted coast. Legend puts him and his wife Agnes in a cave at Bennane Head, between Girvan and Ballantrae in South Ayrshire. Over 25 years they raised a clan of about 45 children and grandchildren, ambushed travellers on the coast road, and killed and ate more than 1,000 people. A search party sent by James VI found the cave, and the whole family was executed in Edinburgh. Historians have found no record of any of it from the time. The story first appears in the Newgate Calendar, an 18th-century crime catalogue published in London and known for its gore.
My guess is that a lonely road with real robberies needed a monster to explain the travellers who never arrived home. If you like your Ayrshire darker, here are the writers and books set in Ayrshire.
33. The ghosts of Culloden
On 16 April 1746, the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart met the government army of the Duke of Cumberland on Culloden Moor near Inverness. Scots fought on both sides. The battle took less than an hour, and around 1,300 men died, about 1,250 of them Jacobites (National Trust for Scotland). Visitors to the moor report a tall Highlander in tartan who walks among the clan graves and whispers one word, ‘defeated’.
34. Isobel Gowdie, Queen of the Witches
In 1662, Isobel Gowdie, a farm labourer’s wife from Lochloy near Auldearn, gave four confessions to witchcraft over six weeks, and there’s no record that she was tortured. She described flying with her coven, meeting the Queen of the Fairies and turning into a hare with a charm that began ‘I shall go into a hare’. No record survives of her execution, or of anything after. People confess to impossible things for reasons that make sense to them, such as fear or the hope of mercy, and Isobel told her interrogators the most detailed story of any Scottish witch trial. Historians still argue over why.
35. The death of Netta Fornario
In November 1929, the body of Norah Emily Editha Fornario, known as Netta, was found on the island of Iona near Loch Staonaig, on a mound island legend linked to the fairies. She was naked apart from a black cloak and a blackened silver cross, and she lay on a large cross cut into the turf, with a knife nearby and her feet cut and scratched. She’d come to Iona from the London occult scene, a friend of the occultist Dion Fortune, and two days earlier had tried in a panic to leave the island. Her death certificate gives exposure. Fortune blamed a psychic attack.
Scottish monster myths
These Scottish folklore tales are the oldest on the list, the myths and legends of Scotland with teeth and claws. I’ve kept them short, because my list of Scottish mythical creatures gives each one a full entry.
36. The Blue Men of the Minch
The Blue Men of the Minch, also called Storm Kelpies, live in the strait between the Outer Hebrides and the mainland. They’re blue-skinned and swim just under the surface, waiting for ships to sink. In the version Donald Mackenzie collected in 1917, their chief challenges a ship’s captain in rhyme. A captain who can answer every line sails on. One who runs out of words loses his ship.
37. The zombie priest of Melrose
The chronicler William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, told of a priest at Melrose so fond of hunting with hounds that he was nicknamed the Hundeprest, the dog-priest. After his death in about 1196 he rose from his grave, tried to break into the abbey and visited the bedroom of his former mistress. Four monks kept watch at his grave. When three left to warm up, he rushed the last one, who struck him with an axe and drove him back underground. The next morning the monks dug up the body, still fresh and bleeding from the wound, and burned it to ashes.
38. The Nine Maidens and the Dundee dragon
A farmer at Pitempton, near Dundee, sent his eldest daughter to the well for water. When she didn’t come back he sent the next, then the next, until all nine were gone. He found them dead by the well with a great serpent coiled beside them. A young man called Martin, sweetheart of one of the daughters, chased it down while the crowd shouted ‘Strike, Martin!’, which folk etymology turned into the place name Strathmartine. A Pictish carved stone at Balluderon is still called Martin’s Stone, and a dragon statue stands on Dundee’s High Street.
39. The Stoor Worm
In Orkney the Stoor Worm, or Mester Stoorworm, was a sea serpent so vast that it woke on Saturday mornings and yawned nine times. A sorcerer told the king to feed it seven maidens every week, or give up his own daughter, Princess Gem-de-lovely. The king offered her hand, and Odin’s sword Sickersnapper, to anyone who could kill it. The winner was Assipattle, a farm boy who spent his days lying in the ashes. He sailed into the worm’s mouth and set fire to its liver with a burning peat. The dying worm’s teeth became Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes, and its body became Iceland.
40. The Loch Ness Monster
Nessie is my favourite, and I’ve stopped at Loch Ness more times than I can count, visiting family in Inverness or driving north to Wick. The first story comes from Adomnán’s Life of St Columba, which says that in 565 Columba drove a beast back into the River Ness. The modern monster arrived in 1933, when the Inverness Courier reported a couple’s sighting of a huge creature from the A82. The famous ‘Surgeon’s Photograph’ followed in 1934, and in 1994 Christian Spurling confessed it had been a toy submarine with a sculpted head. People still look. So do I.
41. The Boneless
Shetland’s Boneless, called the Frittening in older tellings, is barely a creature at all. People describe a pale mass with no shape, wet and foul-smelling, that comes in from the shore at night. It doesn’t hunt like a monster. It arrives before a disaster, which is worse.
Scottish folklore tales behind the national symbols
Scotland’s flag, flower and best-known saying all come with a battle story attached.
42. The Saltire
St Andrew is said to have been martyred at Patras in Greece around 60 AD on an X-shaped cross, because he refused to die on the same shape of cross as Christ. Scotland’s flag comes from a later legend. In 832, King Óengus II of the Picts, outnumbered by the Angles near what’s now Athelstaneford in East Lothian, prayed for victory and saw a white saltire of cloud against a blue sky. He won, and the white cross on blue became Scotland’s flag. The village has a Flag Heritage Centre in an old doocot beside the church.
43. The thistle at Largs
In the late summer of 1263 King Haakon IV of Norway brought a fleet to the Ayrshire coast. Legend says his men took their boots off to creep up on the sleeping Scots in the dark, and one of them stood on a thistle. His yell woke the camp, the Scots won the Battle of Largs, and the thistle became Scotland’s flower. The plant was most likely the spear thistle, a common native species, rather than the cotton thistle on most badges, which probably didn’t grow in medieval Scotland. Largs is a short way up the coast from me, and the thistles there still hurt.
44. Robert the Bruce and the spider
The story goes that Robert the Bruce, beaten and hiding in a cave, watched a spider fail again and again to fix its web, until it finally succeeded, and took it as a sign to fight on. Caves on Rathlin Island and at Kirkpatrick Fleming both claim him. The spider seems to have reached Bruce through Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather in the late 1820s, and an earlier version was told about his ally James Douglas. The line ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ is younger still. It comes from William Hickson’s The Singing Master, published in 1836.
45. The Templar knights at Bannockburn
Legend says Robert the Bruce won at Bannockburn in 1314 with help from a band of Knights Templar, who had fled France after their order was suppressed. In the story, a charge of mysterious riders breaks the English line at the decisive moment. The details change with every telling, and the earliest accounts of the battle don’t name them.
46. The Brahan Seer
Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer, is Scotland’s Nostradamus, a labourer on the Seaforth estate near Dingwall who saw the future. He’s credited with foreseeing Culloden, and a day when Scotland would have its own parliament again. His last vision, the story goes, showed Lord Seaforth with another woman, and Lady Seaforth had him burned in a spiked tar barrel at Chanonry Point, where a memorial stone stands by the lighthouse. Records do show a Coinneach Odhar wanted as a ‘principal enchanter’ in 1577, a century before the legend’s date. He also warned that if the Eagle Stone in Strathpeffer fell three times, ships would sail to the village. It has fallen twice, and it’s now set in concrete.
Unexplained Scotland, including my own Wick ghost story
The last four are the Scottish ghost stories I’d tell first, two of them from Caithness.
47. Wick North Primary School
This one is mine. It was a warm evening and I was playing football on the ground in front of Wick North Primary, where you could see into every classroom window. Near home time I glanced up, and there was my old primary 5 teacher, or so I thought, looking down at us from one of the windows. She had long hair past her shoulders and a white dress, and she looked grey, which I put down to the setting sun on the glass. I waved. She didn’t wave back. She just kept staring. When a friend asked what I was waving at, I turned to point, and the window was empty.
My primary 5 teacher, I should say, was very much alive. Years later she cooked me dinner and showed me her copy of my first book. So whoever was at that window, it wasn’t her. The school has since been demolished, and I still don’t have an answer.
48. The selkie’s grave at St Trothan’s
I grew up with this Caithness legend. In St Trothan’s churchyard in Castletown, the story goes, lies a girl a fisherman found as a baby, wrapped in a sealskin. She grew up seeing the devil in the church rafters, was banned from the church and died in childbirth. A hollow at the foot of her grave never dries out. Local children believed that if you put your foot in it and whispered a wish, it would come true.
49. The day it rained herring in Strathpeffer
In 1828 Major Forbes Mackenzie of Fodderty, near Strathpeffer, crossed one of his fields and found a large patch of ground covered in herring fry, three to four inches long, fresh and whole. The sea was three miles away. The report in the Gentleman’s Magazine pointed out the fish weren’t bruised, so birds hadn’t dropped them, and suggested a waterspout from the firth. My grandparents ran a tearoom in Strathpeffer, so I’ve a soft spot for a village where it once rained fish.
50. The Flannan Isles Lighthouse
The Flannan Isles lie about 20 miles west of Lewis, and the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr was first lit in December 1899. A year later, on 15 December 1900, the steamer Archtor passed in poor weather and reported no light. Storms kept the relief ship Hesperus away until 26 December, and the relief keeper, Joseph Moore, found the station empty. James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald MacArthur were gone. One set of oilskins was still there and the clocks had stopped. The Northern Lighthouse Board’s superintendent concluded the men had most likely been swept away at the west landing. The famous log entries about weeping and praying don’t appear in the official records.
I told this one on video for Tamfest’s Tam’s Sunday Club, and the detail I always come back to is the ship in the dark, looking for a light that wasn’t there.
Where can you see Scottish urban legends for yourself?
Many Scottish urban legends left physical evidence you can visit. The Arthur’s Seat coffins and the 1671 horn are in Edinburgh museums, and the Devil’s card table is at the House of the Binns. Memorial stones mark the Brahan Seer’s death and Martin’s dragon. Here’s where to find the ones I’d visit first.
| Legend | Where to go |
|---|---|
| Arthur’s Seat coffins | National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh |
| The Devil’s card table | House of the Binns, near Linlithgow |
| Annie’s room | The Real Mary King’s Close, Royal Mile |
| The Black Mausoleum | Greyfriars Kirkyard, on a guided tour |
| The 1671 horn | University of Edinburgh Anatomical Museum, open days |
| The Gorbals Vampire | Southern Necropolis, Glasgow |
| Martin’s Stone | Balluderon, north of Dundee |
| Fingal’s Cauldron Seat | Machrie Moor, Isle of Arran |
| Brahan Seer memorial | Chanonry Point, near Fortrose |
| Den Finella | Near St Cyrus, Aberdeenshire |
If you visit one, make it the coffins. They’re small enough to walk past, and nobody in nearly 200 years has explained them.
Scottish Urban Legends FAQ
What is the scariest Scottish urban legend?
The scariest Scottish urban legend, for me, is the Mackenzie Poltergeist in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, because people still report bruises and scratches after guided tours of the Black Mausoleum. Sawney Bean is gorier, but he’s safely in the past. Mackenzie’s reputation is still growing every year.
What is the most haunted place in Scotland?
Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh is the place most often called the most haunted in Scotland, thanks to the Mackenzie Poltergeist. For a road, the A75 Kinmount Straight near Annan holds the title. For a castle, Glamis and Crathes are the usual contenders, each with a ghost story tied to a real room.
What is the difference between a myth, a legend and an urban legend?
A myth explains the world through gods or giants, like Finn McCool building the Giant’s Causeway. A legend attaches a story to a real person or place, like Robert the Bruce’s spider. An urban legend is a modern story passed around as true, usually through a friend of a friend, like the Gorbals Vampire.
Are any Scottish urban legends true?
Some Scottish urban legends are true at the core. The Arthur’s Seat coffins, the 1671 horn and the Flannan Isles disappearance are all documented. Others, like Sawney Bean, have no evidence from the time at all. Most sit in between, a real place or death with a supernatural explanation added later.
Everything else in a legend is decoration. Tonight in Wick, a kid is probably kicking a lamppost and waiting for the axeman, and I hope they get the chase they so desire. That’s how legends begin.
An’ if eh light goes oot, dinny wait aboot til see fit comes oot. (I wrote a whole guide to writing Highland dialect after getting it wrong the first time.)
Which legend did the kids in your town dare each other with? Tell me in the comments, and I’ll add the best ones to the next update.
If you’d like the next story the moment it goes live, subscribe below for new-post notifications. The longer versions of these tales are in my book Scottish Urban Legends: 50 Myths and True Stories, which went straight into an Amazon top 100 bestsellers list when it came out (John O’Groat Journal).
Happy reading,
Aaron Mullins
p.s. I realise that there are hundreds more Scottish myths, legends and true stories out there, and I would love to hear your favourites in the comments below.
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