The story has been memorialized in books and movies, but historians now say that while the pup existed, his extended mourning was probably a fabricated marketing ploy by the cemetery curator and a nearby restaurant owner to encourage tourism. Edinburghers have championed the story of the Greyfriars Bobby: a loyal dog that stood vigil over his deceased owner’s grave for 14 years until his own death, when he was buried near his beloved master’s plot. In 2006, The Scotsman wrote that there had been 450 documented attacks, 140 people who had collapsed, and even suspicion that the Mackenzie Poltergeist was responsible for the death of one local psychic.īut not all of the cemetery’s legends are so ghoulish.įor the past 140 years, a noble-looking, bronze Skye terrier has stood guard outside the grounds and watched over the kirkyard. Today, tour purveyors conducting nighttime excursions around the graveyard have reported some mysterious happenings many participants have emerged from inside the prison and mausoleum with bruises, burns, scratches, and even broken bones, attributed to long-dead prisoners and their violent oppressor. Conditions at the prison were so brutal that only 257 of the prisoners came out alive (a portion of whom escaped or pledged loyalty to the crown) four months after their mass incarceration.

It was once home to an estimated 1200 unfortunate members of a failed anti-government revolution in 1679. The Covenanters’ Prison is connected to Greyfriars Kirkyard by a stone gateway and locked metal grate near MacKenzie’s mausoleum. It was a fate predicted by famed Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson who referenced MacKenzie in his 1879 book “Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes,” writing, “When a man’s soul is certainly in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly some time or other the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave.” Known during his lifetime as a ruthless persecutor of the Scottish Covenanters, a Presbyterian movement in the 17th century, MacKenzie’s spirit, according to legend, was released in 1999 when a homeless man looking for a spot to sleep broke into his final resting place, the Black Mausoleum. Haunting the cemetery is George MacKenzie, called the MacKenzie Poltergeist, who is said to be one of the most aggressive and active paranormal figures around.

Haunted graveyard