Latest / The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales / Mortsafes & a Mean Man | Canongate Kirkyard, Edinburgh, Scotland

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Mortsafes & a Mean Man | Canongate Kirkyard, Edinburgh, Scotland · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Cannon Gate Kirkyard, located in Edinburgh, Scotland.
0:25
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:28
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:29
Kristin: Step carefully.
0:30
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: It's been quite some time since the Grim has opened a gate in Scotland.
0:38
Kristin: Season 1, we only opened one gate, but Grayfird's Kirkyard is a legacy all of its own.
0:44
Kristin: Now we're back, digging into another historical burial ground, that's arguably just as legendary, haunted, and full of grim tales.
0:53
Kristin: In Edinburgh, the Royal Mile is the spine running through the heart of Old Town, from the volcanic rock of Edinburgh Castle at its crown, down through the closes and winds of the medieval city, all the way to the gates of Holyrood Palace at its foot.
1:07
Kristin: For nearly three centuries, that mile has been lined with the living and the dead in equal measure.
1:13
Kristin: Halfway along its descent, tucked behind the sandstone walls of Cannonate Kirch, is a place where some of the most consequential mines of the Enlightenment were laid quietly into the ground.
1:24
Kristin: The Cannonate Kirkyard has been receiving the dead since 1688, but it's not a grand Victorian necropolis.
1:30
Kristin: There's no soaring obelques or no marble angels frozen midplay.
1:35
Kristin: What it holds instead are 62 tombs, 140 monuments, and 150 wall plaques pressed against the stone of the church itself.
1:44
Kristin: A dense, compact city of the dead, squeezed against one of the most famous streets in Scotland, walk through its iron gates today, and you're stepping into a place where the stories of the dead have never stopped unfolding.
1:57
Kristin: A young poet who died forgotten, only to be mourned by the man who owed him everything, the father of modern economics, buries Tessa in the house where he spent his final years, his grave now a pilgrim site for scholars from around the world.
2:12
Kristin: Rows of anonymous soldiers lying beneath open grass, their names never carved into any stone at all.
2:18
Kristin: And somewhere in this kirkyard, or perhaps nowhere at all, rustic gravestone that's said to have inspired one of the most beloved characters in all of English literature.
2:27
Kristin: But Cannonate doesn't give up its dead easily, but it does give up their stories.
2:32
Kristin: The Cannonate was, until the 19th century, a separate parish from Edinburgh, a distinct borough with its own identity, pressed up against the city, but never quite part of it.
2:41
Kristin: When King James VII converted Holyrood Abbey into a royal chapel in 1687, the Cannongate congregation suddenly found themselves without a church.
2:51
Kristin: The solution came quickly.
2:53
Kristin: A new kirk was founded in 1688, completed in 1691, and a generous parcel of ground was purchased alongside of it.
3:01
Kristin: That ground became the kirkyard, and began receiving burials almost immediately before the mortar of the church walls had even fully set.
3:09
Kristin: But the parish boundaries that governed who could be buried here held a particular twist, one that would shape the character of this kirkyard for nearly two centuries.
3:18
Kristin: By an ancient charter linking Edinburgh Castle to the parish of Holyrood, the castle fell under Cannongate jurisdiction rather than Edinburgh's.
3:26
Kristin: What that meant in practice was that the soldiers who died while garrisoned at the castle, one of Scotland's most important military strongholds, were carried down the royal mile and laid to rest in the northern section of this kirkyard.
3:37
Kristin: For almost two hundred years they kept arriving.
3:40
Kristin: The soldiers, the scholars, the poets, and the powerful would all eventually find their way here.
3:46
Kristin: Some would be remembered, some would fade into stone, and some would leave behind stories that refused to disappear.
3:53
Kristin: There is a stone in Cannonate Kirkyard, set beneath the cherry tree to the left of the church, that wasn't placed here by the man whose name it bears.
4:02
Kristin: Robert Ferguson was born in Edinburgh in 1750, the son of a clerk with the British Linen Company.
4:08
Kristin: He was educated at the Royal High School, then at the University of St.
4:12
Kristin: Andrews, where he began writing poetry, first in the English pastoral verse, then increasingly in Scots, the language of the streets where he had grown up.
4:21
Kristin: He was sharp, funny, and alive to the world around him.
4:24
Kristin: His Edinburgh was not the Edinburgh of drawing rooms and learned societies.
4:29
Kristin: It was the Edinburgh of closes, taverns, and markets, a city that smelled of coal smoke, fish, and damp stone.
4:36
Kristin: The same city that earned the name Old Ricky, Old Smoky.
4:40
Kristin: For the hazen settled between its narrow tenements, Ferguson wrote about it all.
4:45
Kristin: His most celebrated poem, Old Riki, published in 1773, was a vivid and satrical portrait of Edinburgh life, its noise and its swallow, its humor and its energy.
4:56
Kristin: It was the work of a man who loved his city enough to see it clearly.
5:00
Kristin: He would never write another major work.
5:03
Kristin: In 1774, he suffered a fall, likely down one of Edinburgh's treacherous old town staircases, possibly after drinking, and possibly made worse from an underlying mental illness that he had been struggling with for some time.
5:17
Kristin: The injury left him with head trauma that he wouldn't recover from.
5:20
Kristin: He was taken to Darien House, the city asylum on Bristol Street, the building that would eventually give its name to the Bedlam Theater that occupies the site today.
5:29
Kristin: He died there on the 16th of October in 1774.
5:33
Kristin: He was just 24 years old.
5:36
Kristin: His family, though, couldn't afford a gravestone.
5:38
Kristin: He was buried without one, and the kirkyard soil closed over his name.
5:43
Kristin: Thirteen years past.
5:45
Kristin: In 1787, a young poet from Ayrshire named Robert Burns made his first visit to Edinburgh.
5:52
Kristin: By then, Burns had already published his first collection, and she's something close to celebrity in the city's literary circles.
5:59
Kristin: But one of the first things he did was walk into Cannonate Kirkyard, searching for the grave of Robert Ferguson.
6:05
Kristin: He had been reading Ferguson since his early twenties.
6:08
Kristin: In a letter written that same year to Dr.
6:10
Kristin: John Moore, Burns explained that he had nearly abandoned poetry before discovering Ferguson's Scott verse.
6:16
Kristin: It showed him that the language of his own community, the language of farms, firesides, and the ordinary Scots-speaking people was capable of carrying poetry that could endure.
6:27
Kristin: He owed Ferguson a debt that could never truly be repaid.
6:31
Kristin: What he found in the kirkyard was a patch of ground with no stone, thirteen years and nothing.
6:36
Kristin: Burns was troubled enough by this that he wrote about it, expressing his disappointment that the grave remained unmarked for so long after the poet's death.
6:45
Kristin: Then he did something about it.
6:46
Kristin: He petitioned the managers of the kirkyard for permission to erect a stone at his own expense and direction.
6:52
Kristin: Permission was granted.
6:53
Kristin: Burns designed the monument, paid for it in installments over several years.
6:58
Kristin: A sign.
6:59
Kristin: The record suggests of just how much the gesture cost him, and wrote the inscription himself.
7:04
Kristin: The stone wasn't erected until 1828, 32 years after Burns' own death in 1796.
7:11
Kristin: The reasons for the delay aren't entirely clear.
7:15
Kristin: Whether the delay was administrative, financial, or simply the inertia of a city that had already moved on from Ferguson isn't recorded.
7:24
Kristin: What is recorded is that it stands exactly as Burns intended.
7:28
Kristin: The stone bears his four lines, carved into the face of it.
7:31
Kristin: No sculptured marble here, nor pompous leg, no storied urned, nor animated bust.
7:38
Kristin: The simple stone directs Pale Scotia's way to Borough Sorrows or Poet's Dust.
7:44
Kristin: On the reverse, the stone records that it was erected by Robert Burns, and that by a special grant from the kirkyard managers, this place of burial would remain forever sacred to the memory of Robert Ferguson.
7:56
Kristin: Then a third Robert enters the story here, though only briefly.
8:01
Kristin: Robert Lewis Stevenson, the Edinburgh-born author of Treasure Island and the strange case of Dr.
8:06
Kristin: Jekyll and Mr.
8:07
Kristin: Hyde, was also drawn to Ferguson's grave later in the 19th century.
8:12
Kristin: He planned to restore and reinscribe the stone, but he died before he could do so.
8:17
Kristin: A plaque within the enclosure around the grave records this intention that never became action.
8:22
Kristin: In 2004, a life-size bronched statue of Ferguson was installed at the entrance to the kirkyard.
8:29
Kristin: A young man caught mid-stride, the poet made permanent at the gate of a place where he's once buried without a name.
8:36
Kristin: Three Roberts, one grave, and a tradition in the living refusing to let the dead disappear.
8:42
Kristin: And yet not every grave here is marked by absence or restored by memory.
8:47
Kristin: Some are marked by presence, quiet, deliberate, and watch over by the weight of what they left behind.
8:54
Kristin: There are graves that draw mourners, graves that draw pilgrims.
8:58
Kristin: Adam Smith's grave in the eastern section of the curricular draws the latter, economists and scholars who come from around the world to stand before a railed stone monument that was once described as somehow too small to notice.
9:12
Kristin: Smith was born in Carcaldy, a coastal town in Fife in 1723.
9:18
Kristin: The son of a customs controller who died before his son was born.
9:22
Kristin: His early life contained at least one usual episode.
9:25
Kristin: At the age of four, he was briefly kidnapped by a group of travelers, and later returned to his family.
9:31
Kristin: Smith studied at Glasgow, Oxford, and later held a chair in moral philosophy at Glasgow.
9:37
Kristin: He traveled through France, where he met Voltaire, Brenderman Franklin, and the physiocrats whose ideas about trade and agriculture would sharpen his own thinking.
9:47
Kristin: He returned to Scotland and spent a decade writing.
9:50
Kristin: In 1776, he published an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, the book that would, by more than any other single text, lay the foundations for modern economic thought, its arguments about free markets, the division of labor, and what Smith called the invisible hand, the unseen mechanism by which individuals pursuing their own interests invertently serve the broader good of society, changed the direction of public policy and economic thinking for generations.
10:21
Kristin: The phrase invisible hand appears only three times across all of Smith's writings.
10:26
Kristin: Its influence, however, has been incalculable.
10:29
Kristin: In 1778, Smith was appointed Commissioner of Customs in Scotland and moved to Edinburgh, settling in a Panmer house just off the Cannon Gate, a building that still stands today and now serves as the venue for economic forums.
10:44
Kristin: He lived and worked there for the last 12 years of his life.
10:47
Kristin: When he died in July of 1790, his executors were two men who had attended his final days and would serve as literary trustees.
10:56
Kristin: The physicist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton, founder of modern geology, Smith characteristically had left instructions for them to destroy any manuscripts not ready for publication.
11:08
Kristin: They complied.
11:09
Kristin: He was buried in Cannegate Kirkyard steps from his home, in a grave that is modest almost to the point of contradiction, given the magnitude of what he left behind.
11:19
Kristin: Smith's grave has acquired a strange ritual over the years.
11:22
Kristin: Economists visiting Edinburgh make their way here, sometimes leaving coins and small offerings.
11:29
Kristin: A secular pilgrimage with no prescribed gesture, only a shared impulse.
11:34
Kristin: The stone itself is railed and simple.
11:36
Kristin: Smith died with regrets, as biographers note.
11:40
Kristin: He had planned additional works on politics and justice, and felt he hadn't got enough.
11:45
Kristin: The man who reshaped the world's understanding of markets died believing there was still more to say.
11:50
Kristin: And there may be one more connection between Smith and this kirkyard, a thread that wouldn't become apparent until years after his death, and which belongs to the next story.
12:00
Kristin: Here's what's known, believed, claimed, or possibly invented.
12:05
Kristin: In 1863, a man named Ebenezer Lennox Scrooge was buried in the Cannongate Kirkyard, beneath a grand tomb.
12:13
Kristin: He was a corn merchant by trade, a meal man, in the terminology of the time, and by some accounts the great nephew of Adam Smith himself, very not far from his famous relation.
12:25
Kristin: He was also, by reputation, a man of considerable energy and few inhibitions.
12:30
Kristin: The historical record includes an incident in which he allegedly grew up the Countess of Mansfield during his session of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the kind of behavior that tends to ensure a certain kind of remembrance.
12:44
Kristin: His gravestone read, Here lies Ebenezer Lennox Scroogey, a meal man.
12:49
Kristin: In 1841, five years after Scrooge's burial, Charles Dickens came to Edinburgh to give a lecture, and he had time to spare.
12:58
Kristin: He went for a walk through the Cannon Gate courtyard.
13:00
Kristin: The story, and it must be said clearly that this is where the ground becomes uncertain, is that Dickens, in the dimming light of an Edinburgh evening, stood before Scrooge's gravestone and misread its inscription, where it said, Me ol man, he thought he saw a mean man.
13:16
Kristin: He was reportedly struck by the thought, what kind of life must a man have lived, that for all eternity, the only thing remembered of him was his meanness.
13:25
Kristin: The idea lodged itself.
13:27
Kristin: Two years later, when he sat down to write a Christmas story, he reached back into his notes, found the name, and altered it slightly.
13:35
Kristin: Ebenezer Scrooge was born from a misreading in a Scottish kirkyard.
13:40
Kristin: And that is the story, as it's been told for decades in guidebooks, walking tours, and Edinburgh legend.
13:46
Kristin: And it's a wonderful story, and it's also very possibly entirely fabricated.
13:51
Kristin: Historians who have searched Edinburgh census records for Scrooge have found nothing.
13:57
Kristin: The gravestone itself is gone, reportedly lost during redevelopment in the 1930s, making verification impossible.
14:05
Kristin: The minister of Canon Gay Kirk has noted there's nothing in the burial records to support the story, while allowing with some ambiguity that there are other figures said to be buried here who also leave no trace in the records.
14:18
Kristin: The scholarly consensus, to the extent one exists, is that the Scrooge story is probably a hoax, possibly even a later invention attached to Dickens, who wasn't above shaping the mythology around his own work.
14:32
Kristin: And yet visitors still come, tour groups still gather, guides still point to a patch of ground near Adam Smith's rail tomb, and tell the story of a misread inscription that changed literary history.
14:44
Kristin: The Cannon Gate Kirkyard has absorbed the legend, the way old grounds absorb everything eventually, and the absence of evidence hasn't made the story any less alive.
14:54
Kristin: Whether Scrooge existed or not, whether Dickens ever stood here at all, the story has taken root regardless, and that may be the most Edinburgh thing about it.
15:05
Kristin: A city that knows how to keep a ghost, even ones that may have never existed.
15:09
Kristin: In the northern section of the kirkyard, the ground opens into a wide stretch of grass surrounding a column of rose-colored granite that rises 26 feet from the earth.
15:19
Kristin: The monument was erected in 1880 by Ford of the Holyrood Glassworks and unveiled in the presence of General Hope and the 71st Highlanders.
15:28
Kristin: The inscription reads, To the memory of soldiers who died in Edinburgh Castle, situated in the parish of Canningate, interned here with military honors from the year 1692 to 1880.
15:41
Kristin: Before this column stood here, the site was only grass, and before the grass, there were nearly 200 years of soldiers beneath it, carried down from the castle to this kirkyard.
15:51
Kristin: Because of an ancient charter that bound Edinburgh Castle to the Canongate Parish, when they died in garrison of wounds, illness, or the slow wear of service, they were brought here.
16:02
Kristin: Most received no individual monument, no names were carved, only regiments, only rank.
16:08
Kristin: Most of them never became names, only entries and a ledger of service.
16:13
Kristin: The column stands for all of them, the named, the unnamed, the ones who died in distant campaigns, and the ones were brought home to this hillside city, and the ones who simply wore out in the shadow of a castle they had served.
16:26
Kristin: The inscription on the base is taken from the epistles to Timothy.
16:30
Kristin: The inscription reads, But their country's sons will round this stone, off speak of the deeds of the brave, and gratefully look on the grassy sod that grows over the soldier's grave.
16:42
Kristin: The grass is still there, the column is still there.
16:46
Kristin: Whether anyone still speaks of the deeds is harder to say, but not all the stories in Cannongate Kirkyard belong to memory alone.
16:54
Kristin: Some belong to what was taken, what was disturbed, and what refused to stay where it was placed.
17:00
Kristin: And in a city like Edinburgh, where medicine, morality, and the desperation once shared the same narrow streets, even the dead were never entirely beyond reach.
17:11
Kristin: The kirkyard has never been a place the living left alone, even in death.
17:15
Kristin: In the 19th century, Edinburgh's medical school had a problem.
17:19
Kristin: The study of anatomy required cadavers, and the legal supply couldn't meet the demands.
17:24
Kristin: When the medical school needed, the resurrectionists were willing to provide for a price.
17:30
Kristin: They were known by several names body snatchers, stack'em-up men, resurrection men.
17:36
Kristin: They worked at night, moving through Edinburgh's kirkyards with practice efficiency.
17:41
Kristin: The method was precise.
17:42
Kristin: Dig down at the head of a fresh grave, drive iron hooks beneath the coffin lid, and haul the body to the surface by rope before the soil could settle, and betray the disturbance.
17:53
Kristin: A fresh grave could be opened and restored in under an hour.
17:57
Kristin: Cannegate kirkyard was a prime target.
18:00
Kristin: Those with means responded by placing Mortsafe over the dead, iron cages bolted into the earth, or iron bars laid directly across the grave, meant to hold the body in place long enough that it would be no longer in use to the anatomists.
18:14
Kristin: You could still see some of them in the kirkyard today, rusted into the ground, doing a job that no longer needs doing.
18:22
Kristin: The poor, though, had no such protection.
18:24
Kristin: They could only hope.
18:25
Kristin: Robert Louis Stevenson, who already haunts this kirkyard through his connection to Ferguson's grave, knew the stories intimately.
18:32
Kristin: In his 1884 short story, The Body Snatcher, it drew directly from Edinburgh's resurrectionist history, and on the case of Birken Hare, who graduated from grave robbery to murder when fresh corpses became harder to obtain.
18:47
Kristin: Stevenson understood what Edinburgh already knew: that the dead were not always safe in the ground, and that the line between medical establishment and the criminal underworld in this city had once been very thin indeed.
19:01
Kristin: But the resurrectionists were not the only dark presence attached to Cannon Gate.
19:05
Kristin: A short distance up the royal mile at Queensbury House, now absorbed into the Scottish Parliament complex, stands a building with a story that never fully left the neighborhood.
19:15
Kristin: James Douglas, the young Earl of Drumlugrig, was the eldest son of the Duke of Queensbury, and was considered violently unstable from childhood.
19:23
Kristin: He was kept under luck and key within Queensbury House, a ward of his own family.
19:28
Kristin: On the night of January 16, 1707, the very night his father signed the act of union between Scotland and England.
19:36
Kristin: While the city erupted in festivities and riots outside, Drumrodig escraped his room and found a kitchen boy working alone, killed him, roasted him on a spit over the kitchen fire, and was discovered mid-act when the household returned.
19:50
Kristin: He was apprehended, and he was confined again, and he died eight years later at the age of 17 and was buried elsewhere, not in Cannonate Kirkyard.
20:00
Kristin: But the story has never left this stretch of the Royal Mile.
20:03
Kristin: Ghost tour guides call him the Cannibal of Canning, and the building where it happened still stands.
20:09
Kristin: Its basement said it contained the original kitchen oven.
20:13
Kristin: Some claim that on certain nights, sounds rise from the basement that have no easy explanation.
20:18
Kristin: Whether you believe that or not is your own affair.
20:21
Kristin: What is not in dispute is that the Cannon Gate has always attracted that kind of history that doesn't stay buried, and that the kind of kirkyard at its center has absorbed more than its fair share.
20:32
Kristin: The cannon gate of kirkyard is small enough to walk in an afternoon, large enough to spend a lifetime in, or longer.
20:39
Kristin: The stories left in this ground outnumber the stones that mark them, and the stones that once marked them are now gone.
20:46
Kristin: We will return.
20:48
Kristin: The dead are not finished with us yet.
20:50
Kristin: For now, the stories of Cannon Gate slip back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
20:56
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil in the Cannongate Kirkyard, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
21:04
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn.
21:07
Kristin: Yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.