The Poltergeist Who Follows You Home

AJ (0:08)

Gather out. This happened in Edinburgh, Scotland. A homeless man slipped into an open tomb at Greyfriar's Kirkyard, looking for a dry place to sleep. He took a few steps and felt the floor shift. Then it gave out.

He dropped into a pit filled with human remains.

Lots of them. He crawled over skeletons wearing filthy clothes, over skulls, some still with hair. He squeezed through a space in the wall, ran, and never looked back.

This was the grave of Bloody Mackenzie, a 17th century Lord Advocate infamous for his brutality. When his tomb was disturbed, Bloody Mackenzie woke up. But worse than that, he got out.

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In 1637, Charles I decided the Scottish Church needed fixing. Scotland was Presbyterian. No bishops, no kings' influence, nobody outside the congregation would the say in how a Scot prayed. Charles wanted it to look like the Church of England, so he sent a new prayer book and ordered the country to use it. The Scots saw this as an attack on their religious independence.

The next winter, a group of Presbyterians wrote the National Covenant. In the Covenant, they swore loyalty to the king, but refused his authority over their faith. Copies went to every town in the country, but it was signed at Greyfriar's Kirkyard. The signers were called Covenanters, and their covenant started 50 years of war. Charles I lost his head in 1649, but his son continued the fight. Ministers were thrown out of their churches, so congregations posted lookouts and met in open fields. The government called the meetings treason. Violence broke out between the government and the Covenanters and escalated for years. The war finally ended in June of 1679 at a bridge over the River Clyde. Government troops broke the Covenanter army in about an hour. 1,200 men surrendered and were marched to Edinburgh for prosecution. And the man in charge of that prosecution was the Lord Advocate, Sir George Mackenzie.

There were trials, public hangings, then severed heads mounted on the city gates. Sir George made it clear, the cost of treason is your head. And those men were the lucky ones. The rest were held in pens in a field behind the Old Town Wall. Edinburgh still calls that field the Covenanters Prison. The prisoners had no roofs to protect them from the cold Scottish rain. No fires were allowed. They got four ounces of bread a day. That's it. The suffering and starvation were intentional. Any prisoner willing to sign a loyalty oath could walk out. Most didn't sign it. So they stayed in the pens and endured the cold and hunger and fever. By November, only 257 were left, and they were sent to the American colonies to work as slaves on the plantations. But their ships never made it.

Ten days out, the ship hit some rocks and started to sink. The crew made it to shore, but the prisoners were trapped in the ship's hold. The captain got paid for prisoners delivered, or prisoners who died on the ship. Not for prisoners who escaped. So he had the hatches nailed shut. One crewman went back to the wreck with an axe and got some men out, but most went down with the ship.

For days, bodies were washing up all along the coast. That's when Sir George got his nickname, Bloody Mackenzie. He died in 1691 and was buried just a short walk from the field where his prisoners starved. His tomb was called the Black Mausoleum.