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153

Unearthed is a new weekly documentary podcast that is made in and mostly about Edinburgh. If I get on so cordially with the present generation of audiodramas because they often remind me of theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe, Unearthed has literally emerged straight from the world of Edinburgh’s commercial walking tours. Ryan Latto, the show’s presenter and interviewer, is a tour guide who is out of work and no doubt restless in the waters of his soul during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet he has not turned to podcasting merely as the nearest socially-distanced substitute for entertaining tourists. In Unearthed he has a new master: truth, rather than entertainment.

It is as if we have stepped off the Royal Mile and into the tranquillity of some overlooked, minor courtyard, out of earshot of all of the history tours’ normal bombast. Here, Latto frets openly about the biases, inaccuracies, and clichés that blight his workaday material. His podcast will take an uncharacteristically serious look at what will be probably more familiar to us as silly history.

There are episodes on the alleged witch Agnes Sampson and the alleged infanticist “Half-Hangit” Maggie Dickson. Other episodes rather skilfully connect figures from Edinburgh’s past with up-to-date political issues. We thus push on through the private chambers of the Victorian surgeon Dr James Barry to pay a visit to modern trans rights activism; we also abseil down from Henry Dundas to the BLM furore at the base of his column in St Andrew Square.

The chief strength of Unearthed is its format. It will select a small handful of people who have a particular knowledge about the episode’s subject and it will then engage them in solid conversation. These interviews are allowed to flow and wander but there is somehow, in the end, very little rambling. A potential problem arises, though, if the contributors do not between them cover the whole story. From now on, I wish to devote myself exclusively to the episode on the Mackenzie Poltergeist.

Strangely, this is a subject that I have never previously written about, or even really reflected on, despite my having lived in Edinburgh since 2001. I suspect that if the poltergeist had popped up in any other city, I would have tackled it years ago. Perhaps it feels less exciting because it is so close to home. Anyhow, Latto’s podcast furnishes me with a useful and timely prompt with which to meditate upon this prize goblin.

City Of The Dead Tours have been operating in Edinburgh since 1999. Within Greyfriars Kirkyard, they have been awarded a commercial monopoly over access to the Covenanters Prison. This is a section of a former field where around three hundred Covenanters who had been defeated in the Battle of Bothwell Brig (1679) had been kept prisoner. The justification for City Of The Dead’s monopoly eludes me and it seems manifestly unfair, given that the land is publically owned and an especially sensitive site in the history of Presbyterianism. The company have been long farming this plot for ghosts and their tour parties are now reliably molested by an entity that they choose to market as “the Mackenzie Poltergeist.”

There are unexpected drops in temperature; some tourists lose consciousness or experience feelings of suffocation; and there are countless photographed instances of flesh that has been scratched or bruised. The poltergeist’s depredations are largely cosmetic, in that they always go up to and never beyond the point where a victim would require hospitalisation. Nobody has ever had an eye gouged out.

As the saying goes, the Mackenzie Poltergeist is neither Mackenzie nor a poltergeist. It is not a poltergeist because it is seldom noisy (“poltergeist” is the German for “noisy ghost”) and it does not pelt its victims with projectiles. The name of the punitive seventeenth-century Lord Advocate George “Bloody” Mackenzie has become attached to the goblin only because the first ever attack had occurred inside a nearby mausoleum where his remains are stowed. The poltergeist has never actually admitted to being Mackenzie.

Today the poltergeist is somewhat set in its ways. It is generally as predictable and as small scale in its behaviour as Greyfriars Bobby, the sentimental terrier that had once famously bedevilled the same kirkyard. It reminds me of how the majesty of Loch Ness – its phenomenal size and depth – can be communicated to some visitors only with the aid of a weirdly friendly cartoon dinosaur. With the poltergeist, the bleakness of all of the cemetery’s piled-up death is likewise switched with a cartoonish proxy, something that is petty and merely a nuisance. If you disable or even blind your imagination within Greyfriars Kirkyard, then the poltergeist is what remains.

Between 1999 and 2003, there were three significant events in the launching of the goblin’s career. Each of them had involved humans encroaching upon what was understood to be, for the purposes of the narrative, the creature’s rightful territory.

Firstly, a homeless man is said to have broken into Mackenzie’s mausoleum in 1999 and fallen through the floor, disturbing the beauty sleep of some skeletons. The rousing or summoning of the poltergeist is today attributed to this event. Secondly a spiritualist minister, the Reverend Colin Grant, is said to have died months after attempting to perform an exorcism on the goblin. The botched ritual had supposedly wound it up a treat. And thirdly, two teenaged hooligans had raided the mausoleum in 2003 and located and decapitated Mackenzie’s corpse. Wittily, they had simulated oral sex with the head, in front of another teenager who would later testify against them at their trial. The head was successfully rescued and the eldest teenager narrowly avoided jail.

City Of The Dead had somehow managed to deftly extricate themselves from the widespread horror at the decapitation. You might think that these antics with the head had otherwise delivered a suitable climax to the company’s sensationalist exploitation of human burial sites. I have not been able to verify that City Of The Dead were responsible for photographs of the head appearing online (Latto’s podcast reveals that this item was kept in their office in the aftermath of the raid). It seems highly peculiar that the authorities would release such pictures, though, since their prosecution of the teenagers had placed such an emphasis on treating human remains with respect.

The third event had overshadowed the poltergeist, making it for once appear passive and overwhelmed. The actions of the teenagers had possessed an undeniable competitive edge in malevolence. In recent years, City Of The Dead have increasingly lost their grip over the other two events as well.

The sceptic Hayley Stevens has surveyed the inconsistencies in the origin story about the homeless man. It is certainly strange that City Of The Dead can amass mountains of photographic evidence about the poltergeist’s scratches but that they have never sought to identify or consult the person who had supposedly awakened it. Meanwhile, Latto’s podcast thoroughly rumbles the second story, in revealing how the Reverend Grant had already suffered “six heart attacks” prior to his date with the goblin. Latto demonstrates that a stray remark that Grant had made about his own ailing health had been misinterpreted by a journalist from the Edinburgh Evening News as referring to the poltergeist’s immanent revenge.

The podcast nonetheless allows Jamie Corstorphine, the manager of City Of The Dead, to assert without any challenge that, “The homeless guy, yes, that aspect of it was very true…” But Corstorphine is a mere altar boy and conspicuously absent from the Unearthed podcast is the high priest of this religion that they have all created. For this has been a narrative in which a single individual has always controlled most of the available information.

This mysteriously silent figure, who the podcast only mentions on a couple of chance occasions, is the phenomena’s true “focus” or “inductor.” It isn’t George Mackenzie. It isn’t Richard Frazer, the minister of Greyfriars Kirk, either. Nor is it some intrepid tomb raider who we might envision poised cinematically over the scandalised bones.

Jan-Andrew Henderson is the entrepreneur who had set up City of the Dead in 1999. Next, in 2001, he had published The Ghost That Haunted Itself, an insider’s account of the haunting. Most of today’s common knowledge about the poltergeist can be traced back to this book.

The control of the information about the poltergeist is critical to its story and possibly to its day-to-day survival. In Unearthed, Latto interviews Ann Treherne, the current chair of the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre, who maintains that “there’s too much evidence…. there is so much evidence with the Mackenzie Poltergeist that it becomes indisputable.” But all of this is sterile and essentially meaningless evidence, which has been simply collected rather than being interrogated in any profound way. For instance, during my research I have not so far encountered any case of the victims’ scratches being examined by a medical professional, to ascertain whether they were inflicted with fingernails or with some foreign instrument. It is in itself remarkable that such a basic test has never appeared to have been carried out.

Of course, part of the innovation of these kirkyard tours is that they replicate the intensity of a séance without the participants necessarily realising that this is what is happening. And when you try to focus on whatever it is that had befallen a specific tour, “you seize the flower, its bloom is shed.” Most of the tours are made up of people who are briefly visiting Edinburgh and who it would be unreasonable to detain with questions. Testimonies are too slippery to therefore ever pin down.

In some playful symbolism, The Ghost That Haunted Itself is ghost-written. Henderson writes about himself pseudonymously and in the third person. In the book he is “Ben Scott” and, what is more, he comes to identify with the poltergeist within the thieves’ den of their shared fictionality. When Scott is experiencing what is recognisably a midlife crisis – but what Henderson would prefer to depict as a more existential one – he confides in the poltergeist that, “You’re more real than me, I think. People believe in you.”

The Ghost That Haunted Itself is often a fun book. But in a rather lamentable exposure of Edinburgh’s tour-guide sector, it is also evidently a work of amateur history that was written before Wikipedia was available. For example, Henderson claims that King Charles I was “openly Catholic” and that he was executed “in 1650.” Even more excruciatingly, there are blunders about Greyfriars Kirkyard itself, with Henderson reporting that the author James Hogg is a tenant (he is in fact buried in Ettrick).

If this book stands first and foremost amongst the sources for the Mackenzie Poltergeist, then maybe the mist is beginning to clear. Yet Henderson is actually determined to cultivate a strategic ambiguity about the poltergeist’s precise status. I had once lived with the guys who had set up Viajar por Escocia and so I have witnessed the tough, street-fighting world of Edinburgh’s commercial tourism up close. For one seeking a maximum return upon the investment of capital, it does not pay to alienate either those who are adamant that ghosts are real or those who are interested in more sophisticated psychological or psychosomatic theories. Henderson accordingly eggs on both.

There are three broad explanations about what the Mackenzie Poltergeist entails: (a) it is an individual who has returned from a future state to meddle in the affairs of the living, (b) it is trickery and manipulation that are familiar from the playbook of Victorian séances or (c) it is phenomena that people will unconsciously unleash upon themselves, should the psychological circumstances prove conducive.

If I was forced to bet millions of pounds, I would put the whole lot on (b), but Henderson can be hardly expected to concur with this. Instead, he evenly divides the weight in his hands between the idea that the goblin is an objectively real creature and that it might be triggered by the rampaging “alarm pheromones” of skittish tourists. So long as the tourists keep coming and keep paying, it does not particularly matter to him which of these interpretations they find the most gratifying.

Latto concludes that the “real” George Mackenzie had been a complex individual, who had upheld both the values of the Scottish Enlightenment and the barbarism of monarchical power. Mackenzie still seems greatly more rounded than the man behind the Mackenzie Poltergeist, who has spent the last twenty years cynically selling fairground thrills amidst the tombstones. I do not approve of Latto’s acquiescence in Corstorphine’s judgement that the Covenanters’ Prison was “the world’s first concentration camp.” The Jews weren’t free to walk out of Auschwitz if they swore an oath to Hitler. Even so, what this site means is serious enough and historically important enough not to be commemorated predominantly through pinches and scratches.

[A forthcoming episode of Unearthed will look at Robert Kirk, whose writing Tychy has reviewed here.]