What happened
Thomas Weir was born around 1600 in Lanarkshire. He fought in Ireland in 1641 and in 1649–1650 commanded Edinburgh’s town guard – it was he who guarded the Marquis of Montrose before his execution. Among the strict Presbyterians he was held up as a model of piety: famed for his gift of prayer, he drew listeners from miles around. He lived with his sister Jean (also called Grizel) in a turreted house on the winding West Bow, and never went anywhere without a black staff carved with satyrs’ heads. In 1670, aged about seventy, he fell gravely ill and, to the astonishment of the city, began confessing to monstrous sins – incest, bestiality and sorcery. The Lord Provost at first thought him mad, but on 9 April 1670 Weir and his sister were tried and condemned. Weir was strangled and burned at the Gallowlee, between Edinburgh and Leith; his staff was burned with him and, witnesses said, “gave rare turnings” in the fire. Jean was put to death in the Grassmarket. Their house stood empty for over a century: people said lights burned in it at night, a spinning wheel could be heard whirring, and the staff walked the street on its own, carrying a lantern before its master.
Witnesses
The trial record of 9 April 1670; contemporary diarists and ministers, including the authors of “Ravaillac Redivivus” (1678) and George Sinclair’s “Satan’s Invisible World Discovered” (1685); later Robert Chambers, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Explanations and hypotheses
Weir was not directly charged with a pact with the Devil – the indictment dealt chiefly with incest and bestiality, and witchcraft appears in it only in passing. Historians suspect the old man may have been mentally ill, and many details of his “wizardry,” such as the magic staff and the spinning wheel, were added later by preachers and writers of tales of terror. Sources disagree even on the date of the execution (11 or 12 April) and on how his sister died. The house itself, which Walter Scott described as being pulled down around 1830, finally disappeared in 1878. Weir’s story – a revered saint with a dark second self – may have influenced Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- Thomas Finlayson Henderson, Weir, Thomas (Dictionary of National Biography, t. 60, 1899; Wikisource)
- Francis Watt, Edinburgh and the Lothians, rozdz. XVI: Two Edinburgh Criminals (1912; Electric Scotland)
More: Wikipedia (en)