The Mackenzie Poltergeist: The Judge, the Covenanters' Prison, and the Tomb Someone Should Not Have Opened
Greyfriars Kirkyard sits in the middle of Edinburgh, a walled burial ground on a slope below the castle, ringed by tenements and the back of the old university. Tourists go there for two reasons. The first is a small dog: Greyfriars Bobby, the terrier who supposedly lay on his master's grave for fourteen years, whose statue at the gate has had its nose rubbed gold. The second is the graveyard itself, which is one of the loveliest and most photographed in Britain, full of skulls and hourglasses and winged souls carved in blackened stone, and which lent J.K. Rowling a name or two she found on the stones. And then, at the far end, past Bobby and past the tourists, there is a locked gate. Beyond it is a strip of ground called the Covenanters' Prison, and in it stands the mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie. The gate is padlocked by the City of Edinburgh Council. You may not go in without a guide licensed to take you. And in the twenty-odd years since a homeless man broke into that...