Laura Wright 
For years, Major Thomas Weir seemed to be one of the last men in Edinburgh anyone would suspect of serving the Devil.
He was a soldier.
A Covenanter.
A deeply religious Presbyterian.
His prayers were so passionate and eloquent that people gathered simply to hear him speak. In the intensely religious community surrounding Edinburgh’s West Bow, Weir acquired a reputation for extraordinary piety.
Some called him Angelic Thomas.
Others knew him as one of the Bowhead Saints.
Then, in 1670, the elderly Major became ill.
And for reasons no one could understand, Thomas Weir began confessing.
By the time he finished, the Bowhead Saint had transformed himself into one of the most notorious figures in Scottish supernatural lore.
The Bowhead Saint
Thomas Weir was born around 1599 and came from Lanarkshire.
He served as a soldier and became associated with Scotland’s Covenanters, eventually settling in Edinburgh.
The West Bow where he lived was a steep, narrow, crooked street connecting the Grassmarket with the higher portions of the Old Town. Robert Chambers later described it as an ancient and peculiar place filled with tall houses, projecting gables, dark passages, and the sort of atmosphere almost designed to produce ghost stories.
Weir fit comfortably into its intensely Presbyterian community.
He was known for his powerful prayers and rigid religious devotion.
A contemporary description remembered him as tall and dark in appearance, habitually wearing a cloak and carrying a staff. His expression was grim, and he frequently walked with his eyes lowered toward the ground.
Nothing about his public reputation suggested what was coming.
Thomas Weir Begins to Confess
In early 1670, Weir was approximately seventy years old and in failing health.
Then he began making extraordinary admissions.
He claimed that the respectable religious life everyone knew concealed another existence entirely.
According to Weir, he had committed adultery.
Bestiality.
Incest.
He claimed to have engaged in an incestuous relationship with his own sister.
And woven throughout his confessions were claims of supernatural dealings with the Devil.
At first, authorities reportedly didn’t know what to make of him.
An elderly man suddenly confessing to fantastic crimes and demonic activity could simply be suffering from illness or mental deterioration.
Then Weir’s sister began talking.
Jean Weir
Thomas lived with his sister Jean Weir, also remembered as Grizel or Grizelle.
When questioned, Jean didn’t dismiss her brother’s extraordinary confessions.
She added to them.
According to the story, Jean admitted that she and Thomas had maintained an incestuous relationship beginning when she was young.
She also supplied stories of supernatural activity.
The Devil had supposedly provided Jean with a peculiar gift involving magical yarn. With supernatural assistance, she could produce yarn of superior quality and do so more quickly than ordinary people.
Then there was the coach.
The Devil’s Fiery Coach
Jean claimed that in 1648, a supernatural coach came for her and Thomas.
It was no ordinary carriage.
Six horses pulled it.
The horses appeared to be on fire.
According to Jean, the strange coach transported the siblings as part of their dealings with supernatural forces. Thomas’s particular reward for serving the Devil was supposedly the gift of foresight.
Later tradition embellished the image still further.
The coach became one of the most memorable elements of the Weir legend, eventually returning in stories about the haunting of his house.
But Weir supposedly possessed another supernatural object that was even more important to him.
His walking stick.
Major Weir’s Black Staff
People had long been accustomed to seeing Thomas Weir carrying a staff.
After his confession, the ordinary walking stick acquired a much more sinister reputation.
According to the legend, it had been given to him by the Devil.
The staff was said to have been fashioned from a single piece of thornwood and decorated with strange figures, including satyr-like carvings and a human head upon the handle.
Weir supposedly claimed the staff contained or enabled his supernatural power.
Without it, he was himself.
When he held it, something changed.
He reportedly claimed that he could not even pray properly unless the staff was in his hand.
That detail must have been particularly disturbing to people who had once gathered to hear the celebrated Bowhead Saint pray.
If the story was believed, the eloquence they had interpreted as evidence of divine favor had come from precisely the opposite source.
The Confessions Grow Worse
Weir’s admissions continued.
He claimed he could enter houses whenever he wished.
He described visiting women while their husbands were absent.
He reportedly claimed that he could not look upon an orthodox minister.
By the end, the respected religious figure had accused himself of adultery, incest, bestiality, sexual misconduct, and repeated dealings with the Devil.
Whether everything Thomas and Jean said should be regarded as factual is a very different question.
Even contemporaries initially found the confessions difficult to believe.
But seventeenth-century Scotland was not a forgiving place to confess publicly to such things.
Thomas and Jean had supplied authorities with enough material to destroy themselves.
And that is exactly what happened.
The Bowhead Saint Goes to the Gallows
Thomas Weir was condemned to death.
Importantly, the legal case against him was not simply a witchcraft prosecution. His confessed sexual crimes, particularly incest and bestiality, were central to his condemnation.
On April 11, 1670, Major Thomas Weir was executed.
His body was burned.
According to the legend, his notorious staff was burned with him.
Jean Weir was also condemned and executed.
But death did not end the story.
If anything, that was when the legend of Major Weir truly began.
The Empty House
After the executions, the Weir residence acquired a terrible reputation.
People wanted nothing to do with it.
The house remained empty for years.
Then decades.
Stories circulated that Weir had cursed the building.
One supposed spell affected anyone foolish enough to enter. A visitor might believe he was walking in one direction only to discover that he was actually traveling in another.
But confusion was among the least frightening things supposedly happening there.
People began seeing lights inside the abandoned building.
Then they heard music.
The Infernal Parties
According to the stories, the empty Weir house sometimes seemed very occupied indeed.
Lights shone from within.
Music played.
People heard what sounded like dancing and revelry.
But nobody was supposed to be living there.
Other witnesses reported terrible howling coming from the building.
Strange mechanical or spinning noises were heard inside.
The respectable home of Edinburgh’s former Bowhead Saint had supposedly become the location of infernal gatherings.
And occasionally something arrived to collect the occupants.
Six Supernatural Horses
A phantom coach was reportedly seen approaching the house.
It was drawn by six horses.
In later versions of the legend, the animals became headless.
The coach stopped outside the Weir residence.
Then the dead siblings appeared.
Thomas and Jean emerged from the house and climbed inside.
The spectral carriage carried them away.
The image echoes Jean’s earlier confession about the fiery coach that supposedly transported the siblings during their lives.
What had once been part of their alleged witchcraft became part of their afterlife.
Major Weir Rides Again
Other witnesses supposedly encountered Thomas without his sister.
The dead Major emerged from his old house riding a headless black horse.
Horse and rider galloped away into the darkness.
By then, Thomas Weir had been transformed completely.
The man once called Angelic Thomas was now remembered as a wizard.
The religious staff became a demonic object.
His house became cursed.
His coach came from Hell.
And even his horse had lost its head.
The legend continued growing long after everyone who had actually known Thomas Weir was dead.
Someone Finally Moves Into the House
Eventually, in 1780, more than a century after Weir’s execution, someone was willing to challenge the house’s reputation.
A former soldier named William Patullo acquired the property.
He moved in with his wife.
Perhaps Patullo considered the old stories nonsense.
Perhaps a house burdened by a century of supernatural rumors could be obtained cheaply.
Whatever his reasoning, the couple apparently intended to stay.
They lasted only a few hours.
The Creature on the Bed
That night, William and his wife encountered something in their bedroom.
A creature appeared.
It resembled a calf.
The animal came to the bed.
And stared at them.
That was enough.
The Patullos fled.
If their attempt was supposed to demonstrate that the old Weir house was perfectly habitable, it accomplished precisely the opposite.
After more than a century, the house still apparently belonged to Major Weir.
The House Disappears
The old building eventually vanished.
Your original places its demolition around 1830, although this is another detail worth checking carefully during the later research pass because the West Bow itself underwent substantial redevelopment and historical descriptions of Weir’s residence do not always agree neatly.
Removing the house did nothing to remove Major Weir from Edinburgh folklore.
His story had already escaped the building.
The Horrors of Major Weir
There is something particularly unsettling about the story of Thomas Weir because the mystery begins before the ghosts.
Why did he confess?
That question remains more interesting than whether a supernatural coach ever thundered through Edinburgh.
Thomas Weir had spent years cultivating a reputation for extraordinary religious devotion.
Then, late in life, he began voluntarily describing himself as almost everything his society considered abominable.
Authorities initially struggled to believe him.
He persisted.
Then his sister corroborated and expanded upon his claims.
Modern readers can imagine several possibilities.
Illness.
Mental deterioration.
Religious mania.
Guilt over real crimes.
Shared delusion between two siblings.
Or some combination of them.
What we cannot safely do is assume that every supernatural confession was literally true simply because Thomas and Jean apparently believed or repeated it.
But the consequences were real.
Thomas Weir was executed.
Jean Weir was executed.
And Edinburgh was left with one of its great supernatural legends.
From Saint to Wizard
There is a wonderful symmetry to the story.
During his life, people came to Thomas Weir’s house because they wanted to hear him pray.
After his death, they avoided the same house because they believed the Devil lived there.
The Bowhead Saint became the Wizard of the West Bow.
The prayers became sorcery.
The walking stick became an instrument of Satan.
The respectable house became a gathering place for demons.
And the elderly soldier who once walked Edinburgh’s streets with his eyes lowered toward the ground eventually rode through its folklore on a headless black horse.
Perhaps that transformation tells us as much about the people who remembered Major Weir as it does about Weir himself.
Seventeenth-century Edinburgh watched a saint confess to being a sinner.
Folklore did the rest.
About the Author
