When figures from the past stand tall; Ian Curtis (1956-1980) Macclesfield Cemetery & Crematorium

My father lay dying in Macclesfield, an unknown town to us but the District General there was the nearest hospital to his care home. Network Rail had closed the entire West Coast Main Line down for the weekend, between Stafford and Manchester, to carry out engineering works. With time running out for the old man I still had to get to Cheshire and my brother, with ill-concealed bad grace, agreed to pick me up from Crewe station, a 20-mile drive from Macclesfield, mainly along unlit country lanes. We drove, too fast, in the rapidly fading light of a bleak January Sunday afternoon, between high hedgerows and through small villages, making desultory conversation. I appreciated that it was a pain in the ass having to pick me up and make a forty-mile round trip but my brother seemed more resentful of my father for taking his time to die, than he did of me. In one of the many silences that punctuated our conversation, I cast around for something to say. 
“Wasn’t Ian Curtis from Macclesfield?” I suddenly remembered. My brother takes his time to answer.
“Buried there,” he eventually says, rather tersely, knowing of my interest in such things, before adding “the cemetery is near the hospital.”
At some point during one of the two nights I spent sitting by my father’s hospital bed, I recalled this conversation and checked where the singer’s grave was. The cemetery and crematorium were in Prestbury Road, a ten-minute stroll away from the hospital. As day dawned after my second sleepless night spent in a chair in dad’s hot and stuffy side room, when I went to his window to look out at the view of brick walls, service pipes and rubbish bins, I was surprised to see that it had been snowing. The snow must have been silently falling for hours as there were a good couple of inches on the ground.  When my sister came to join me an hour or two later, she encouraged me to get some fresh air. Forty minutes was enough time to walk to the cemetery, stroll round, find the grave (helpfully marked on google maps), take a few photos and walk back to the hospital. The snow-covered cemetery and Curtis’ grave reminded me of Kevin Cummin’s famous photos of Joy Division taken 45 years ago, in January 1979, standing on the Princess Parkway in Hulme. Time collapsed for me and I found myself vividly reliving my own memories of the time and of the band. 

Ian killed himself on the night of Saturday/Sunday 17/18 May 1980, though the 18th is usually given as his date of death. I found out the following day, the Monday, probably around 10.15pm. I was about to leave the student bar at my college when my friend Joe walked in. A bespectacled Cornishman in a worn leather jacket and crumpled cords, he looked like he was in shock and said that he needed a drink. Unusually he ordered a neat whisky. “I was listening to John Peel,” he told me, “Ian Curtis is dead.” It was my turn to be thunderstruck. We had been to the second of the three gigs Joy Division played at the Moonlight Club the previous month and the Rainbow in Finsbury Park in November when they supported the Buzzcocks. The band were everywhere – they were on the cusp of the big time, the music papers raved about them, John Peel, if no one else, played tracks from Unknown Pleasures and the various singles and EP’s every other night on his Radio 1 show and they had done their first TV appearances. Their new album was already recorded and due out in the summer. We were obsessed by two bands, The Fall and Joy Division; Joe had introduced me to both. We caught every gig we could, we bought the records, read the reviews and interviews in the music press and, about Joy Division, we gossiped because one of the girls at the college was going out with a music journalist and he knew the band well enough to go backstage and hang out with them when they were in London. He told us things about the band that weren’t common knowledge. That Ian had a wife and kid ‘up north’ and that he had a glamourous ‘French’ girlfriend (in reality she was Belgian and her name was Annik Honoré). There were hints of his marital problems. We knew about his epilepsy. We knew next to nothing but felt like we knew a lot. But now Ian Curtis was dead and we didn’t understand how or why he had died. John Peel’s announcement at the start of his show had been brief, apologising for being the bearer of bad news he told his audience that Ian Curtis, the singer of Joy Division had died and he had no further details. After saying that his thoughts were with the family and friends he played ‘New Dawn Fades’ and when the track finished my stunned friend came to knock on my door to see if I had heard and, when I wasn’t in my room, he made his way to the bar. After much discussion we decided that it must have been Ian’s epilepsy that had killed him. 

The last known photo of Ian Curtis, a photo booth passport shot, taken for the American visa he needed for the band's forthcoming US tour

It was our journalist acquaintance who first told us, a couple of days later, that he had committed suicide, that he had hung himself in the kitchen of his house. We found ourselves in shock all over again. Premature deaths in the music business weren’t unknown but they were the usually the result of an accident and drugs were generally involved somewhere. We didn’t know of any other case where someone has actually killed themselves. Someone on the brink of success, with fans that idolised him, a wife, a child, a girlfriend, who journalists called a genius, killed themselves. It just did not make any sense. The mythmaking began immediately; hagiographic accounts of the tortured, sensitive genius, too good for this world filled the music press. Just a couple of weeks later Dave McCulloch in Sounds wrote “his was a poetically beautiful death. It was no cheap r’n’r death….Ian Curtis belonged to the real world: the bleak and industrial pyre you made for him is now your own pyre, your own guilt, your own stupidity, your own way of evading the simple truths…That man cared for you, that man died for you, that man saw the madness in your area.” Leaving aside the irony that the final lines in McCulloch’s angry eulogy were lifted from songs by The Fall, what is interesting is how the writer seems to somehow blame the reader for Curtis’ death. The singer has become a martyr to and for his listeners! 

As always happens following the death of a noteworthy musician within a few weeks Joy Divisions next single ‘Love will tear us apart’ was in the charts. It only reached number 13 but that was still incredible for an Indie band. The second album ‘Closer’ came out a month later and reached number 6 in the album charts. For the whole of that year the music press seemed to speak of little else other than Joy Division and Ian Curtis’ death. I found it all rather harrowing. I had been struggling with my own mental health issues since I had left school in 1978. I had spent the first 8 months of 1979 attending a psychiatric day hospital and had made multiple, incompetent, suicide attempts. At college I gritted my teeth and marched miserably through each day, somehow hoping that things would improve for me. Ian Curtis’ suicide was a horribly bleak reminder that life really probably was not worth living. I found myself poring over the lyrics to the later songs and identifying completely with Ian’s despair, like this from that otherwise quite chipper track ‘Isolation’;

Mother I tried please believe me
I’m doing the best that I can
I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through
I’m ashamed of the person I am

I became so obsessed that at the end of the year I wrote a long letter to the NME explaining exactly why Ian had killed himself. Much to my amazement they published the letter; thankfully I have lost my copy and that edition of the paper has never been digitised as my explanation was no doubt, hopelessly callow. My heart felt theories about Ian’s reasons for killing himself were, as these things often are, an attempt to understand my own feelings. My identification with the singer’s emotions, as expressed in his lyrics, was so complete that dissecting them was dissecting myself. From Ian’s suicide I moved onto others; Sylvia Plath and John Berryman in particular. My obsession with Ian’s death, reading Al Alvarez’s The Savage God and talking to my friends were the only forms of therapy I had. Psychiatrists checked in on me, assessed my symptoms and adjusted my medications but there were no other methods available to help me deal with or understand my crippling depression. It took me quite a while, the best part of three years perhaps, but I eventually managed to dig my way out of the hole I was burying myself in. I learned to cope with myself, with my emotions and with the messiness of life. My friends, all just kids themselves at the time, helped me enormously. But Ian Cutis helped me too, and I will be forever grateful to him for that, and for the music, which I still listen to.

A Winter Afternoon in Brompton Cemetery; 10 January 2024

 

I’ve strolled through cemeteries around the world, like everyone who is deathly afraid of death and dying (actually, which are we more afraid of —death or dying?) who wants to see his fear's lair, to confirm that this place is calm, quiet, that it has been made for people after all, for a rest…. A place for getting used to it as it were. Isn’t it strange, Gaustine once said to me, it’s always other people who are dying, but we ourselves never do.

Georgi Gospodinov - Time Shelter

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; Joseph Bonomi (1796-1878), Brompton Cemetery

 

There are eight people buried in the private grave of Joseph Bonomi in Brompton Cemetery, five of his children, his wife and his mother-in-law. The first four of his children predeceased him, all dying within one harrowing week in April 1852; the eldest still hadn’t reached their sixth birthday and the youngest was, at just eight months, still an infant. The epitaph on the rather simple Grade II listed headstone describes Bonomi as a ‘sculptor, traveller and archaeologist’. The only unusual element in the design is the motif, drawn from a hieroglyph, of the god Anubis, in his full jackal incarnation (i.e. not just jackal headed but jackal bodied too) sitting on top of a tomb with battered sides, practicing his guardianship of the dead.

Cemetery records show that the Bonomi grave was originally dug for the funeral of the families four young children. The gravediggers cannot have been pleased when they were told they had to excavate a grave deep enough to take four coffins; the burial records says a shaft 12 feet deep was dug. The Bonomi’s had been married in September 1845 at St Marylebone Parish Church in the Marylebone Road; the groom, at 49, was just 10 years younger than his father-in-law, his bride, Jessie Martin, was just 20. Joseph wasted no time starting a family; the couple’s first child, a boy, was born exactly 9 months after the wedding, in June 1846, and was named Joseph, after his father and grandfather, and Menes, after the Pharoah who united Upper and Lower Egypt into one Kingdom and founded the first dynasty (fellow Egyptologists would have got the reference immediately). Their second son, Cautley Frederick, was born 17 months later, in November 1847. A daughter, named Jessie after her mother, was born in July 1849 and another son, John Ignatius in September 1851. The family were living at 7 Upper Cheyne Row in Chelsea with a couple of live in servants.  Through the final months of 1851 and during the start of the new year Joseph had been putting the finishing touches to his book ‘Ninevah and its Palaces’, not only written but illustrated by him, and been seeing it through the presses. It was due to be published at the end of April. In was in this month that all four of his children fell ill with whooping cough. Caused by a bacterium, Bordetella pertussis, this was a fairly common disease amongst children and infants at the time.  All common illnesses would have been a cause for concern for parents at the time as without antibiotics, infections could get out of hand and prove fatal. Even so it would have been usual to lose four children to the same disease. On the first day of the tragedy, the 11th April, the Bonomi’s lost their youngest and oldest children, 8-month-old baby John and then Joseph Menes, who was just two months shy of his sixth birthday. Cautley Frederick died on the 15th April.  Perhaps in an effort to get her somewhere where the healthy effects of sea air might ease her breathing, 2-year-old Jessie had been removed to Worthing. It did no good; she died there on the 17th April.  Two days later the Rev. Albert Badger, chaplain of Brompton Cemetery, presided over the funeral whilst Joseph and Jessie watched all four of their children lowered into the 12-foot grave shaft.  

The Bonomis went on to have four more children, the first, a daughter Isabella, was born in March 1853, less than a year after the couple has lost their first four. Then came Cecilia in June 1855, Marion in August 1857 and a son John Ignatius in 1858. At some point, probably after her husband had died in 1854, Jessie’s mother, Susan, had come to live with the Bonomi’s at their new address, 13 Vicarage Gardens in Kensington, close to Kensington Palace (the house still stands). As the headstone explains, Susan was the widow of John Martin, the visionary painter who was famed for his vast and dramatic canvasses showing human beings dwarfed by fantastical landscapes, often undergoing apocalyptic upheavals, deluges, plagues, volcanic eruptions and so on. Thomas Lawrence referred to him, probably enviously, as ‘the most popular painter of the day’.  The couple married in 1810; John was 21 but his bride, at 30, was 9 years older than him. They went on to have ten children of which only six survived to adulthood. Susan lived with the Bonomis for about four years, dying herself on 30th December 1858. Cemetery records show that she was buried on January 4th 1859 by Rev Nathaniel Badger and that the grave was dug to a depth of 9 feet.  

'The country of the Iguanodon' John Martin's imagination fired by the recent scientific discovery of the dinosaur 

Jessie, quite possibly worn out by grief and child bearing, survived her mother by just 9 months before dying herself, at the age of just 34, in September 1859. She was buried on Tuesday September 13. The Rev. Nathaniel Liberty, the chaplain of Brompton Cemetery, officiated at the funeral and her grave was dug 7 feet deep. Her oldest child at the time of her death, Isabella, was still only six and the youngest was just one. With a young family to look after, many men in Bonomi’s position would have hastily remarried but the 63-year-old was probably overwhelmed by grief. Instead, his wife’s older, unmarried sister, Isabella, came to live with him and the children to take care of them and the household. The family moved to a new house in Wimbledon, The Camels. Bonomi found steady employment as the curator of the John Soane Museum in Lincolns Inn Fields and settled into old age, focussing on his responsibility for providing for his young family. 

Despite already being an old man at the time of his young wife’s death, Joseph survived her by 19 years, dying at his at his home in Wimbledon, The Camels, on the 3rd March 1878. He was buried at Brompton on the 8th, with the Rev Nathaniel Liberty conducting the funeral service. Because there were already 6 people in the grave, the gravediggers only had to dig to a depth of 6 feet. On Saturday 16th March The Illustrated London News published a portrait of the recently deceased Egyptologist and published the following obituary;  

THE LATE MR. BONOMI. The death of Mr. Joseph Bonomi, Curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum, in Lincoln’s-inn fields, was announced last week. He was Italian, born at Rome, in 1796; but his father, who had been architect to St. Peter’s at Rome, came about that time to live in England. The son, as he grew up in London, became a student of the Royal Academy and a pupil of Nollekens, the sculptor. In 1821 he was engaged to accompany Mr. Robert Hay to make a collection of Egyptian antiquities, which has since been placed in the British Museum. He stayed in Egypt eight years studying and drawing the hieroglyphics with Hay, Burton, Arundale, and others. In 1833 he went with Arundale and Catherwood to the Holy Land. At Jerusalem they were the first to visit the so-called Mosque of Omar and make detailed sketches of it. Mr. Bonomi had adopted the Arab dress, and he was able to pass himself as an Arab on this occasion. He also visited Sinai, Damascus, and Baalbek. On his return to England he was busily employed in making drawings in connection with works on Egypt, such as those of Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Dr. Birch, and others. In 1812 the great expedition was sent out under Lepsius by the King of Prussia, and Mr. Bonomi was added to the important staff which composed the party. On this second visit to Egypt Mr. Bonomi was two years in that country. A record of this expedition was cut in hieroglyphics over the entrance-passage of the Great Pyramid of Ghizeh. These hieroglyphics were designed and carved by Mr. Bonomi. On his return to England he produced the drawings from which panorama of Egypt was painted and exhibited. In 1853 he assisted Mr. Owen Jones in the works at the Egyptian Courts of the Crystal Palace. In 1861 Mr. Bonomi was appointed Curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum. In addition to illustrating and assisting other labours, Mr. Bonomi produced some original works of his own, such as “Nineveh and its Palaces,” besides numerous papers for learned societies and contributions to scientific journals. Mr. Bonomi married one of the daughters of John Martin, the painter. The portrait is from a photograph by Messrs. T. and J. Holroyd, of Harrogate.

It is interesting that Joseph is reported to have designed and carved a hieroglyphic inscription in the great pyramid of Giza. If you check any reliable reference source it was almost certainly tell you that there no hieroglyphics in the pyramids; this, for example, is what the Encyclopaedia Britannica has to say, “contrary to what one might expect, there are no hieroglyphic texts, treasures, or mummies in any of pyramids of Giza.” And the last known use of hieroglyphs in Egypt is usually accepted as a piece of graffiti on the temple of Philae known as the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, which was carved on 24th August AD 394. Joseph was a member of the Prussian expedition led by Karl Richard Lepsius during the period 1842-1845. The Prussians decided to commemorate the birthday of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV on 15 October 1842 by carving an inscription in hieroglyphics on one of the western gables above the original entrance of the great pyramid. The inscription was possibly written by Lepsius himself, but it was definitely designed and carved by Bonomi who therefore gives the lie to the commonly stated facts that there are no hieroglyphics in the pyramids themselves and that the last recorded use of hieroglyphics was in 394 of the Common Era.

The last interment in the Bonomi grave was of Joseph and Jessie’s only surviving son, Joseph Ignatius, who had been just one when his mother died, died himself at the age of 72 on the 27th March 1930 at his home at 55 Holland Road, Kensington. The grave was opened to a depth of 5 feet according to the Brompton burial register.  According to the 1881 census, the 23 year was already a Lieutenant in the Kings Own Regiment of Foot (later the Kings Own Royal Lancaster) based at Bowerham Barracks in Lancaster. He had already been on active service and fought in South Africa in the Zulu war of 1879. He remained a military man all his life, retiring in 1897. With nothing better to do with his time the now retired Major, finally married. His bride was a Frenchwoman, Jeanne Marie, who was 12 years his junior. Jeanne did not die until 1957, when she passed away in Westminster Hospital. The couple had no children.   

Photo of the 19 year old Joseph Ignatius Bonomi, standing at the rear of this photo 

The sad abode of the dead; Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh

Setting aside the tombs of Roubiliac, which belong to the heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to love for their own sake the emblems of time and the great change; and even around country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for the Judgment Day. Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep consciousness of death, and loved to put its terrors pithily before the churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and any dead farmer was seized upon to be a text. The classical examples of this art are in Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries; and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, the significance remains.

Robert Louis Stevenson ‘Edinburgh; Picturesque Notes’ (1878)

There is nothing like them anywhere else in the UK; the grand monuments of the 17th century in Greyfriars are unique in their scale, their craftmanship, and their inimitable style. The individual elements of the memorials are to be found in churchyards and cemeteries all over Europe and North America; the hourglasses, grinning skeletons, skull and crossbones, chubby putti resting casual elbows on craniums, columns, urns, flaming torches, scythes, serpents and skulls (skulls and more skulls), are executed with such exuberant vigour that their counterparts elsewhere seem pale imitations. It is ironic that death is represented as so teeming with life and vitality. As Robert Louis Stevenson observed, “every mason was a pedestrian Holbein”, and Scottish churchyards are ballrooms for a never-ending dance of death, none more so than Greyfriars.

Greyfriars officially dates from 1562 but at least some part of the grounds may have been used for burials before then by the Franciscan monks whose monastery occupied the site until the reformation. The collapse of papal authority in Scotland in 1560, the belated dissolution of the monasteries there, and the destruction of the abbey buildings by the radically protestant local population of Edinburgh all coincided with the need to find an alternative burial ground for the city. Up until this point the principal site for burials had been the ground surrounding St Giles Cathedral but after three centuries of constant use this had become overcrowded. In 1562 Mary Queen of Scots granted the land that had belonged to the Franciscans to the town for use as a burial ground. Unusually Greyfriars was in all but name a cemetery, a place dedicated to the burial of the dead. The church that turned the burial ground into a kirkyard was not built until 1620. Burials continued until the late 1800’s. 

Edinburgh has become the premier tourist trap of Scotland and Greyfriars, even on a dull, cold, January weekday afternoon was full of visitors, many drawn by the story of the faithful dog Bobby who kept watch over his masters grave for 16 years or the Harry Potter associations (long time Edinburgh resident JK Rowling allegedly used the names on gravestones at Greyfriars to name her characters though some of the supposed borrowings strike me as being slightly tenuous – there are Potters named on the Giles memorial but every cemetery England probably has a Potter somewhere or other. There are also Scrymgeours, a Mrs Moodie, a Thomas Riddell and a McGonagall, amongst others.)  Visitors to the kirkyard weren’t always made as welcome as they are now. In August 1833, an early tourist to the Scottish capital who preferred to keep himself anonymous and therefore went by the non de plume of Viator, wrote a long letter to the editor of the Caledonian Mercury detailing his experiences at the Kirkyard;

Walking the other day at a leisure hour into the Greyfriars' kirkyard, I happened to step aside to look at a grave which was just dug. I was instantly accosted in the rudest manner by a surlv semi-barbarous Celt, who demanded, in a sort of bark, and threatening aspect, if I knew the consequences of standing there? Not exactly sure what the consequences might be, I instantly stepped to the footpath, which was about a yard off. He told me, however, I had no right to stand upon the footpath, nor to be within the kirkyard at all, except on business; that his instructions were to that effect, and that such was written on the gate.

Events took an even more disturbing turn when Viator suddenly realised that the gravedigger was not, as he initially assumed, a man but a woman (a female sexton rare but not a unique phenomenon; see the story of Hester Hammerton of Kingston-upon-Thames);

On my replying, that I did not call in question his instructions, but that I thought he ought to deliver them with more temper and civility, her nainsell, instead of mitigating, became still more ferocious, and, walking close up to me, not much unlike one of the wild cats of her native mountains, she gave me an unequivocal hint, that she was ready to fight me any day, and absolutely said, that if I was not satisfied, I might just turn aside a little, and she would give me satisfaction immediately.

Understandably put out by his encounter with the doughty female gravedigger, Viator (a Sassenach to be sure) asks “Now, Sir, passing by the ludicrous conduct of the poor crazy grave-digger, I should like to know by what authority the churchyard is thus shut up. I thought it was a species of public property, or at least that it belonged to the inhabitants of the parish.” He goes on the lament;

Whatever the object may be, I know not, but I am sure a great moral lesson is thus prevented from being communicated. In former times, one used to visit Les triste sejour des Morts -the place of coffins, epitaphs, and worms- the appointed rendezvous of all travellers, and to meditate upon his own destiny; or he felt a melancholy pleasure, and learned how to estimate human enjoyments, in reading the memorial of departed worth, of titled greatness, or of kindred blood; or, at all events, he gratified an innocent curiosity. The wise authorities, however, from whom this order emanates, see no occasion, it would appear. for this mode of instruction. The good old motto, "Memento Mori” it is to be feared, is a figure of speech becoming fast obsolete, and the more fashionable expression, "Memento Vivere," or as the old Epicurean maxim has it, "Carpe Diem," substituted in its place.

The Kirkyard has long associations with the Covenantors; the National Covenant, opposing the proposed church reforms of Charles I, was signed here in 1638 (though probably not on a tomb as is commonly depicted.) Militant Presbyterian Covenanters were held prisoner on the churchyard following the battle of Bothwell Brig in 1679. The area they were held in is now known as the Covenanters prison and is gated off from the rest of the cemetery because its relative seclusion made it a preferred location for local drug users in search of a quiet spot to shoot up. The mausoleums which flank the prison were not yet built at the time the covenanters were held here. There was no damp mausoleum or indeed any other shelter for them; they were held in the open air for several months until they could be transported to the colonies. The association with radical Protestantism continued to draw visitors to the kirkyard until relatively recently. In May 1981 the Reverand Ian Paisley came to Edinburgh to lead a religious ceremony to commemorate the 300 year anniversary of the execution of the Covenantor Donald Cargill. He was not entirely welcome, a few Republican sympathisers in the crowd yelled ‘bigot’ and ‘What about Bobby Sands’ as Paisley led a band of several hundred supporters around central Edinburgh, laying wreaths at the Covenantor’s  Memorial in Grassmarket and on the railings at Greyfriars, the gates of which remained firmly closed against him by order of the Environmental Committee of Edinburgh District Council, who feared unrest if he was allowed to lay his wreath at the memorial within the grounds of the church.  Then, according to the Scotsmen of 30 May 1981;

At a 35-minute service in the High-Street, before a-gathering of several hundred — about 150 of whom had come with him from Ulster for the occasion —- he condemned those who had. tried to disrupt the plans for the commemoration, including Lothian Regional Council. He said: “If their ban had continued, we would still have gone ahead. We do not intend to allow anyone to take from us our inalienable right to practise our religion and to enjoy our religious liberty that has been fought for in this United Kingdom.”

Mr Paisley then took a swipe at the former Labour MP, Mrs Shirley Williams, who he said had been one of those to condemn his visit. He said: “She herself is a Roman Catholic. I would advise Shirley Williams that she does not live in a Roman Catholic nation but in a Protestant nation. We have still a Protestant constitution, a Protestant throne and, thank God, Prince Charles is marrying a Protestant. This is a Protestant land and we intend to retain this heritage and to maintain it. Mrs Williams has no objection to a ‘foreign monarch’ the King of the Vatican, coming to this land but she objects to me, a member of the British House of Commons, from declaring my witness here in Edinburgh. I would remind her that I retained my seat at the General Election. She lost hers."

After laying the final wreath at the Mercat Cross, Mr Paisley spoke to a number of well-wishers and signed some autographs before being driven off to a city hotel where he was staying the night.

By one of those ironies that are so common in graveyards where the dead are buried unheeding of their station or role in life, the kirkyard houses the magnificent mausoleum, designed by the renowned architect James Smith, of one of the Covenantors great enemies, Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh. MacKenzie was Lord Advocate for Charles II and responsible for seeing the monarch’s anti-covenanter policies put into practice. He is held responsible for using the kirkyard as a prison for mercilessly persecuting the covenanters following the debacle at Bothwell Brig. When he wasn’t persecuting radical protestants Mackenzie was defending witches; whilst he didn’t deny that witchcraft existed he felt that they were far fewer than common belief held out. The Judge became something of a bogeyman to local children as reported by the Shields Daily Gazette of 09 October 1882;

In the Greyfriar's Kirkyard the Mausoleum of Sir Geo. Mackenzie, the King's Advocate, known from savage deeds to the children of today as Bloody Mackenzie, who pride themselves on their prowess in knocking at the mausoleum and singing out the challenge “Bluidy Mackenzie, come oot if ye daur!" The bairns shake their clenched little fists, spit on the Judges grave, and, when startled, run terrified as for their mortal lives. This childish hatred renders criticism unnecessary; his name soon makes a restless bairn fall asleep with its head happed among the blankets.

Today MacKenzie’s mausoleum is said to be haunted by a poltergeist which, according to the Scotsman on 14 Bebruary 2015, was said to have been loosed upon an unsuspecting city when a homeless man chose to bed down in the Mausoleum;

IT MUST have seemed like a good idea at the time. The homeless man was without a bed and the night was chilly. When he found the door to the mausoleum open it could have looked inviting but quite why he decided to open a coffin and snuggle down beside the skeleton is less easy to explain. He may have been fine had the entire coffin not crumbled on top of him, showering him with the dust of a 400-year-old corpse. He let out a rather loud scream, which was heard by a passing dog-walker, who let out an even louder scream when he saw what looked like a zombie coming straight for him. There followed a Scooby-doo moment when they, and the dog, ran around the graveyard screaming before running off in opposite directions.

Since this undated and farcical incident, the article claims that “there have been 350 documented attacks. 170 people have collapsed. Tourists have reported hot spots, cold spots, somewhere in the middle spots. They have been bloodied and bruised, pushed and pulled, by an unseen and altogether unwanted visitor to the Black Mausoleum.” Entrance to the mausoleum is the highlight on ghost tours of the churchyard; “night after night visitors spook themselves. Most leave entertained, some leave a little frightened and others walk away from the Black Mausoleum convinced that they have had a close brush with something very nasty indeed,” says the newspaper. 

And finally, an even more improbable story, of premature burial this time, from the Edinburgh Evening News of Saturday 28 November 1925;

Truth was vouched for in the recital of the gruesome stories of the body-snatchers, who at one time in Edinburgh plied a lucrative trade, and I can still remember the story told by my revered "granny" of an incident that happened in the Greyfriars Kirkyard. Despite the vigilance of the watchers, who were ever on the alert, and whose duty it was at certain hours of the night to fire their muskets to scare away the resurrectionists, the ghoulish work was begun ot opening a newly-made grave. The body of a wealthy lady had been interred that day, and a couple of expert body-snatchers were losing no time in prising open the coffin. Their eyes were soon dazzled by the sight of a number of valuable rings on the fingers of one of the hands. A small saw was quickly taken from their bag, and the act of severing the finger begun. To their horror, however, the "dead" woman sprang from her coffin, and her shrieks of pain re-echoing as far as the Candlemaker Row, the sacrilegious pair took to their heels and managed to escape. As was afterwards explained, the old lady, had been buried in a trance, an occurrence said to be very common at a time when a doctor's certificate of death was not to essential as now.

The Paton Monument

The Mausoleum of George MacKenzie

The Kincaid monument

Detail from the Paton monument

The monument of Bayne of Pitcairlie