Julianna 
George MacKenzie’s tomb in Greyfriars Kirkyard has injured over 500 people since 1999 – and the violence is getting worse.
The Edinburgh City Council started keeping records of what was happening at the tomb of George MacKenzie. They had to. The injuries were real, documented, and happening with disturbing frequency.
The Facts
You wake on cold stone, head throbbing. The last thing you remember is pushing open the iron gate to the mausoleum. Now you’re outside the tomb, bleeding from wounds you don’t remember receiving.
Your camera is smashed. There are scratches on your arms that weren’t there before – three parallel lines, precise as claw marks, burning like acid. Your friend is screaming. She’s staring at her neck in her phone camera. Red marks are appearing on her throat as you watch. Handprints. Forming finger by finger in real time on her skin.
You’re the 140th person this year to be attacked inside George MacKenzie’s tomb. You won’t be the last.
Welcome to the most violent haunting in recorded history.
Bloody MacKenzie: The Lawyer Who Made Torture Legal
George MacKenzie didn’t just kill people. He perfected the art of making death last.
As King’s Advocate in the 1670s and 1680s, MacKenzie prosecuted Scottish Presbyterians, the Covenanters, who refused to accept the king’s authority over their church. But he didn’t simply execute them. That would have been too quick, too merciful for a man who believed religious dissent deserved infinite punishment.
In the winter of 1679, MacKenzie imprisoned over 1,200 Covenanters in an open field beside Greyfriars Kirkyard. No shelter. No blankets. They slept on frozen ground whilst Edinburgh’s winter winds cut through their ragged clothes. MacKenzie ordered minimal rations, just enough to keep them alive for the trials he was meticulously preparing.
They starved slowly, watching each other waste away, knowing MacKenzie was in his warm chambers drafting the legal frameworks that would make their torture lawful.
The thumbscrews were his favourite. Metal devices that crushed fingers joint by joint until bone splintered and marrow oozed out. MacKenzie is alleged to have sometimes watched, taking notes on how long it took for men to confess to crimes they hadn’t committed. The boot, an iron frame that shattered leg bones inch by inch, he reserved for the stubborn ones. Some he had hanged.
Others had their heads struck off on the Maiden, Edinburgh’s basic but deadly beheading machine. Many simply died of exposure in that frozen field, their bodies left where they fell as warnings.
He called it justice. He slept peacefully every night.
As any sadist would.
MacKenzie died in his bed in 1691, having never faced consequences for the estimated 18,000 Covenanters killed during his tenure. They buried him in a grand mausoleum in Greyfriars Kirkyard, the very Kirkyard where his victims had frozen, starved, and died begging for mercy he never gave.
For 308 years, his tomb stood undisturbed. His victims were buried in unmarked mass graves mere metres from his ornate resting place, their names forgotten whilst his was carved in marble.
Then someone opened the door.
The Man Who Fell Into Hell
December 1999. A homeless man sought shelter from freezing rain in Greyfriars Kirkyard. He noticed the MacKenzie Mausoleum, a structure like a small stone house with an iron gate. It was a perfect place to find solace, or so he thought. How wrong can you be? The gate was old and rusted. It shouldn’t have opened.
It did.
Inside was darkness and the smell of centuries-old decay. He stepped onto the stone floor. It gave way beneath him.
He fell through rotting wood into the burial vault below, landing hard in absolute blackness. His hands found stone. Then fabric. Rotting fabric over something solid and cold. A coffin. He was surrounded by them, stacked in the dark, some cracked open from his fall. In his panic, scrabbling to get away, his fingers sank into something that felt like leather.
It was skin. Mummified, centuries-old skin that crumbled at his touch.
He clawed his way up, screaming, pulling himself out of that vault on handholds he couldn’t see and didn’t want to identify. When he finally hauled himself back through the broken floor, he ran. He didn’t stop running until he’d left the Kirkyard, and he never went back.
He told everyone who crossed his path about his horrifying experience.
MacKenzie’s own lead coffin, sealed in a separate chamber of the vault, remained untouched. Whatever the man had fallen into, it wasn’t the lawyer’s final resting place. Not directly.
The attacks began the next day.
The Violence Begins
The first documented incident came within 24 hours. A woman visiting the Kirkyard felt suddenly, violently ill near the MacKenzie Mausoleum. She collapsed. When she came to, she had bruises around her throat in the distinct pattern of fingers. She’d been alone.
Then came the burns. Visitors reported sudden, searing pain in their arms, necks, and faces. When they looked, red marks were appearing on their skin – welts that looked like brands, like something impossibly hot had pressed against them. But there was nothing there. Just air.
The scratches started appearing in February 2000. Three parallel lines, always three, raking down arms and backs and faces. Sometimes they appeared whilst people were inside the tomb. Sometimes they appeared after people left, forming slowly over minutes like invisible claws were dragging through flesh in slow motion.
By March, people were losing consciousness. They’d enter the mausoleum healthy and alert. Seconds later, they’d be on the ground, sometimes bleeding from injuries they didn’t remember receiving. Cameras malfunctioned. The film emerged blank or showed strange, dark shapes that hadn’t been visible to the naked eye. Digital cameras simply died, batteries draining from complete to empty in seconds.
The Edinburgh City Council started keeping records. They had to. The injuries were real, documented, and happening with disturbing frequency.
The Escalation
By 2004, over 500 incidents had been officially logged. But the numbers only tell part of the story.
The nature of the attacks was changing.
Colin Grant, a tour guide, reported being shoved violently backwards inside the tomb in 2001. He landed hard enough to crack a rib. He’d been alone in the mausoleum. His group was waiting outside and saw him fly backwards through the doorway as if thrown by invisible hands.
People Are Still Experiencing Violence Inside The Tomb
Sarah Saunders entered the tomb in 2003 with her boyfriend. She felt suddenly, painfully cold, a drop in temperature so severe she could see her breath crystallising. Then something grabbed her hair and yanked her head back. Her boyfriend saw it happen: her head snapping back, her hair standing straight up as if gripped by a fist, her screaming. He pulled her out. She had a bald patch where hair had been torn out by the roots.
Multiple visitors reported the same sensation: invisible hands around their throats, squeezing. Others reported heavy breathing near their ears, and all reported the stench of rotting.
The phenomenon became so notorious that tour companies started running nightly ghost tours to the site. They were required to issue liability waivers. The warnings were explicit: physical harm was possible. People ignored them. Many regretted it.
The Pattern Emerges
Researchers studying the MacKenzie Poltergeist identified disturbing patterns. The violence seemed concentrated in specific areas: the mausoleum itself and the Covenanters’ Prison – the field where MacKenzie’s victims had been imprisoned and died.
Temperature fluctuations of up to 20 degrees Celsius were recorded within seconds inside the tomb. Electromagnetic field detectors registered massive spikes with no identifiable source. Video footage showed shadowy shapes moving inside the mausoleum, even though it had been verified empty.
But most disturbing was the specificity of the injuries. The three-line scratches matched the spacing of human fingers. The burns appeared in patterns – sometimes handprints, and shapes that resembled the instruments of torture MacKenzie had favoured.
The choking sensations always lasted exactly long enough to cause panic but not death, as if something was calibrating the violence for maximum terror.
Jan-Andrew Henderson, who documented hundreds of cases in his book The Ghost That Haunted Itself, noted that the attacks seemed almost purposeful. Not random violence, but deliberate intimidation. Punishment.
The kind of systematic cruelty MacKenzie had perfected in life.
Still Active, Still Violent
The MacKenzie Poltergeist hasn’t stopped. In 2020, during Edinburgh’s lockdown, security cameras recorded the mausoleum gate, secured with modern locks, swinging open by itself at 3 a.m. Nothing was visible on the footage. Just the gate slowly opening from the inside.
The Council Of Edinburgh Still Keep Records
Reports continue. Scratches. Burns. Unconsciousness. The overwhelming smell of rot. Voices calling names when the Kirkyard is empty. Tour guides refuse to enter the tomb alone after dark. Some refuse to enter it at all.
The mausoleum where George MacKenzie lies contains his lead coffin, supposedly still intact despite the 1999 breach.
Whether you believe the dead can harbour grudges or not, the facts remain undisputed. Over 500 documented injuries across two decades, continuing to this day, all centred on the tomb of a man who tortured thousands without remorse and died believing he’d escaped justice.
George MacKenzie spent his life perfecting cruelty. Three centuries later, something in that black mausoleum is still practising what he taught it.
And it’s getting better at it.
Want to Find Out More About this Horrific Mausoleum?
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Sources & Further Reading:
Henderson, Jan-Andrew. The Ghost That Haunted Itself (2001) – Comprehensive documentation of 500+ MacKenzie Poltergeist incidents with witness testimonies
Coventry, Martin. Haunted Places of Scotland (2004) – Analysis of Greyfriars Kirkyard phenomena and attack patterns
Historic Environment Scotland records on Greyfriars Kirkyard and the Covenanters’ Prison.
Edinburgh City Council incident reports (1999-2004) regarding injuries at Greyfriars Kirkyard.
Hewison, James King. The Covenanters: A History of the Church in Scotland (1908) – Historical documentation of MacKenzie’s prosecutions and torture methods
Aird, Andrew. Glimpses of Old Glasgow (1894) – Contemporary accounts of Covenanter imprisonment and execution
