Major Weir, the Wizard of the West Bow

Major Weir is often filed alongside Scotland's lurid "witch" legends as if he were an invented bogeyman like Sawney Bean. He wasn't. Weir was a real, named, socially prominent Edinburgh Covenanter whose 1670 self-confession to witchcraft, incest, and bestiality is a matter of surviving court record, not chapbook invention — the haunting that followed is folklore, but the man and his trial are history.

Major Weir's case sits unusually close to documented history for a "legend" card: his military career, civic rank, trial date, and sentence are matters of record, not retrospective myth. The supernatural content — the Devil's coach, the possessed staff, the haunted house — belongs to a separate, softer tier of 17th- and 18th-century report and oral tradition, and this article treats the two tiers distinctly throughout.

The man before the confession

Thomas Weir cut an unlikely figure for a "wizard." Born around 1599, probably in Carluke, Lanarkshire, he served as a Covenanting officer during the 1641 Irish campaigns and rose by mid-century to command Edinburgh's Town Guard — a position of real civic trust. He was a signatory of the Solemn League and Covenant and was known across the city for his gift of extempore prayer, delivered with such fervour that neighbours gathered on the West Bow to hear him. By every outward measure, Weir was a pillar of strict Presbyterian respectability, not a fringe figure.

The confession

In 1670, in failing health and around seventy years old, Weir abruptly confessed — apparently unprompted — to a catalogue of offences: long-standing incest with his sister Jean, adultery, and bestiality. He also described meeting the Devil at Dalkeith and travelling in a fiery coach drawn by six horses. City authorities initially suspected senile delirium, but physicians who examined him found him lucid. Jean, questioned separately, corroborated much of his account and added her own: that their mother had been a witch, and that she herself had once been carried supernaturally to Musselburgh. The pair were tried on 9 April 1670. Notably, Weir was formally charged with incest, adultery, and bestiality — not witchcraft — while Jean faced the witchcraft charge. Both pleaded guilty. Weir was executed by garroting and burning at Gallowlee on 11 April; Jean was hanged at the Grassmarket the following day.

The staff and the house

Popular tradition added a supernatural prop to the human horror of the case: Weir's carved thornwood walking stick, nicknamed "the Lilyroot" and said to bear carved satyr heads, was credited with moving independently, lighting his way like a lantern, and resisting the flames at his execution. None of this appears in the surviving trial record; it belongs to the embellishment that accumulated around the Weirs in the years after their deaths. What is independently attested is the fate of the house itself: it stood vacant on the West Bow for more than a century, with generations of Edinburgh residents reporting phantom lights, music, and a ghostly coach thundering past at night. An occupant who dared move in around 1780 is said to have fled after encountering a spectral calf. The association persists into the present day, with some commentators connecting surviving structural fabric to the building now occupied by Edinburgh's Quaker Meeting House on Victoria Street.

Why Weir, not Sawney Bean

This card exists specifically to replace "Sawney Bean," the legendary clan of cannibal outlaws said to have preyed on travellers in Ayrshire. The curatorial judgment behind that substitution is explained fully in Caveats below, but the short version is this: Weir gives the series a genuinely attested case of a real, named person whose documented confession and trial produced a lasting folk-haunting, which is a structurally richer and more honest example of "Scottish witchcraft legend" than an invented cannibal clan with no supporting historical record.

• The Weir story circulated for a century in print: an Edinburgh edition of George Sinclair's Satan's Invisible World Discovered (1769) advertised on its title page "that marvellous History of Major Weir and his sister".
• Weir was formally charged with incest, adultery, and bestiality — witchcraft was the charge laid against his sister Jean, not against him.
• Physicians examined Weir after his confession specifically to rule out that he was simply delirious with age; they judged him sound of mind.
• His final recorded words were reportedly: "Let me alone. I have lived as a beast, and I must die as a beast."
• Weir had commanded Edinburgh's Town Guard and was present in connection with the execution of the Marquess of Montrose two decades before his own trial.
• His house stood empty on the West Bow for more than a hundred years — an extraordinarily long "haunted" vacancy by the standards of Edinburgh property history.
• The carved staff legend gave Weir a signature prop in later retellings, much as a sword or ring might mark a hero; here it marks a villain.
• Some researchers argue Weir's crimes, stripped of the supernatural framing, were real and his confession substantially accurate — making this less a ghost story and more a documented case of serious abuse later mythologised.
• The site's modern association with a Quaker Meeting House gives the legend an unusually traceable physical throughline from the 1670s to today.

• This card deliberately replaces "Sawney Bean," the legend of a cannibal clan said to have terrorised Ayrshire travellers from a coastal cave. The curatorial judgment is explicit: Sawney Bean is chapbook fiction manufactured for 18th-century popular print, with no supporting historical record of the clan, the cave, or the killings — it is the kind of lurid pseudo-"Scottish legend" this series is built to exclude, precisely because it was never folk belief, only commercial invention dressed as one. It is mentioned here only to draw that contrast with Weir, whose documented reality anchors this card.
• The supernatural elements of Weir's own case — the Devil's coach, the possessed staff, the demonic visitations — rest entirely on his and his sister's own testimony and on later retelling, not on independent corroboration. This article treats them as attested belief and tradition, not as established fact.
• Some modern historians suggest Weir's underlying crimes may have been real abuses that he and his sister later reframed in supernatural language consistent with the religious culture of the time; this reading is plausible but not provable from the surviving record.
• The claim that the staff resisted burning, moved on its own, or carried a lantern appears only in retrospective accounts and should not be read as part of the 1670 trial record.