Major Thomas Weir was a pillar of Presbyterian Edinburgh — a Covenanting officer and captain of the Town Guard, so austere in his piety that locals called him the 'West Bow Saint'. He shared a narrow flat on the West Bow with his spinster sister Grizel. Then, around 1670, while leading a prayer meeting, the elderly major astonished the company by confessing unbidden to a lifetime of secret crimes and to commerce with the Devil.
The story
Weir was strangled and burned, often named as the last man executed for witchcraft in Scotland, and his sister was hanged soon after. But it was his house that fixed him in the city's folklore. For more than a century the dwelling on the West Bow stood empty, for no one would live in it. Passers-by reported lights moving in the windows of the deserted rooms, the sound of music and laughter, and the shapes of enormous women behind the glass.
When an old soldier named William Patullo at last took the cheap house around 1780, he and his wife are said to have fled after a single night, driven out when a spectral calf appeared at the foot of their bed and rested its forelegs on the frame to stare at them in the dark. The 'Wizard of the West Bow' became one of Edinburgh's most enduring ghost stories.