Major Thomas Weir: The Wizard of Edinburgh Who Confessed to Everything

In the spring of 1670, a man walked into a room in Edinburgh and began to destroy his own life with considerable thoroughness. He was seventy years old. He was a retired military officer of good standing, a man who had served in the Covenanting cause with distinction and who had built a reputation over decades as one of the most devout and respected figures in the city. He led prayer meetings. He was known for the fervour and eloquence of his public devotions. The godly citizens of Edinburgh’s Bow Head quarter had long regarded him as a pillar of their community, possibly the pillar of their community, a man whose righteousness was so reliably on display that his nickname among the faithful was Angelical Thomas.

He confessed to witchcraft. He confessed to sorcery. He confessed to a catalogue of sexual crimes spanning decades. He confessed to a pact with the Devil. He confessed to everything, unprompted, with a calm thoroughness that suggested he had been carrying this for a long time and had simply decided that carrying it was no longer something he was prepared to do.

Nobody had accused him. Nobody had arrested him. Nobody had tortured him or threatened him or given him any reason at all to speak.

He simply walked into that room and began to talk, and when he was finished he was one of the most notorious figures in Scottish history, and Edinburgh had a legend it has never entirely put down.

Who Thomas Weir Was

Thomas Weir was born around 1600 in Lanarkshire and came from a family of sufficient standing to provide him with an education and a military career. He served as a captain in the army raised by the Scottish Covenanters, the Presbyterian movement that resisted Charles I’s attempt to impose episcopacy on the Scottish church, and he later commanded the Town Guard of Edinburgh, a position of real civic authority.

His religious credentials were impeccable by the standards of his time and his community. He was a committed Presbyterian of the stricter sort, attending conventicles and prayer meetings with a regularity and a visible devotion that marked him out even in a community where visible devotion was the norm. He carried a black staff, a thornwood walking stick, that became so associated with his public persona that it featured in the confessions and the subsequent legend as an instrument of supernatural power.

He never married. He lived with his sister Jean Weir, who shared his household on the West Bow, the steep, winding street that connected the Grassmarket to the Royal Mile, and who shared, as it turned out, rather more than just the household.

He was, by every external measure available to those who knew him, exactly what he appeared to be. A godly man. A righteous man. A man whose spiritual life was a matter of public record and public admiration.

The external measure, it turned out, was measuring the wrong things.

The Confession

The confession that Thomas Weir made in 1670 was not given to a magistrate or a court. It was made in a private gathering of the kind of devout Presbyterians who regularly met at his house, a prayer meeting that turned into something considerably more disturbing than its participants had expected.

Weir began to speak about his sins. This was not in itself unusual in a Covenanting prayer meeting, where the acknowledgement of sin and the seeking of forgiveness was a standard element of communal religious practice. But Weir did not speak in the general terms of a man acknowledging his fallen nature in the conventional religious sense. He was specific. He was detailed. He did not stop.

He confessed to a long catalogue of sexual crimes, the specifics of which the contemporary record is relatively reticent about in its published form but which were understood by those who heard them to be severe, involving both adults and members of his own family over a period of decades. He confessed to a pact with the Devil. He confessed to the use of his staff as an instrument of sorcery, a thing given to him by supernatural agency and empowering his apparent gift for devotional oratory. He confessed to having received his apparently extraordinary spiritual gifts not from God but from the other direction.

The people in the room were horrified and did not initially know what to do. The confessions were so extreme, and so contrary to everything they believed they knew about Thomas Weir, that the immediate response of some of the witnesses was to assume he was mad. The Provost of Edinburgh, when informed, took the same view. A man of Weir’s standing and reputation could not be what he was confessing to be. He was ill. He was losing his mind. He would be better after rest and treatment.

Weir insisted he was not mad. He was entirely calm. He knew exactly what he was saying and he wanted it acted upon.

Jean Weir

Thomas Weir’s sister Jean did not wait for the authorities to come to her. She made her own confessions, which in some respects were even more extraordinary than her brother’s.

Jean Weir confessed to witchcraft and to a pact with the Devil, which placed her in the same legal and theological category as Thomas. She confessed to having received a visit from a woman in fine clothes while she was spinning, a woman who gave her a piece of equipment that transformed her spinning ability in exchange for something she was not initially willing to describe in detail. She confessed to having driven with Thomas in a coach attended by the Devil himself. She confessed to encounters and events that placed the Weir household firmly in the tradition of diabolical witchcraft as the seventeenth century understood it.

She also, with a matter-of-factness that made some of those who heard it question her sanity as they had questioned her brother’s, confirmed the details of Thomas’s confession regarding the sexual crimes, providing her own account of events that corroborated his in ways that made the possibility of shared delusion or coordinated fabrication less plausible as an explanation.

Jean Weir had a particular characteristic that became part of the legend surrounding the family. She was a skilled spinner, and her spinning was said to continue by itself even when she was not working it, the wheel turning without a hand to drive it, the thread appearing without visible effort. This image, the self-spinning wheel in the house on the West Bow, became one of the most persistent details in the Edinburgh legend of the Weirs.

The Trial

The authorities, having concluded that Thomas Weir was not in fact simply ill and that his confessions were specific and detailed enough to require a legal response, brought him to trial in April 1670.

The trial was swift by the standards of the period. The confessions were the primary evidence, supplemented by Jean’s corroborating accounts and by the testimony of witnesses who had been present at the original prayer meeting confession. The defence that Weir was simply mad was raised and considered and rejected. He was not mad. He was, by every measure available to the court, a man who knew what he had done and had chosen to speak about it.

He was convicted of sorcery and of the sexual crimes described in his confession. Jean was convicted of witchcraft. Both were sentenced to death.

At his execution on the 11th of April 1670, Thomas Weir reportedly maintained the attitude he had held throughout, calm, clear, unrepentant in the specific sense that he did not recant his confessions, though he did not on the other hand show the conventional signs of a man seeking divine forgiveness for his sins. When urged by the ministers present to pray or to seek mercy, he declined. When asked if he had any hope of salvation, his response was reported as indicating that he did not expect it and was not seeking it.

He was strangled and his body was burned between Edinburgh and Leith. His staff, which he had identified as an instrument of sorcery, was burned with him, and contemporary accounts describe it burning with an unusual resistance to the fire, writhing in the flames in a way that those present found disturbing.

Jean Weir was executed the following day. She reportedly died in a manner that the witnesses found eccentric, pulling at her clothing in a way that suggested she intended to die with as little covering as possible, which in a seventeenth century context was understood as a final diabolical gesture.

The Staff

The staff that Thomas Weir identified as his instrument of sorcery deserves attention, because it occupies a central place in both his confession and in the subsequent legend.

Weir described the staff as having been given to him, or having come to him, through supernatural means, and as being the source of the apparently extraordinary power his public prayers had over those who heard them. His gift for devotional oratory, the quality of his public religious performance that had made him Angelical Thomas to his community, was in his own account not a spiritual gift at all but a diabolical one, the staff making him appear to be what he was not.

This is one of the most disturbing elements of the whole Weir story. The godliness that his community had admired and tried to emulate, the devotional intensity that had made him a spiritual exemplar, was by his own account a performance powered by the wrong source. The people who had sat in his prayer meetings drawing inspiration from his apparent closeness to God had been, without their knowledge, drawing on something else entirely.

The staff itself is described in the accounts as doing things after Weir’s confession that physical staves do not normally do. It was reportedly seen running ahead of Weir in the street before his arrest, without a hand to guide it. It burned in the fire at his execution with the resistance described by witnesses. It features in later accounts of hauntings at the house on the West Bow as a presence rather than an object, the sound of it on the cobbles heard when nothing was there.

The Haunting of the West Bow

Thomas and Jean Weir’s house on the West Bow became one of Edinburgh’s most notorious haunted locations within years of their executions, and remained so for well over a century.

Nobody would live in it. The house stood empty for the remainder of the seventeenth century and through much of the eighteenth, the neighbourhood growing around it while the Weir house remained unoccupied, its reputation sufficient to deter any tenant regardless of the practical inconvenience of leaving a perfectly functional building unused.

The accounts of what was seen and heard at the house across those decades are remarkably consistent. Lights in the windows when no one was inside. The sound of the staff on the cobblestones of the West Bow when the street was empty. A figure seen at the window. A spectral coach, driven at speed up the West Bow in the night, recalling Jean Weir’s confession of the coach attended by the Devil. Sounds of spinning from the upper rooms.

The house was eventually demolished in the early nineteenth century as part of the general redevelopment of that area of Edinburgh, which removed the specific physical location of the haunting but did not remove the legend. The West Bow still exists, though the lower section that contained the Weir house was substantially altered by Victorian-era building work. The area around what is now Victoria Street occupies roughly the ground where the most notorious household in Edinburgh’s history once stood.

The Question the Confession Raises

The central mystery of the Thomas Weir case is the same one that the Isobel Gowdie confession raises, and it is a mystery that the historical record cannot resolve: why did they confess?

Weir was seventy years old. He had built a life of extraordinary apparent respectability over seven decades. He had survived the political upheavals of the Covenanting period, had served the cause he believed in, had arrived at old age with a reputation that was the envy of his community. He had nothing obvious to gain from confessing and everything to lose.

He was not tortured. He was not accused. He was not cornered by evidence. He walked into a prayer meeting and began to speak, and what he said destroyed everything he had built, ended his life, and consigned his sister to execution alongside him.

The explanations that have been offered range across a considerable spectrum. That he was genuinely guilty of the things he described and was driven by age or illness or religious crisis to confess. That he was suffering from a mental illness that produced detailed and specific false confessions and that the authorities were wrong to execute him on the basis of it. That the sexual crimes were real and the diabolical element was a framework he imposed on them or that the court imposed on his account of them. That something happened to him late in life, an encounter or an experience that he interpreted in the theological terms available to him, and that the confession was his attempt to account for it in those terms.

The man himself provided no explanation. He confessed, he maintained the confessions, he declined pastoral comfort at his execution, and he died.

Why Weir Still Matters

Thomas Weir is not well known outside Scotland, and within Scotland he occupies a specific niche in the Edinburgh ghost tour tradition without being widely understood as the genuinely extraordinary figure he is.

He matters because he is unique. Not in the category of executed witch, which is unfortunately large, but in the category of person who confessed voluntarily, without coercion, in specific and detailed terms, to things that ended their life. Isobel Gowdie is his closest counterpart in the Scottish record, and she and Weir together raise the same unanswerable question in two different registers.

He matters because the diabolical piety he embodied, the appearance of godliness powered by something else, the staff that made him seem what he was not, is a specific and disturbing idea. The community that had drawn spiritual sustenance from his apparent closeness to God was, in his own account, drawing on the opposite. This is not simply a story about a hypocrite. It is a story about the impossibility of knowing, from the outside, what is actually producing the appearance of virtue.

And he matters because his house stood empty for over a century on one of Edinburgh’s busiest streets, and the people who lived and worked around it heard the staff on the cobblestones at night, and nobody was willing to live there regardless of the practical inconvenience.

The West Bow is a busy street now. The house is gone. But the accounts of what was heard there in the decades after the execution are consistent enough and span enough years to be something more than simple ghost story embellishment.

Something was in that house that nobody wanted to share space with.

Angelical Thomas, it turned out, had not left entirely.