Craigmillar Castle's association with witchcraft accusation predates its much better-known connection to Mary, Queen of Scots by nearly a century, and involves a case with genuine royal stakes rather than local folk suspicion. In 1479, King James III, a monarch whose reign was already marked by deep suspicion of his own close relatives, became convinced through a reported dream that a witch had warned him he would die at the hands of his nearest kin. Rather than treating this as a private anxiety, James acted on it as though it were credible intelligence, moving against his own two brothers within the same year: Alexander, Duke of Albany, was imprisoned at Edinburgh Castle, while John Stewart, Earl of Mar, was sent to Craigmillar.
The charge against Mar specifically was witchcraft, built, according to two surviving contemporary chronicles, on his association with several people already under suspicion of the practice — guilt attached less to anything Mar himself was accused of doing than to the company the king's suspicious mind decided he had kept. Whatever the true substance of the case, it proved fatal: Mar never emerged from Craigmillar Castle alive. The precise cause and circumstances of his death were never conclusively established even at the time, and remain genuinely uncertain today, though some accounts state that he was removed from the castle and bled to death, an execution method with unsettling echoes of the mediaeval belief that bleeding could draw the taint of witchcraft out of the body along with the blood itself. Whether that detail is historical fact or a later embellishment, the underlying case — a king's brother imprisoned and killed on a witchcraft accusation born from a dream — stands as one of the earliest and most consequential witchcraft-related deaths tied to any single building in this register.
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