This account stands apart from most of Craigmillar Castle's other reported ghosts (see the separate records on its Grey Lady haunting and the 1479 witchcraft imprisonment of the Earl of Mar) by resting on an actual contemporary press report rather than generalised local tradition. In May 1935, a newspaper ran a story, headlined with the memorably specific "Edinburgh Ghost with Spurs," describing a mysterious hooded figure seen gliding across the fields at Niddrie Mains, right in the shadow of the ruined castle. The description given was unusually precise for this kind of report: a long, dark blue hooded cloak, a mass of tangled black hair falling forward over the figure's forehead, and heavy riding boots fitted with actual spurs — a detail that, whatever else it suggests, at least implies witnesses got a good enough look to notice footwear.
The 1935 sighting didn't come out of nowhere. The year before, in 1934, separate witnesses had already reported a hooded figure prowling the grounds of Craigmillar Castle itself, close enough in both location and description that the two reports are generally treated as the same phenomenon, or at least the same local legend, recurring across two consecutive years. Unlike the castle's more generic and undated Grey Lady tradition, this case has the specificity of a real, dated, named-publication press account behind it, even if the figure's ultimate identity and origin remain as unexplained now as they apparently were to the newspaper's readers in 1935.
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