The historical Bobby is reasonably well attested: contemporary accounts describe a small dog, generally said to be a Skye Terrier, that kept close to the Greyfriars Kirkyard grave of John Gray (by some accounts a nightwatchman, by others a gardener) after Gray's death in 1858, and that became enough of a fixture that the city licensed him in 1867 to keep him from being destroyed as a stray, with the Lord Provost himself reportedly paying the fee. He is said to have died in 1872 and was buried, not in consecrated ground since dogs could not be, just inside the kirkyard gate near his owner. A statue funded by philanthropist Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts and sculpted by William Brodie was unveiled at the corner of Candlemaker Row in 1873.
The ghost story sits alongside that history rather than growing directly out of it: people over the years have reported hearing a dog bark, whine or pad about near the kirkyard entrance and Bobby's small headstone, with nothing visible to account for it. It is one of the gentler and more thinly documented hauntings on any Edinburgh tour, generally told as a coda to the historical account rather than investigated as a case in its own right, and is included here on that honest footing — a widely repeated single claim rather than a well-evidenced haunting.
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