The murder of David Rizzio is one of the best-documented violent events in the palace's history, not folklore built on thin air. Rizzio, a favourite of Mary, Queen of Scots and widely resented for his influence over her, was set upon in a small supper room next to the Queen's own chamber on the night of 9 March 1566 by a group that included her husband Lord Darnley, jealous of Rizzio's closeness to the Queen and resentful at being denied the full royal title he wanted. Contemporary accounts describe Rizzio being stabbed dozens of times before being dragged out and finished off elsewhere in the palace, while Mary, six months pregnant with the future James VI, was restrained and threatened during the attack. Darnley's own death less than a year later, in the Kirk o' Field explosion of February 1567, only deepened the palace's reputation for violent intrigue.
The haunting tradition that has grown up around the murder centres on a bloodstain on the floor of the supper room, said to be Rizzio's and to be impossible to permanently scrub away, periodically reappearing or darkening according to those who maintain the story. His ghost is reported in the same rooms, sometimes alongside Darnley's. A separate, less specific tradition holds that a figure called Bald Agnes also haunts Holyroodhouse, generally identified by those who tell the story with Agnes Sampson, one of the women interrogated in connection with the North Berwick witch trials partly at Holyroodhouse itself before her execution on Castlehill in January 1591 (told in full in this register's separate record on her trial). The two hauntings — Rizzio's and Bald Agnes's — are usually mentioned together as part of the palace's ghost lore but rest on entirely separate historical events roughly a quarter-century apart.
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