Sir Thomas Dick Lauder told a story of an old lady of the Home family murdered by her trusted butler, who filled the bolt hole of her bedroom door with cherry stones to get at her rent money, cut her throat and then jumped from a window and broke his leg. The Langs say the murder happened at Linthill House, a fine old mansion on a brae over Eye Water, five or six miles from Billie Castle, and not at Billie, which was a ruin by then. According to them the woman got up when robbed, was cut down and left for dead, then crawled to the bell and raised the alarm. The butler was found some days later in a bean field, tried and executed, said to be the last person in Scotland hanged in chains.
The Langs write that the blood of a murdered person is said to refuse to wash out of woodwork, and that at Linthill there is no doubt the marks remain: the prints of the woman's bloody hands cling to the oak wainscoting of the room where the deed was done, despite visible attempts to plane them out. They add that the house is not haunted by mistress or man, but that people who had stayed there told of an upper chamber to which there came nightly the shuffling tramp of men carrying a heavy weight from a vehicle that was heard to drive up, then a closing door, retreating steps and silence. The womenfolk living in the old house said it was nothing, but looked over their shoulders.
This is a secondhand account in a book of 1913. I have not checked the murder against court records.
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