Maggie Dickson's story is, unusually for this register, a genuine and well-documented piece of eighteenth-century Scottish legal and social history rather than a ghost story or folk legend layered onto real events after the fact. Margaret Dickson worked as a salt-hawker out of Musselburgh, and found herself, sometime in the early 1720s, convicted under the harsh Concealment of Pregnancy Act of 1690 — a law that presumed infanticide, and applied the death penalty accordingly, whenever a woman had concealed a pregnancy and the resulting child was later found dead, regardless of whether the death was in fact natural, stillbirth, or otherwise. Whether her own child was stillborn or died shortly after birth remains disputed in the historical record, but the outcome for Dickson was the same: she was sentenced to hang, and did so in the Grassmarket on 2 September 1724, in front of the crowds who routinely gathered there for executions.
What happened next is the part of her story that made her famous. As her coffin was being carried out to Inveresk for burial, the procession stopped at the village of Peffer Mill, where those accompanying it heard knocking coming from inside the coffin — some accounts specify her own family among those who heard it. When the lid was opened, Dickson was found to be alive, having survived the hanging with, by most accounts, remarkably few lasting physical effects. Scots law at the time held that a sentence, once carried out, could not be repeated for the same crime; since Dickson had technically already been executed and, in the eyes of the law, had legally died, she and her husband had to formally remarry one another to restore her legal existence and marital status. She lived on for at least another forty years.
Her survival made her a minor celebrity in her own lifetime, written up in contemporary press accounts and referred to by historians since as having achieved something close to cult-heroine status across central Scotland — a rare case of an ordinary woman becoming a folk legend not through any supernatural claim but through a documented, medically inexplicable stroke of survival. The nickname "Half-Hangit Maggie" stuck to her for the rest of her life and long after, and a pub in the Grassmarket, close to the spot of her original execution, still carries her name today, keeping her story in active local circulation three hundred years on.
Comments