Thomas Weir's case is one of the strangest in the whole of Scottish witch-trial history, precisely because it began with a confession nobody had tortured out of him. He had spent decades as a model of Presbyterian rectitude, a former Covenanting soldier respected enough in the godly circles of the West Bow to be called its "Bowhead Saint," leading prayer meetings and generally regarded as one of the more zealously pious men in the city. When illness struck him in 1670, he began, entirely unbidden, to tell those around him that he had for years been committing incest with his sister Jean, along with further offences the court records describe only obliquely, and that he practised witchcraft, deriving supernatural power from an elaborately carved walking staff.
A special court was convened in April 1670 to try Weir and his sister together. Jean, for her part, told interrogators that their mother had herself been a witch who had taught her children the craft, that her brother bore the Devil's mark on his body, and that the two of them had travelled the countryside together in a fiery coach — testimony that, alongside Thomas's own confession, was enough to secure convictions for both. Thomas Weir was garroted and then burned at the Gallowlee, the site used for executions on the road between Edinburgh and Leith, on 11 April 1670; when pressed by those present to pray for his soul, he reportedly refused. Jean was hanged the following day in the Grassmarket.
Weir's house on the West Bow acquired an immediate and lasting reputation. Local tradition holds that lights were seen burning in its windows and strange sounds heard within for years after it was abandoned, that Weir's ghost was seen riding a headless horse down the street, and that no one would take the house as a tenant despite its low rent, until eventually it was demolished. The West Bow itself was later redeveloped as part of Victoria Street in the nineteenth century, and a Quaker Meeting House built partly on the site has, according to more recent staff accounts, itself reported sightings of a figure walking through its walls.
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