According to the account the Scotsman drew from Martin Coventry's writing, the laird was tormented by suspicion of his young wife although there was no sign of infidelity. He killed her, hid the body, and said she had gone to visit relatives on the Continent. Later he announced that she had drowned. The laird died in unexplained circumstances before he could move the upper half of the body from the tower.
The strange manifestations were then said to begin: the top half of a woman in the upper rooms, and the lower half in a blood-splattered dress on the ground floor, in the grounds or in the graveyard. Coventry cites an 1882 letter from a Reverend E. J. Simmons, who woke after a hot and painful kiss and felt his cheek ache as if burnt, although it showed no mark. His friend Beaumont Featherstone reported an apparition with a look of despair, and saw it again at a window ten days later. The murder itself has no independent record that we found.
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