The Sheep Heid Inn's real history is remarkable enough on its own terms to make its ghost story feel almost incidental. Trading continuously from the village of Duddingston since 1360, it holds a strong claim to being the oldest surviving public house anywhere in Scotland, and its list of historical patrons reads like a survey of Scottish history itself: Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James VI are both said to have visited, as did Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson in later centuries, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, who drank there while his Jacobite army lay encamped at Duddingston in the weeks before the Battle of Prestonpans in 1745. In a rather different register, Queen Elizabeth II made a surprise lunch visit in 2016 after a day at a nearby racecourse, adding a twenty-first-century footnote to six and a half centuries of royal and literary custom. The inn also holds Scotland's oldest surviving skittle alley, built in 1880 and still in working order for guests today.
Against that backdrop, the pub carries two separate ghost stories. Following restoration work that returned the building closer to its historic appearance, a visiting medium reported sensing the presence of a young girl near the skittle alley, a story that has circulated since without further elaboration on who she might have been. The more established haunting, though, belongs to a figure known simply as the Major, generally assumed by staff and regulars to be a former landlord of the inn, whose presence has been reported standing quietly by the bar. Witnesses describe him not as threatening but as watchful, staring intently at those present as though scrutinising them — a landlord, perhaps, still keeping an eye on his house centuries after his working life there ended.
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