The Tolbooth, Aberdeen

The Tolbooth Museum on Castle Street is the surviving wardhouse of Aberdeen's burgh jail, a granite tower of vaulted 17th-century cells reached by a tight turnpike stair. It is widely sold as the place where Aberdeen held its witches, and the dates do not allow it. The Justice Court that condemned Janet Wishart and her son Thomas Leyis did sit in the Tolbooth in February 1597, but in the older, unsafe building that stood on the site; the burgh's own accounts pay a smith for shackles for the witches in the steeple of the Kirk of St Nicholas, across town. The cells visitors walk into were begun in 1616 by the mason Thomas Watson of Old Rayne and finished in 1629, in obedience to an act of the Scottish Parliament of November 1597 ordering every burgh to build a secure jail. The building's documented misery is real and comes later: a suicide dragged through the streets, an escape in 1636, Jacobites held so straitly in 1745 that food barely reached them. The apparition people report here wears a 1920s trilby. The museum has been shut since 2020 and the council expects to reopen it in spring 2027.

The Tolbooth Museum on Castle Street is what is left of the burgh tolbooth of Aberdeen. Aberdeen City Council calls it "the former wardhouse, or prison for Aberdeen, a unique complex of 17th and 18th century gaol cells". Historic Environment Scotland dates the surviving fabric to 1615-29, notes that "The Tolbooth cells are particularly rare as many from the 17th century no longer survive", and names the builder in a single line: "In 1616 Thomas Watson, a mason from Old Rayne in Aberdeenshire, was employed to build a Tolbooth in Aberdeen." The same record describes an interior of "stone-flagged floors, a narrow spiral stair, several small internal rooms, some of which are vaulted with original heavy timber iron bound yetts". An earlier tolbooth stood on the same ground from about the close of the fourteenth century, and it was a poor prison. William Robbie, writing in 1893, put the reason plainly: "it was sometimes necessary to keep a watch on the cells night and day to insure their inmates remaining in safe custody, and, notwithstanding this additional precaution, escapes were numerous". By the 1610s the burgh called its own tolbooth, in the phrase Robbie quotes, "a dishonour and dishonestie to the town". Aberdeen's great witch hunt fell in 1596 and 1597, and its court did sit in the Tolbooth. Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives say so in seven words: "The trials were held in the Tolbooth." The assize records printed by the Spalding Club in 1841 open with the sitting of 17 February 1596, which is 1597 by modern reckoning: "The Court of Justiciare hauldin within the Tolbuithe of Aberdene, the sevinteenth day of Februar, 1596, be Alexander Rutherfurd, provest of Aberdene", acting on a royal commission dated at Holyroodhouse on 2 February. Janet Wishart was tried that day. Her son Thomas Leyis followed on 23 February and was convicted by all but three of his twenty-one assizers on the first point, "that he was the ringleader of the dans on a Hallow evin last, about the croce". The city archive's account of the charge adds that the dancers were "under the conduct and guiding of the devil present with them" and that Leyis struck Kathren Mitchell "because she spoilt the dance and ran not so fast as the rest". Of mother and son the record then says only that they "war convict and brint for wichecraft and socerie". The accused were held somewhere else. The Dean of Guild accounts for 1596-97, kept by William Dun and printed in the same volume, pay a smith for the irons: "Item, To Alexander Reid, Smyth, for tua pair of scheckillis to the Witches in the Stepill, xxxii sh." Arthur Winfield of the OpenSpace Trust and the historian Chris Croly, then Aberdeen's city historian, identified those two prisons as the stone-vaulted chapel of St Mary and the steeple of the Kirk of St Nicholas, where an iron ring survives in a pillar; Winfield told Live Science that "In the winter nowadays, the temperature gets down to 3 degrees [Celsius] in St Mary's Chapel, and I guess it would be even colder up in the spire." The accounts also record what that winter cost the prisoners. They open with "Imprimis, For eirding of Suppak, quha deid in prisoun", and pay ten shillings for "trailling of Manteith throw the Streittis of the Town in ane Cart, quha hangit herself in Prisoun, and for Cart hyir and eirding of hir". The fires were on the hill: "Item, For careing the peittis, coillis, and barrellis to the Hill". 1597 is also the year the granite came from. On 1 November the parliament of James VI passed the act that the Records of the Parliaments of Scotland head "Prison houses should be built within all burghs". Its complaint, in that edition's modernised spelling, was that "through want of sufficient and sure prisons, jails and ward-houses sundry rebels and transgressors of the laws, as well criminal as civil, escape unpunished and justice contemned". Its remedy was that "within the space of three years in all burghs within this realm there be sufficient and sure jails and ward-houses built, upheld and maintained by the provost, bailies, council and communities of the said burghs upon their own common good". Historic Environment Scotland records the consequence for this building in one sentence: "A Parliamentary Act, passed in 1597, required all burghs to erect prisons." Aberdeen took nineteen years to begin. Robbie dates the start: "in 1616 the work of rebuilding was seriously entered upon". The wardhouse was finished in 1629, the year a spire went up on the tower, and the tower was extended again in 1704. The cells held accused witches in the next wave. The city archive states that "The city's wardhouse, completed in 1629 within the walls of the existing Tolbooth, housed several witches awaiting trial." A commission of 9 August 1630 tried Marion Hardie, a vagabond from Elgin, who confessed before the Bishop of Aberdeen and the magistrates and was strangled and burnt. In 1636 Margaret Fraser, suspected of witchcraft, "managed to break ward and flee from the Tolbooth"; she was still being sought in Turriff in 1650, when she was reported dead. The Reverend John Bisset, living in the town under Jacobite occupation, wrote on 21 December 1745 that the merchant John Dingwall and David Bartlet were kept in different rooms in the tolbooth so straitly that necessaries could hardly be got in to them, and on 15 May 1746 that the prisoners in the tolbooth were to be taken to Inverness and shipped from there for London. When Peddie and Kinnear built the present Town House in 1868-74 the rest of the old complex came down, and the listing records what survived: "only the prison tower, or wardhouse of the Tolbooth remains". The whole is listed category A as LB19990, first listed in 1967 and revised in 2017. Aberdeen City Council opened the wardhouse as a museum in 1995 and the building marked its four hundredth anniversary in 2016. The ghost stories date from that museum period and are attributable. The Aberdeen local-history site aboutaberdeen.com summarises the chapter that the paranormal investigator Graeme Milne devoted to the building in his book The Haunted North (2008): white mist, a photographed orange light, shuffling feet, the sound of a chain, cold down one side of the body, and accounts collected from others of a figure about four feet tall in 1920s clothes and a trilby hat. A Most Haunted crew filmed here in April 2009; the episode, series 13 number 7, was broadcast on 1 December 2009.

The Tolbooth Museum has been closed for years. Aberdeen City Council's visitor page gives the opening hours as "Closed for building maintenance", and the earliest capture of that page in the Wayback Machine, from 27 October 2020, already read "Temporarily closed to the Public". By January 2023 the same page said the museum "will remain closed until further notice whilst a comprehensive survey of the historic building is carried out, which will inform a programme of care and maintenance". Read on 7 September 2026, it reports the restoration finished and recognised with a "Conservation Category Award at the annual Aberdeen Society of Architects (ASA) Design Awards", the electrical, lighting and fire detection systems being reinstated, and that "we expect to be able to reopen the Museum to the public in spring 2027". Listings that still print hours of ten to four are quoting a museum that has not opened in six years. The council gives the address as The Tolbooth Museum, Castle Street, Aberdeen AB11 5BB, at the Castlegate end of Union Street, with its own door beside the Town House; VisitAberdeenshire gives the postcode as AB11 5BQ, and the two do not agree. Buses 1 and 2 stop directly outside. There is no parking at the door and the nearest pay and display is on Marischal Street across the road. "There are no toilets on site", the council notes. Neither page prints an admission price, and the museum was free before it shut. VisitAberdeenshire, which calls the building "one of Aberdeen's oldest buildings and among the best-preserved 17th-century gaols in Scotland", lists "the Maiden and the blade of Aberdeen's 17th-century guillotine" among the displays. Access is the hard limit, and the council states it without hedging: "Due to its historic nature The Tolbooth Museum is not accessible with wheelchairs and prams. The turret steps tight and steep." Assistance dogs are welcome. Until it reopens the exterior is free at any hour. Historic Environment Scotland's description picks out the detail worth finding on the Castle Street front: "A vertical metal sundial is set high on the wall to the far right and carries the motto UT UMBRA SIC FUGIT VITA (Life flies like a shadow)." The seventeenth-century masonry is round the other side, where, in Robbie's words, "a part of the north side of the original tower of 1616, and its ancient corbelling can still be seen from Lodge Walk". The documents are open as well. Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives publish a guide to their witchcraft records with a transcription of the surviving dittay against Isobel Strathauchyn, and the whole 1841 Spalding Club volume of the 1596-97 trials is free at the Internet Archive.