The Ringcroft of Stocking Poltergeist: Andrew Mackie's Farm, Rerrick, 1695

In 1695 Andrew Mackie was a mason and tenant farmer at Ring-Croft of Stocking, in the parish of Rerrick, in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, Galloway. The farm stood on a rise to the north-west of Auchencairn. About the beginning of February, something began to trouble it. The minister, the Rev. Alexander Telfair, recorded it day by day.

Cattle in the byre were found loose, their ropes cut. One beast hung by its halter from a high beam, its feet clear of the ground. The children and others saw "as it were a young boy, about the age of fourteen years, with gray cloths, and a bonnet on his head, but presently disappeared."

Then the stones came, with no visible thrower. Telfair noted: "The stones which hit any person had not half their natural weight; and the throwing was more frequent on the Sabbath than at other times." He stayed a night in the house. "I felt something pressing up my arme; I casting my eyes thither, perceived a little white hand and arm, from the elbow down, but presently it evanished."

Visiting ministers were pelted, and Andrew Ewart of Kells was hit twice. Mrs Mackie found, under a stone, "seven small bones, with blood, and some flesh, all closed in a piece of old suddled paper." Then came a letter written and sealed with blood. "Repent and tak warning," it urged.

The ministers held a fast and prayed in the house. It "gripped and handled the legs of some, as with a man's hand; it hoised up the feet of others while standing on the ground." In prayer it was "busiest then, throwing most at the person praying." A hot stone landed in the children's bed and burned through the bedclothes.

On 22 April it gripped John Keige, a miller in Auchencairn, until he begged his neighbours for help. On Wednesday 24 April, a parish day of humiliation, it threw stones "with such cruelty and force, that all in the house feared lest they should be killed." On 26 April it spoke, threatening to return with "an hundred worse" unless the land repented.

Fires broke out again and again, and the gable was pulled down. On 30 April Mackie saw something in the barn. "He could not discern it to have any form, but as if it had been a black cloud; it was affrighting to them all." Then: "Upon Wednesday's night, being the 1st of May, it fired a little sheephouse; the sheep were got out safe, but the sheep house was wholly burnt." After that, it stopped.

Telfair weighed the parish's theories. A rumour said Mackie had given his firstborn to the Devil when he received the Mason-word. Mackie denied ever taking such vows. Others blamed an old charm, or a dead woman's clothes. Telfair concluded it was a real diabolical spirit, and wrote against the unbelief of his day, "Sadducism". George Mosman printed the account in Edinburgh in 1696, attested by five other ministers and nine laymen, Charles Macklelane of Colline among them.

No one was caught or accused of producing the phenomena. Sceptics often read stone-throwing poltergeist cases as hidden human agency, but no one has argued it for Ringcroft specifically.

J. Maxwell Wood reprinted the full account in 1911. Sara Bain built her novel The Ghost Tree around it. A wind-blown oak above the village is said to be the last of the Auchencairn "Ghost Trees". Legend says that when it dies, the Rerrick Parish Poltergeist will return.