The ghost of Sergeant Arthur Davies and the ghost-evidence murder trial of Terig and Macdonald, Braemar, 1749 to 1754

The year is 1749. It is the aftermath of Culloden, and Highland dress is banned. At Dubrach, in the parish of Braemar, a small detachment of General Guise's Regiment of Foot is stationed on upper Deeside. Among them is Sergeant Arthur Davies. English. Newly married. Known to carry money.

28 September 1749. Davies went out alone with his gun. He did not come back. His men searched for about four days.

Summer 1750. Alexander M'Pherson, a young man of Inverey, lay in bed at night in a shieling. A figure came to him, "a man clad in blue." He took it for a living man. He rose and followed it to the door. There it spoke: "I am Serjeant Davies." It told him where the bones lay, and to get Donald Farquharson's help. They spoke in Gaelic. Then it vanished "in the twinkling of an eye."

It came back naked, and urged him to bury the body. Asked who had killed him, it first held back. On a later visit it named the two men who would one day stand accused.

M'Pherson was not alone in that shieling. Isobel M'Hardie, whose servant he was, lay at the other end. One night she "saw something naked come in at the door." It came in "in a bowing posture." She drew the clothes over her head. Next morning M'Pherson told her it would not trouble them any more.

On the hill of Christie, at the head of Glenconie, M'Pherson found the remains in a moss bank. He had passed within a yard of them on his first search. There was mouse-coloured hair, torn blue cloth, and brogues with the buckle tags cut away. With Donald Farquharson, he buried the bones in the moss.

June 1754. Duncan Terig alias Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald stood trial for murder before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. M'Pherson repeated the ghost's words under oath. Isobel M'Hardie repeated hers. Other witnesses said they had seen the killing from the hill. The jury of fifteen acquitted both men "in one voice."

Tradition, preserved by Walter Scott, keeps one more moment. M'Pherson said the ghost spoke "as good Gaelic as he had ever heard in Lochaber." Defence counsel Robert M'Intosh replied: "Pretty well, for the ghost of an English sergeant!"

Scott, whose preface introduced the trial record printed for the Bannatyne Club in 1831, thought M'Pherson learned of the crime by ordinary means and invented the ghost so he could speak without danger. Katherine Langrish agreed in 2025. Arthur Conan Doyle was more generous. In 1920 he argued that Davies could have picked up Gaelic during his months in the Highlands, while listing the objections: the four-year delay and the ghost's apparent indifference to its own remains.

Andrew Lang printed a friend's postscript. An elderly Braemar woman said an ancestor had watched the killing and fled after his dog was wounded. Then she abruptly stopped talking. A tradition holds that a blue-coated ghost still wanders the hills around Glenshee. No dated modern sighting supports it.