The Faerie Coffins of Edinburgh: Murder and Mystery 1836

 

Just outside of Edinburgh, Scotland, a rocky precipice rises hundreds of feet into the air.  This place is called Arthur’s Seat.  It is the site of a long dormant volcano with a name that hearkens back to the chivalric past of the mythic Kingdom of Camelot.

Arthur’s Seat is a series of grass covered hills filled with caves and deep dark crevasses.  And based upon what happened at this location in the early summer of 1836, Arthur’s Seat holds many more mysteries, than even its name steeped in Arthurian legend as it is, would indicate.

Sometime in late June of 1836 three boys out hunting rabbits climbed up the rocky hillside of Arthur’s Seat and happened upon a discovery, the origins and true nature of which remain a mystery to this very day.

Hidden inside a cave; tucked away into a stone niche on the wall, the boys found seventeen tiny wooden coffins each containing a miniature lifelike figurine dressed in time period clothing.  The tiny wooden coffins were arranged in three tiers, with the ones resting on the top tier being fragile and in a state of advanced decay, while those on the bottom tier were the most well preserved as if each one of the wooden figurines and coffins had been placed inside the niche purposefully at different times.

News of this strange discovery at Arthur’s Seat in June of 1836 was quickly picked up on by newspapers across the United Kingdom.  First, the local Edinburgh paper, The Scotsman, reported on July 16 that, “Lilliputian coffins decently laid out...with mimic representations of all the funeral trappings,” had been found.  The Scotsman further reported that it appeared as if, “evident dispositions must have been made singly and at considerable intervals.”

On July 20, 1836 The London Times reported the story of the discovery by the three boys and spoke of, “(S)eventeen tiny coffins three or four inches high.  In the coffins were miniature wooden figurines.  They were all dressed differently in style and material.”

At the time, newspapers were able to accurately report on what had been discovered just outside of Edinburgh--seventeen tiny coffins that contained seventeen fully dressed miniature wooden figures--but no one back then, nor anyone since, has been able to identify who exactly put these seventeen tiny wooden coffins and figurines deep inside a cave on Arthur’s Seat or why.

With a lack of any clear answers to the mystery, the public quickly latched onto the intriguing story, and labelled the find as the discovery of the Faerie Coffins based upon the artifacts diminutive size and mock human characteristics.  The early 19th century public lost no time in attributing the Faerie Coffins to the supposed dark arts of witchcraft and black magic.

In fact, right from the very moment that the coffins were discovered, the entire story becomes foggy and shrouded in mystery.  In researching this article I was unable to locate any of the names of any of the three boys who found the coffins, although speculation has it that the boys themselves were probably around twelve or thirteen years old.

Some reports say that the boys who found the Faerie Coffins thought so little of what they had found that they promptly began to play a game of catch with the delicate artifacts, damaging many in the process, before bringing them back down the hillside to Edinburgh.  But other sources say that the boys were so, well, freaked out by the creepy oddity of their find, that they left all of the coffins exactly where they had found them and promptly ran back to town to inform their teacher, an eminent local historian, of the strange discovery that they had made.

Whoever the three boys were who happened upon the seventeen Faerie Coffins buried deep in a cave on the side of Arthur’s Seat, and what exactly they did with those coffins once they found them may forever remain a mystery, but some facts about the fate of the Faerie Coffins of Edinburgh are firmly established.

It would appear that only eight of the reported seventeen Faerie Coffins that were discovered in June of 1836 survived the trip down to Edinburgh from their resting place inside of Arthur’s Seat.  These eight remaining wooden coffins and figurines were displayed in the shop window of a prominent Edinburgh jeweler named Robert Frazier until 1845.  In that year the eight Faerie Coffins were auctioned off, for just under 4 pounds, to an unknown private buyer.  

        The Faerie Coffins remained in private hands until 1901 when the 8 surviving artifacts were donated to the National Museum of Scotland where they currently remain  on display.

Today, we know where eight of the Faerie Coffins are, and we know when and where they were discovered; but how exactly did they come to be hidden in a cave on a Scottish hillside and who put them there in the first place and why?

One of the most persuasive and intriguing theories, in my opinion, is that the Faerie Coffins may have been someone’s attempt to provide a decent symbolic burial for the seventeen murder victims of serial killers William Hare and William Burke who in 1828 had murdered seventeen men, women and children in cold blood and then sold their bodies to a local Edinburgh doctor named Robert Knox.

Like most other large European and American cities that contained a university at the time, Edinburgh was home to a thriving black market that traded in corpses.  Medical students and their teachers would pay large sums of money, no questions asked, to procure specimens to perform dissections and study upon in the early 1800’s when such practices were considered illegal.

William Hare during the 1820’s was the owner of an Edinburgh boarding house.  Around the year 1828, whenever a lodger in Hare’s boarding house would become past due in their rent payments, they would somehow suddenly and mysteriously disappear never to be heard from again.  

Soon, with a rash of disappearances all connected to Hare’s boarding house, local Edinburgh authorities became suspicious.  Under questioning, hoping to avoid the hangman’s noose, Hare’s friend William Burke admitted to being an accomplice in seventeen murders with Hare.  He stated that both he and Hare had undertaken the murders of tenants staying at the boarding house for profit and sold their bodies to Knox who used them for dissection and study.

This theory has much circumstantial evidence to support the creation of the Faerie Coffins.  The number of seventeen murder victims matches the supposed number of coffins discovered, the time period fits nicely with the discovery of the Faerie Coffins, and each of the miniature figurines discovered was dressed differently indicating that they may have been used as representations of seventeen unique individuals with unique personal identities.

However, circumstantial evidence does not prove anything definitively, and many other interesting theories are just as plausible to explain the existence of the Faerie Coffins.

One theory is that the Faerie Coffins were created over a longer period of time dating back to the mid-eighteenth century by Edinburgh widows who had lost their husband’s at sea and wanted to commemorate their deaths in some tangible and lasting way.  Such practices were known throughout America and Europe, and this would explain why some of the Faerie Coffins were so new and well preserved while others were old and decaying, but it does not account for the differing appearances, some even feminine in nature, of each of the Faerie Coffins.

Of course, there is still the original and third theory, which is that the Faerie Coffins are in fact something that was connected to a ritual witchcraft practice, surrounding mock funerals and black masses that the three boys out rabbit hunting in June of 1836 just happened to inadvertently stumble upon.

Are the Faerie Coffins an attempt to give innocent murder victims the decent Christian burial that William Hare and William Burke so violently took from them?  Are they symbols of the sadness and mourning of widows who would never see their husband’s ever again?  Or, are the Faerie Coffins, something even more dark and sinister--symbolic representations of the darker sides of human nature and the afterlife?

We may never know.  Perhaps, in the distant future, it will take three other unknown boys out chasing rabbits, or something else, up the steep hillside of Arthur’s Seat to unwittingly discover the answers to the mysterious questions behind Edinburgh’s Faerie Coffins.