HANGING AROUND: Leonard Low with noose about an execution with a twist

A HANGING PREMONITION

* BY LEONARD LOW *

Aberdeen 1785. The crowd in Marischal street had been impatiently waiting, suddenly there was movement! The people crushed forward to get the best view, figures could be seen, a Woman with guards either side was brought up the steps of the wooden stage. Pathetic, malnourished and looking anxious and confused to why she was there! All types of the City’s citizens were present, vagrants, working class and here and there soldiers in red uniforms. Today would see the common thief Elspeth Reid make her peace to God and be hanged to death on the Scaffold. She had been caught stealing linen cloths and other women’s clothing from washing drying areas. Elspeth was a habitual thief and alcoholic vagabond. Arresting her and jailing her put nothing but expense on the city. The minute she went over the threshold of a jail cell, she now cost money as all did who met the dark dungeons of the Tollbooth in Aberdeen.

All fines incurred for crimes had to be paid as did the food, security costs and paperwork incurred in a stay in the Tolbooth. There was no one left who would pay Elspeth Reid’s fees and fines anymore. She was now utterly friendless. A habitual thief for years, she had been warned by judges and courts that they wouldn’t tolerate her arrests any longer, and still she had paid no heed! This new theft brought the harshest of charges against her. She was to be made an example off, and to rid the city of nothing but a burden to the public purse! She was sentenced to be hanged by the neck ‘til she was dead! Little Catherine Davidson was in her early teens and swept along by the excitement of witnessing a public hanging. She had been there early to command a decent view of the proceedings. The crowd grew into thousands, it seemed the citizens of Aberdeen had all turned out to see the sorry sight of Elspeth Reid meeting her end on the noose of the hangman’s rope! The moment came when Elspeth stood, she said a few words in which the crowd couldn’t hear. The hangman put a hood over Elspeth Reid, pulled a lever fast and a secret trapdoor in the floor opened and she fell straight down breaking her neck! The crowd cheered as the rope was pulled back up and cut down from the gibbet, the noose was removed from the victim’s neck and the hangman taunted the audience with it waving it like a lasso around his head as the crowd cheered. He let the noose fly into the crowd as was tradition and the rope slapped down on Catherine Davidson. She caught it square on her chest. For a moment she couldn’t hear a thing! The crowd cheered loudly but she only saw open mouths, no noise! It was the strangest of things, as she looked back at the scaffold, she was horrified to see herself there, holding the noose. With the hangman…but he was putting the noose around her neck!

“She screamed! Then the vision was gone. She still held the executioner’s rope in her hands but was led away by her friends. For the next 45 years this nightmare would follow her, until the premonition eventually came true!”

Catherine would grow into womanhood settling in her hometown of Aberdeen. She would eventually marry a Tavern owner and become Mrs Humphreys. But over the years the Tavern would take its toll. Socialising the customers was a way of life that brought ruin to many a publican. Alcoholism was rife with wine and beers readily at hand. And so, Mr and Mrs Humphreys descended into a ginsoaked existence. Drunken vicious brawls were a hazard of the back-street Taverns in Aberdeen, but here it was often as naught the very Tavern Owners themselves entertaining the base quality of drinkers, screaming and fighting each other. Mr Humphreys would joke “that one day his own wife would hang and face Marischal street herself “meaning in jest – “in one of her drunken rages in the near future- there was every chance she would kill him”.