Launched Into Eternity: Aberdeen, Scotland and the Spectacle of Execution, 1560-1963

In 2026, the Granite Noir crime writing festival celebrates its 10th anniversary. Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives have been a partner in the festival since its inception and this year, we once again open a window onto the city’s murkier past by contributing an exhibition and a talk to the festival programme. 

Among the many stories preserved in the archives, few are as unsettling as those concerning capital punishment. From witch hunts to Scotland’s last execution, these documents trace five centuries of what was long seen as the ultimate sanction under the criminal justice system. 

The phrase “launched into eternity” appears time and again in broadsides and newspapers of the 18th and 19th centuries. It sounds almost serene, but the reality behind it was anything but. It was a euphemism—an attempt to soften the brutal image of a hanging, in which choking, thrashing, and terror were the norm. 

Witchcraft, Fear, and Fire 

The journey begins in post-Reformation Scotland. By the late 16th century, religious upheaval had blended with superstition to create fertile ground for witchcraft accusations. The Witchcraft Act of 1563 made practising sorcery—or merely consulting someone accused of it—a capital offence. 

Dean of Guild Accounts, 1597

In 1597, Aberdeen saw one of its most intense outbreaks of witch hunting, spurred on by King James VI’s Daemonologie, which gave royal endorsement to these persecutions. That year alone, around 25 people—mostly women—were executed. 

The Dean of Guild accounts from that year paint a vivid picture of how these deaths were orchestrated. Strangulation was followed by burning, a method chosen not just for punishment but for annihilation, thereby preventing the devil from reanimating the body. Pages list the materials required for a single execution: peat, firewood, tar barrels, rope, a stake, and the fee for executioner John Justice, whose very job made him a social outcast. 

The Maiden and the Heading Hill 

Aberdeen was one of the Scottish burghs to use The Maiden, an early beheading machine. Brought into use in the 1590s, it ensured a clean, rapid death at a time when axe beheadings could take several gruesome blows. The blade of the Maiden still survives in Aberdeen’s museum collections.

James Gordons Map of 1661 - courtesy of NLS

Executions in this era took place primarily on the “Heading Hill,” a site marked on James Gordon’s map of 1661. The map also identifies Gallow Hill, where hangings were carried out until 1783. 

Spectacle, Crowds, and Moral Anxiety 

By the 18th century, hanging had become the dominant method of execution. These events were theatrical public rituals, with crowds numbering in the thousands. 

Broadsides—cheap single-sheet publications—were the tabloid newspapers of the day. They sensationally described criminals’ lives, confessions, and final moments. One such broadside recounts the execution of Catherine Davidson, unusual because women constituted only about 10% of those executed. Davidson had witnessed the previous hanging of a woman decades earlier when she was aged only 5 - in a grim twist, the rope used at that execution had struck her on the chest when it was cast into the crowd.

Broadside related to Catherine Davidson - courtesy of NLS

Newspaper reports reveal a mix of fascination and disdain toward execution crowds. Coverage of the 1849 execution of James Robb and the 1860s hanging of George Christie describe audiences of 8,000 people and warn of drunkenness, pickpocketing, and disorder. Public executions were meant to deter crime—yet pickpockets often worked the crowds, undeterred. 

Dissection, Dread, and Riot 

Under the Murder Act of 1752, post-mortem dissection became part of the sentence for murder. To an 18th century mind, this was terrifying: if the body was the vessel for the afterlife, dissection threatened one’s very salvation. 

Hogarth - The Reward of Cruelty 1751

Suspicion and fear of anatomists was commonplace. James Miller was executed in Aberdeen on the 16th November 1753 for theft from a house in Inverurie. The authorities ordered his corpse to be buried at the foot of Gallows Hill. However, when his body was cut down "some friendly sailors saved it from the surgeons by soon-after taking it up and carrying it out with them in a yawl, and singing it in the sea".

Local hostility to anatomisation was to reach a crescendo in 1831, when the stench of decaying waste and the discovery of body parts on ground adjacent to the new anatomy theatre on St. Andrew's Street so incensed the population that a riot ensued, and the anatomy theatre was destroyed.

Behind Closed Doors: The End of Public Executions

By the mid 19th century, concerns about morality, crowd behaviour, and modern sensibilities led to calls for reform. The last public execution in Aberdeen was that of John Booth in 1857, who was hanged for the murder of his mother-in-law in Oldmeldrum. 

The final public execution in Scotland took place in Dumfries in 1868. Yet the death penalty itself persisted. Aberdeen’s last execution occurred much later: the hanging of Henry Burnett at Craiginches Prison in 1963. Notes by executioner Harry Allen, the death warrant, and correspondence discussing the rope to be used serve as chilling reminders of how matteroffact officialdom could be, even at the end of someone’s life.

Death warrant of Henry Burnett

Capital punishment in the UK was finally abolished in 1965, suspended at first and made permanent in 1969. 

A Changing Society 

The story of executions in Aberdeen is not just about crime and punishment—it is about how societies evolve. Practices once accepted as necessary, even moral, gradually became intolerable.  

Launched into Eternity: Aberdeen, Scotland and the Spectacle of Execution, 1560-1963 is part of the 2026 Granite Noir crime writing festival.

[Phil Astley, Archives Team Leader]