Going underground

As Halloween beckons, Michael Alexander explores some of the haunting tales associated with notorious burial sites in Tayside and Fife

The higglety-pigglety jumble of gravestones sit at jaunty angles to one another as autumn leaves rustle in the wind and long shadows point towards the shorter days ahead.

Here in the Howff cemetery in the centre of Dundee, faded, crumbling, forgotten stones dating back centuries hint at the city’s social – often tragic – history where thousands of children died young and where disease proved no respecter to social status.

Yet for the majority of people buried over the centuries in the Howff there is no gravestone marker at all.

“The conservative estimate of how many bodies are in here is between 80,000 and 100,000, in comparison to the 1,200 gravestones that are here,” says Stewart Heaton, 37, who owns and runs Dark Dundee walking tours with his business partner Louise Murphy, 36.

“But if you think about things like the infant mortality rate and the fact there are a lot of people buried in here we don’t know about, it could go anywhere up to 120,000 or 150,000 dead bodies.”

The history of the Howff dates back to 1260 when a monastery was built there. But it wasn’t until the mid-1500s that the grounds of the by then postreformation ruins were turned into a graveyard after the land was donated by Mary, Queen of Scots. Very quickly, however, and with disease and poverty rife, it became overcrowded.

Stewart adds: “In the early 1800s there was about nine feet of earth put back in here because there were so many bodies in the ground. Gravediggers just couldn’t get a spade in without what they quoted as ‘white foam’ coming back out on their spade, so the council of the time decided they’d put extra earth in here, and that allowed the burial of even more bodies.”

One of the loneliest gravestones can be found at the rear of the cemetery. It belongs to Lt Col William Forrest, who died of cholera on his way up to Dundee from London in 1832. However, he is just one of 512 Dundonians who died from a cholera outbreak in the city – likely caused by polluted water supplies – and he sits above an unmarked cholera pit that lies beneath today’s cobbled path.

“In 1832, over 30 weeks, 800 people got infected in Dundee and 512 died just of cholera,” says Louise. “They decided they needed to build a cholera pit to put all these bodies in. They made makeshift pine coffins but they did need to bury them deeper than they normally would and they would just pile the coffins on top of each other five or six deep, fill it with lime and a bit of earth.”

The ‘new’ Howff was built north of the ‘old’ Howff in the 1860s. That new site was redeveloped in the second half of the 20th Century to make way for what is now the city’s Bell Street car park and Abertay University, with most of the bodies exhumed and relocated to the city’s Eastern Cemetery.

But elsewhere, some remains are

Gravediggers just couldn’t get a spade in without what they quoted as ‘white foam’ coming back out on their spade...