Margaret Dickson, known as Maggie Dickson and later Half-Hangit Maggie, lived in the early 18th century as a fish seller. When her husband deserted her in 1723, she was forced to leave the city and move to Kelso, near the Scottish Borders.

Baby Death

In return for basic lodgings, she worked for an innkeeper. Soon after she arrived, she started a relationship with the innkeeper’s son and fell pregnant. Afraid that she would be dismissed from her job, she kept the pregnancy secret.

The baby was born prematurely and died within a few days of birth. She carried on hiding the baby’s existence, planning to throw the child into the River Tweed. In the end, she couldn’t do this, so she left the baby on the riverbank.

The same day, the baby was discovered and traced back to Maggie. She was arrested and tried in Edinburgh. The Act Concealing of Child-Baring (1690) made concealing a pregnancy grounds for a presumed murder charge if the infant died, so she was tried under this specific statute which carried a mandatory death penalty.

She was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.

Resurrection

Maggie was hanged on 2 September 1724 and pronounced dead. Her body was cut down, nailed into a coffin, and put into a cart. On the route to Musselburgh to be buried, a knocking and banging was heard coming from the coffin.

When the lid was lifted, there was Maggie, quite alive. She was well enough to walk the rest of the way to Musselburgh.

Under Scottish law, you were sentenced to be “hanged until dead.” Maggie was freed because her sentence had been carried out and her official death certificate was treated as fulfilled The public viewed her survival as an act of God, making a second execution politically and socially dangerous to attempt. Incidentally, she was now free from her marriage. This would not have been the case had she been hanged in England.

Maggie lived for another forty years. She became a local celebrity and picked up the nickname of “Half-Hangit Maggie”.

Some are happy to see her survival as an act of God, while others state she may have seduced and manipulated the rope maker into making a weaker noose. Whatever the story, Maggie survived to see old age.

An Edinburgh pub was named after Maggie, and free beer is given to all patrons on the day of her resurrection.

Subscribe today: I spend hours digging through archives, old testimony, and forgotten files to bring these cases to life. Free posts are just the beginning, paid subscribers keep this work possible and get access to my full vault of articles.

If you’ve enjoyed this story and want to see more, please consider upgrading. It’s readers like you who keep Murder Mayhem UK alive.

Subscribe now

Don’t want to commit then consider leaving me a tip if you enjoyed this article.

In 1994, a teenager was seen walking around his area with a small electronic device in his hand. In today’s society, this would not be a surprise, but this was not a mobile phone; it was a Geiger counter he was holding.

Why?

He was monitoring whether the reactor he had built in his mother’s potting shed was working.

David Hahn was a regular Boy Scout. When his parents divorced, his dad was worried that he was isolated, so he sent him to Scouts. That decision changed the course of David’s life in a way neither of his parents could ever imagine.

When he started working through his badges, he wasn’t interested in the mundane, such as helping your neighbour or local community. Only one interested him, and that was in Atomic Energy; yes, that was actually a badge when he earned it in 1991. David’s passion for Scouts led to his arrest for making a nuclear reactor with everyday items.

Read more

The Grand Canyon crash was one of the deadliest aviation disasters in US history and was largely caused by legislation and technology not keeping up with invention.

In 1956, when air traffic control and commercial flights were still developing, two planes collided at 21,000 feet above the canyon. One hundred and twenty-eight people died.

The disaster led to the creation of the Federal Aviation Administration, but it’s unclear why it wasn’t foreseen and prevented before it happened.

Read more

Just before Christmas in 1988, the United Kingdom became the target of one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in history. A bomb planted aboard Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the small town of Locke…

Read more

Howard Hughes: eccentric, rich, and unconventional. Think Elon Musk in flares; he was a man who truly liked to explore life. So, when he announced in 1972 that he was building a state-of-the-art ship to mine for manganese on the ocean floor, no one was very surprised.

The ship, known as the Hughes Glomar Explorer, was 618 feet long and featured state-of-the-art technology, including a massive grab claw that lowered from the vessel’s bottom to pick up manganese. It cost the equivalent of $4 billion to build in today’s money.

As the project progressed, actor Richard Anderson, famous for The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, became involved, publicly showing off the ship’s technology.

Except that everything I have told you about the reason for building this ship was an elaborate lie constructed by the CIA.

Read more

It was the 15th November 2010, when an unidentified driver discovered a body in the middle of a residential street in the Boston suburb Milton. The body was that of a mutilated Black youth. He wore n…

Read more

The movie portrays Abagnale as a master conman who impersonated an airline pilot to travel millions of miles for free. He also supposedly impersonated a doctor and a lawyer, among others. When he was finally caught and sent to federal prison, he was released early to work with the FBI to catch white-collar criminals.

However, the film fails to show the biggest con he ever pulled, one that many people remain unaware of. Despite admitting to various crimes, he is less willing to concede this: the victim of this con was all of us. Abagnale may have lied about most of his story, including his tenure with the FBI.

Read more

Undoubtedly, some will read this article and think, “This would never happen to me.” To think that would be naive; I have nearly been caught a couple of times myself.

When I was researching this artic…

Read more

On Wednesday we looked at The Cobra Effect and whether this is a term adopted into popular culture or was it actually true. Today we will look at the historical concept of the snake problem in India which could support the theory of a massive, systemic struggle between the population and the environment.

Read more

Politicians are notorious for implementing poorly conceived decisions that inadvertently trigger more problems than they solve. This phenomenon has repeated itself throughout history, serving as a ca…

Read more

There are plenty of people who have been accused of hiring a hitman to remove someone from their lives; some have even been convicted of the crime as shown in Monday’s article.

However, when Tan Youhui hired a hitman, he thought he had found the right man for the job. What he didn’t realise was that the world of sub-contracting was alive and well in the hitman industry. The man he hired, hired another and the story only got stranger from there. This is one of those cases where the truth is truly far stranger than fiction.

Read more

Neighbours often saw Gary Johnson as a quiet, polite psychology professor who lived with two cats. However, those who met him in the shadows had no idea that to others he was also known as Mike Caine…

Read more

In 2006, a documentary film by Eric Steel spanned one year of filming at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The documentary filmed every part of the bridge, from the people who crossed it to several suicides that occurred there.

The documentary did not stop there, however; it then interviewed the families of these victims and identified the people who had taken their own lives. This led many to question the ethics of the film and whether the filmmakers had a right to capture the last desperate moments of these people’s lives.

The Golden Gate Bridge

The bridge first opened in May 1937 and holds the title of the most popular suicide site in the world. The fall sends people plunging 245 feet at 75 miles per hour into the waters of the bay. It is the equivalent of a speeding truck hitting a concrete building. The fatality rate for jumpers is 98%.

For the rare 2% who survive the impact, their accounts are harrowing. Survivors, such as Kevin Hines, have famously noted that the second their hands left the railing, they felt an immediate and total sense of regret.

Despite this notoriety, little was done for decades to prevent jumpers. While most bridges of this size are fitted with suicide barriers, these were not fully added to the bridge until 2018.

Program Idea

Steel developed the idea after reading an article in The New Yorker about some of the 1,300 people who had thrown themselves from the bridge since it opened in 1937. He said he tried to imagine their last moments; he thought of the bodies he had watched falling from the World Trade Centre towers on 11th September 2001.

Read more

The mystery surrounding the Scottish Highlands has been fuelled by a mix of genuine curiosity and calculated deception. For generations, the legend has inspired ‘Nessie Hunters’ from the 1930s to the present day.

Scientific exploration has often resulted in more questions than answers. While pictures exist of the monster on the lake, some of these have been uncovered as examples of the most elaborate hoaxes in history.

On Wednesday, we looked at the facts surrounding Nessie; today, we are going to explore some of the best hoaxes and false trails people have used for fame and fortune. These stories have continued to fuel the sceptics who maintain that there is nothing in the Loch.

Read more

There are many stories of unknown monsters: Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Almas. But, the one that has always fascinated me is the one I live closest to, the Loch Ness Monster, affectionately known as N…

Read more

When the jury announced that Dan White would serve only seven years for the double assassination of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, the reaction wasn’t just sadness; it was a visceral, collective real…

Read more

Harvey Milk was a trailblazing politician who became one of the first openly gay public officials in the United States and the first in California. During his rise, he showed society that gay people …

Read more

The highest point on Earth, the summit of Mount Everest, remains a place of profound contradiction. It is a symbol of human triumph that tragically doubles as the world’s most elevated cemetery.

While…

Read more

The urge to explore places that push your body to the limit, has always fascinated me. This started when I was in my 20s, when I met the son of Ernest Shackleton and learned about his amazing adventu…

Read more

Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and raised in El Paso, Texas, Salazar was a bilingual, bicultural, binational journalist who used his background to bridge Mexican and Anglo-American cultures in his re…

Read more