Once upon a time, in Scotland’s second city of the Empire, there was an estate called Logie, and it was home to the Read family. Logie, on the road between Dundee and Lochee before industrial expansion joined them together, was home to Alexander Read and Ann Fletcher following their marriage in 1756. The estate had changed hands several times over the preceding century and a half but had most often been owned by members of the Wedderburn family, to whom Read was related by marriage. Ann and Alexander lived in a mansion house first built by Read’s parents, Alexander senior and Elizabeth Wedderburn of Turfbeg, in 1722, which they expanded with their own building projects. They had a son, whom they named Fletcher, to continue his mother’s family name. He would grow up to inherit Logie House.
Now we leave history behind. The story goes that young Fletcher grew up to be a flighty and restless laird of Logie, fond of the bottle and anything else that could distract him from reality. Wanting to see the world, he followed family connections to become an Officer of the East India Company, and found himself in British-ruled India, enjoying the hospitality of a Maharajah who had a beautiful daughter. Infatuated, Fletcher asked the Princess’s father for her hand in marriage. The Maharajah was reluctant at the thought of his only daughter being far away, with a man he barely knew. But Fletcher was persistent and charming, and swore he would care for her as lovingly as if she were a child in a cradle. Eventually her father consented, and they were married.
But back at home in Logie, Fletcher grew bored of his Indian bride, who was lonely and depressed in a place where she knew no one, and could get to know no one as she did not speak English. Wanting her out of the main house, he built a small summerhouse in the grounds whose roof, with a chimney at each corner, mocked the shape of the cradle he had promised to hold her in, and banished her there. In rapidly declining health, the Princess made a last attempt at escape. She wrote a note in her own blood (being forbidden access to ink) which a sympathetic servant quietly sneaked out of the house for her. When word of her situation reached her father, he immediately sent a spy to aid her escape. But by the time he reached Dundee, it was too late. She had died of a broken heart.
By this time having a good sense of Fletcher’s character, the Maharajah sent word that, as his daughter’s widower, he was entitled to a share of her fortune. As he expected, Fletcher was on the next boat. But the Maharajah had four of his strongest guards meet him at the docks on horseback. Each took hold of one of his limbs, and they rode to the four points of the compass, tearing Fletcher limb from limb. So that was the end of him, but the Princess’ mournful ghost remained in the grounds of Logie for years after. The ‘cradle,’ and the house itself, were demolished in the early 20th century, and there have been no reports of her being seen among the flats which have taken its place, but it is very hard to say when a ghost has truly gone.
The one thing we know for sure about this story is that it did not really happen, though it links to real places and people in Dundee history. Fletcher Read himself certainly existed, and lived in Logie, though he seems to have spent at least some of his adult life in England. Read’s name appears in 1791 as an apprentice to the ironmonger trade in London, and he was involved in amateur boxing. He sold Logie House in 1805. Read was found dead in Surrey in 1807, the morning after a ‘convivial evening’, in potentially suspicious circumstances – one speculation at the time was that he may have been suffocated. He seems to have been an interesting character in his own right, and it’s not hard to imagine how his name became linked to historical legend. Read did marry, but to a Scotswoman named Jean Scott, who outlived him and returned to Dundee, appearing in the 1809 Dundee Directory at South Tay Street under the name Mrs Fletcher Read.
Perhaps the earliest attempt to track down the real historical background to the Logie story was made by Alexander Elliott, in his 1911 book Lochee as it Was and as it Is. Elliott concluded that, while Read may have been a “heedless, gay man-about-town”, in reality there was no evidence for him having ever visited India, let alone married there, and that there was no record of an Indian woman having ever lived at Logie House.
Logie’s Princess may not have been a real person but she is a real ghost, in that her story was well known enough for long enough to feel like part of the city’s lore now, and it is in that spirit that I write about her story. 19th-century Dundee was a city deeply involved with India, so deeply that it is surprising that the story of the Black Lady seems to be one of the only surviving parts of the city’s folk tradition which explicitly mentions it. For much of the 19th century, Dundee’s economy ran on jute imported primarily from Bengal, first sent to Dundee through the East India Company in the 1820s. By the 1880s, production had begun to shift to India itself, as manufacturers found they could pay Indian workers even less than the Dundonian women who they paid less than Dundonian men. Mill owners, engineers and overseers from Dundee frequently travelled to and from India over the decades that followed. And although the events it describes are said to have taken place before Dundee became Juteopolis, it was in this cultural context that the story of the Black Lady of Logie seems to have been at its most popular.
In 1978, Edwin STowell wrote a piece for the Scots Magazine, drawing on Elliott’s work and exploring the possibility that the legend did have a basis in reality, but had been attached to the wrong family member. The Fletcher family connections to the East India Company are real, but Fletcher Read was not the key figure in them. Ann Fletcher’s brother Thomas was a Major, and laterally a Lieutenant Colonel, with the East India Company. For a time, he lived with his sister’s family at Logie. Towell sets out a theory that Thomas could have married or had a relationship with an Indian woman during his time there, and brought her back to Logie. This relationship would have had to be over (or hidden) before his historically verifiable marriage to Ann Hunter, from the neighbouring estate of Blackness, some time prior to 1780. Perhaps a partial truth about Thomas Fletcher’s relationships became attached to his nephew as gossip around Fletcher’s untimely death gradually developed into urban legend.
As a tale circulated in the oral tradition, there is no evidence about who first told the story of the Black Lady of Logie and when, but reports around the demolition of Logie in the Dundee press suggest the tale was well-established at the beginning of the 20th century, and this is further backed up by the dedication of a whole chapter in Elliott’s book to exploring the truth behind it – legends that no one tells rarely need debunking.
The Dundee Evening Post ran a sensational serial story based on the Black Lady of Logie in spring 1904, presumably inspired by the news that Logie was due for demolition. Later that year, the same paper added a new layer of mystery and confusion as they reported on the discovery of a “secret furnace” during the demolition itself. Although the Evening Post did not go so far as to state in print that Read was responsible for the deaths of others, its article invoked the legend and reported that the furnace contained a mysterious powder thought to be “no less than the remains of cremated bodies.” In February 1905, the Courier reported on Read family documents found during the demolition, where Fletcher’s wife’s signature appeared as “Jan Reid” [sic] on a bond for the purchase of Logie House. Although this is more than likely Jean Scott’s signature, the Courier highlighted its “crude, childish” style (presumably stemming from a patronising assumption that an Indian woman would not have had good handwriting) and suggested that this must be the mark of the Black Lady of Logie.
The Princess in this story was not a Black woman in the sense of being of African descent – her name comes from a tradition of naming women’s ghosts by the colour of either the apparition themselves, or their clothes, though as an Indian woman in 18th century Scotland she may have been described in life as ‘black’ as a catch-all for ‘not white’. Green, Grey, White and indeed other Black Ladies haunt the length and breadth of Scotland. Another Indian Black Lady is said to haunt Broomhill House in Larkhall, and she shares much of her story with Logie’s Princess.
James Robertson included the Broomhill ghost in his 1996 collection of Scottish Ghost Stories, largely based on the story as told to him by Helen Sykes. Helen’s grandmother spent her whole working life in service at Broomhall, a period which overlapped with the presence of the woman who became the ghost. Helen knew the story from childhood and was reminded of it in her adult life when she began to have disturbingly consistent dreams about a dark-skinned woman in Broomhill House. This prompted her to research the story of the Black Lady. She found that a woman from Ceylon named Sita Phurdeen, probably a Hindu born into a high-caste family in 1862, lived at Broomhill for a time at the end of the 19th century. She had previously been a servant to the British Army in South Africa, an unusual situation for a woman of high social standing, and a suggestion that the sadness of her life began before she came to Scotland. She almost certainly became the mistress of Captain Henry McNeil-Hamilton of Broomhill while in South Africa, and he brought her back to Scotland under the guise of a domestic servant. McNeil-Hamilton later died of syphilis. The details of whether Sita Phurdeen left Broomhill alive, or died there – either naturally or violently – were not evident in extant records. One local tradition has it that she at least attempted to make her escape, but others suggest she died at McNeil-Hamilton’s hands. Both legends, and recent first-hand accounts of sightings of her tragic ghost, continue to be current in Larkhall.
There are striking shared elements between the Broomhill and Logie stories, and the core of the tale – the profligate and well-connected landowner returning to mistreat his high-born Indian wife or mistress in a country where she is made a stranger – is the same. Whether some details of Larkhall’s more historically verifiable Black Lady flitted to Dundee to settle around the already noteworthy character of Fletcher Read can probably never be proven, but it’s possible. However, stories only settle when they have something to settle into, when they make sense to the listeners in their new home.
Like many ghosts, the Princess haunts Logie because she has been wronged. In the story, this is specifically by her husband, but it’s hard not to see the wider metaphor, Read’s connection to the East India Company and Dundee’s social elite making him a stand-in for all those profiting from the exploitation of Indian people and land. Fletcher Read gets his comeuppance in the end, satisfyingly ripped limb from limb, and listeners may feel comforted – or disturbed, depending on who they are and where their money comes from– that this is the fate awaiting abusers and colonialists, if not in this world then in the next. But often, in reality, the consequences did not arrive. And though this Princess may not have been real, the hurt her story hints at was real for many women, as Sita Phurveen’s story reveals.
Ghosts tend to linger around power dynamics, their stories revealing layers of hurt going all the way down. And when the world you live in dismisses your existence, or your right to it, there is power to be found in haunting. Musician and folklorist Angeline Morrison, writing in the zine Hellebore, says that her Black ancestors’ presence in Britain “remains spectral, as knowledge of their historic presence is dismissed, or turned away from, or held outside of common knowledge.” Shared stories and memories, Morrison writes, are “profoundly connecting” where the official record has refused to pass on information. This has undoubtedly been a systematic and purposeful refusal – ‘Operation Legacy’ saw thousands of documents relating to the British Empire’s most shameful activities burnt or dumped at sea as officials mediated the dismantling of the Empire in the mid-20th century.Hellebore, says that her Black ancestors’ presence in Britain “remains spectral, as knowledge of their historic presence is dismissed, or turned away from, or held outside of common knowledge.” Shared stories and memories, Morrison writes, are “profoundly connecting” where the official record has refused to pass on information. This has undoubtedly been a systematic and purposeful refusal – ‘Operation Legacy’ saw thousands of documents relating to the British Empire’s most shameful activities burnt or dumped at sea as officials mediated the dismantling of the Empire in the mid-20th century.
In many ghost stories, particularly those of womens’ ghosts, the fear and power comes from the ghost’s potential to reveal hurt and mistreatment, to demand justice, long after the perpetrator thinks he’s got away with it. And there are countless memories and forms of knowledge which have been pushed aside – made into ghosts – by colonial Western history. But something that has always struck me about the story of the Black Lady of Logie is that, in many ways, it does not feel like her story. The Princess herself is nameless and shadowy, and the story is told in a language that – we are explicitly told – she did not speak. She would know a different storytelling tradition and have different things to say. This is one of Dundee’s stories, for sure, and carries one of our truths despite being historically unverifiable. Tradition isn’t something that just happens, forming from nowhere and passing down. People make it, and it is as flawed and complicated as everything else we make, but it also belongs to all of us to change and re-create. We can keep telling old stories, but we can also learn new ones, and new ways of telling.
Written by Erin Farley, Local History Librarian, Leisure & Culture Dundee
Sources
Alexander Elliott, Lochee as it Was and as it Is (J P Mathew & Co, 1911)
Angeline Morrison, ‘Ghost Hunting in the Ruins of Empire,’ Hellebore no 7, 2022
James Robertson, Scottish Ghost Stories (Warner Books, 1996) pp162-178
Jim Tomlinson, Dundee and the Empire: ‘Juteopolis’ 1850-1939 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014)
Edwin S Towell, ‘The Black Lady of Logie’, The Scots Magazine May 1978
‘Secret Furnace Discovered in Logie House,’ The Evening Post, 30 November 1904
‘Logie House Mystery. Interesting Documents Discovered.’ The Courier, 3 February 1905
Further Reading:
http://angusfolklore.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-cradle-or-dark-lady-of-logie.html
http://www.fdca.org.uk/1911_Old_Lochee_Book.html
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