Hangman's Close, St John Street

Until 1951, when it was torn down during a period of urban renewal, the Mediaeval ‘Staffman’s House’ - where Hangman Jock Rankin is said to have choked to death on a chicken-bone in the late 18th-century – stood next to the Tolbooth in St John Street.

Rankin’s ghost became one of Stirling’s famous phantoms...but the legend of his grumbling, gagging phantom being heard within its walls was actually invented by Victorian locals to deter their kids from venturing near what by the mid 19th-century had become a Night-Shelter for vagrants.