Half-Hangit Maggie: The Edinburgh Woman Who Survived Her Own Execution

Half-Hangit Maggie awakes in a cart of dead bodies after surviving execution in 1724 — a true Edinburgh legend.

In the heart of Edinburgh’s Grassmarket, where once the crowds gathered to witness death, one woman’s tale still lingers like a whispered dare. Her name was Margaret Dickson—though history prefers her by the nickname Half-Hangit Maggie. She was the woman who was hanged… and somehow lived.

It was 1724, and Maggie was a fishwife from Musselburgh, married but left to fend for herself while her husband was away at sea. During his absence, she fell pregnant after a brief affair with an innkeeper’s son. Desperate and afraid, she concealed the pregnancy. When the baby died shortly after birth, Maggie was accused not of murder but of hiding the pregnancy and the infant’s body—an offence that, at the time, carried the death penalty.

She was tried, condemned, and sentenced to die in the Grassmarket, where executions were public events. On the appointed day, she stood on the scaffold before a sea of faces. The rope was fixed, the trapdoor opened, and Maggie dropped. Her body swung. She was declared dead, removed from the noose, and placed in a cart bound for Musselburgh for burial.

But on the journey, something remarkable occurred. Somewhere between the Grassmarket and her hometown, Maggie began to move. First a twitch, then a gasp—and then she sat upright.

She had survived the hanging.

According to Scots law, the sentence had been carried out. She had been hanged as ordered, and there was no provision to hang someone twice. The officials—startled, perhaps a little spooked - let her go. The public, already drawn to her story, now saw her as a walking miracle. Maggie returned to Musselburgh, remarried, and lived for many more years. Some say she even returned to the Grassmarket every year on the anniversary of her execution, quietly standing where she once danced with death to contemplate her life.

Today, her story lives on in the very place she defied it. Stand in the Grassmarket and you’ll find The Last Drop Tavern and Maggie Dickson’s Pub—both nods to a woman who beat the noose and became legend. Hers isn’t the story of queens or warriors, but it’s no less epic: a tale of grit, survival, and the stubborn refusal to die when the world expected it.

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