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Jedburgh Jail - Scotland

When the dice and planchette spelled my name in a jail I had never been to, with people I had never met.

I. T. Thompson

9/4/20265 min read

June 14, 2025. Jedburgh Jail. Scotland.

Set in the historic Scottish Borders town of Jedburgh, Jedburgh Castle Jail is an imposing 1820s prison built on the site of the original Jedburgh Castle. It operated as the town jail from 1823 until 1886, and its surviving cell blocks, corridors and jailer's quarters provide an unusually tangible glimpse into nineteenth-century prison life.

But it is the atmosphere inside that makes Jedburgh particularly memorable. Thick stone walls, narrow passages, enclosed cells and uneven, dimly lit spaces create a setting where sound seems to behave differently and every distant creak or movement can draw your attention. Even the organisation that operates the site describes it as a building with a powerful atmosphere and notes its reputation for ghostly sightings and paranormal activity. Paranormal investigations and overnight experiences are available by arrangement.

For investigators, the jail carries another layer of intrigue: the human history behind those walls. Prisoners, jailers and staff lived and worked within the complex, while the building witnessed the harsh realities of nineteenth-century crime and punishment. The site also includes the story of Malcolm Munro, who was convicted of murder and hanged at Jedburgh Jail in 1835.

That combination of history and atmosphere makes Jedburgh a compelling paranormal setting. During an investigation, reports of unexplained sounds, movements, sensations and apparent communications can take on an added intensity simply because of the environment in which they occur. Behind those cold stone walls, the past feels remarkably close, and when something unexplained happens, it can be difficult not to wonder whether the building has retained more than just its history.

This was the location of a ghost tour I decided to participate in. Along with a group of paranormal investigators and visitors, we decided to try something slightly different. For one of our group experiments, instead of a conventional Ouija board, we used a simple overturned roll of wallpaper and a planchette fitted with a pencil. The arrangement was crude by comparison, but that was precisely the point. There were no letters printed on a board, no numbered spaces to guide the movement and no predetermined message waiting to be spelled out. The pencil would simply record whatever path the planchette took across the paper.

Several people, unknown to each other, gathered around the setup, including myself. We placed the planchette onto the paper and placed our fingers upturned on it. We waited and watched as slow movement began. What happened next was captured on the paper as a series of apparently uncontrolled pencil movements, long strokes, sharp turns and looping marks that initially looked more like meaningless scribbling than writing.

Then something began to emerge.

Looking at the completed sheet, I could see a sequence of marks that appeared strikingly similar to my own name.

At first, I wasn't certain. It was easy to dismiss the shapes as random movement and the human tendency to find patterns in ambiguous marks.

So I studied the individual strokes rather than the finished image. When the apparent letters were highlighted, however, the resemblance became much harder to ignore.

"My word!" I hollered, "That's my name!"

What made the moment especially unsettling was the circumstances surrounding it. The people present, no one knew me, or for that matter my full name. They were not sitting with their fingers simply guiding the planchette, they were watching the scribbles, there was no deliberate attempt to write a name they didn't know. There was simply a pencil attached to a moving device, recording its path across a blank sheet of paper.

However, having 20 dice gives many opportunities to produce combinations resembling short words or names, so the overall chance of eventually obtaining IAN is considerably higher than 1 in 216. That means the result cannot by itself be regarded as statistically unlikely evidence of paranormal communication.

What makes this account interesting is not simply that IAN appeared, but that the same name had apparently emerged through a separate pencil-and-planchette experiment beforehand. The repetition is the part worth documenting, and the probability should ideally be calculated from the exact way the 20 dice were rolled and selected.

The results remains intriguing rather than definitive. A planchette, simple dice, could potentially move through subtle forces that are difficult to perceive in the moment, and apparent words can emerge from random or unconscious movement. But watching an apparently directionless series of strokes resolve into something resembling your own name is a very different experience from seeing it afterwards in a photograph.

At Jedburgh Jail, that's exactly what happened.

A blank sheet went down.

The pencil moved.

The dice rolled.

And when we looked at what it had left behind, my name appeared to be staring back at us.

We took the experiment a step further.

Having seen the strange collection of marks produced by the pencil, we wanted to remove the planchette altogether and try another method. We introduced a set of dice, each one marked with letters rather than numbers. The idea was simple: allow the dice to determine the letters, one after another, without anyone deliberately selecting them. Again, we were looking for something that could be attributed to chance, coincidence or human influence before considering anything more mysterious.

Then, from the roll of the dice, the name IAN appeared.

Once again, my own name.

It was difficult not to pause at that point. One occurrence could be dismissed as coincidence. Two separate methods producing the same name, however, gave the session an entirely different atmosphere.

But it did not end there, on three separate rolls by different individuals, my name could be selected again by the random letters.

We were surrounded by the cold, ancient walls of the jail, a place steeped in history, suffering and countless stories of those who had passed through its cells. In that environment, watching the letters come together was genuinely unnerving.

There was no instruction to spell my name. No one had their fingers on a planchette this time. The dice were simply part of an experimental attempt to see whether a meaningful sequence could emerge from an uncontrolled process.

And yet, deep within the cold walls of Jedburgh Jail, the same name came through again.

IAN.

Coincidence?

Some form of unconscious influence?

Or something we had yet to understand?

With around 20 dice in play, each having six lettered faces, IAN is a very short three-letter name, so it is inherently easier to produce than a longer name. If we assume each die has one face showing I, one A and one N, and three other letters, then getting the exact sequence I-A-N from three independent rolls would be:

1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 = 1 in 216, or about 0.46%.