Greedy St Johnston couple butchered ‘Stumpy’ and were haunted all their days

They tried to put him in his pack after emptying it of the goods but he was too tall. So they cut off his legs at the knee to bury him. Legend says he was buried among the roots of a tree.

Tom came back for vengeance as a gruesome ghost that walked about on the stumps of his legs and tormented his killers to their dying day.

Tradition varies as to where Stumpy was interred. The story says they carried the body to a Brae and that there was a bridge over a burn between their house and where they put him.

Some say then that the burial was in Craighadoes on a small brae between what used to be Joshua Galbraith’s farm house and the road. The legend tells us that the ghost came over the bridge and there is bridge between where Stumpy was buried in Craighadoes and Stumpy’s Brae.

The steep brae between Craighadoes and Lifford which is now Stumpy’s Brae is where Stumpy was murdered. The poem tells us where the house in which the murder took place is supporting the legend that it was an old house at the foot of what is now called Stumpy’s Brae. The house was demolished in recent years.

Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander the author of Once in Royal David’s City and All Things Bright and Beautiful and There is a Green Hill Far Away wrote the legend in poetry form.