author
William Ogilvie
1688–1729
A Scottish minister remembered today for one of the strangest little works in early eighteenth-century popular literature, he is best known for a ghost story tied to parish life in East Lothian. His surviving reputation rests less on a large body of writing than on the eerie, long-lived appeal of The Laird of Cool's Ghost.
1 Audiobook
The Laird o' Coul's Ghost
by William Ogilvie
About the author
William Ogilvie (1688 or 1689–1729) was a Scottish minister of the gospel at Innerwick in East Lothian. Modern library and author records consistently identify him with The Laird of Cool's Ghost, a supernatural narrative presented as a series of conversations between Ogilvie and the ghost of Mr. Maxwell, the late Laird of Cool.
That work gave him an unusual afterlife as an author. Rather than being known for sermons or church controversy, he is chiefly remembered for a compact piece of religious and supernatural storytelling that circulated widely in chapbook form and continued to be reprinted long after his death.
Very little else about his life is easy to confirm from the sources reviewed here, so it is safest to picture him as a parish minister whose fame came from a single memorable tale. For listeners drawn to early ghost stories, folklore, and the overlap between belief and everyday life, Ogilvie stands out as an intriguing voice from eighteenth-century Scotland.