In July 1818 the poet John Keats stays briefly in the area, while touring South West Scotland, writing to his brother Tom: "the barefooted Girls look very much in keeping - I mean with the scenery about them.

According to a pamphlet first published by local minister Alexander Telfair in 1696, a farm called The Ring-Croft of Stocking inhabited by the family of stonemason and farmer Andrew MacKie was the site of mysterious occurrences such as stones being thrown, cattle being moved, buildings set on fire, voices heard, family members beaten and dragged, and notes found written in blood.

In the pamphlet, Telfair described various things suspected "to have been the occasion of the Trouble", including MacKie supposedly taking an oath to devote his first child to the Devil, clothes left in the house by a "woman of ill repute", and failure to burn a tooth buried under the threshold stone by a previous tenant as advised by a 'witch wife', but declared the matter "still unknown."

[9][10] Telfair's pamphlet, entitled "A TRUE RELATION OF AN Apparition, Expressions and Actings, OF A SPIRIT, Which Infested the House of Andrew Mackie in Ring-Croft of Stocking, in the Paroch of Rerrick, in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, in Scotland.

By Mr. Alexander Telfair, Minister of that Paroch: and Attested by many other Persons, who were also Eye and Ear-Witnesses", was published by an Edinburgh printer in 1696 and sold at the shop of George Mosman.

[12][13] The 4 October 1890 issue of the Saturday Review dismissed Telfair's story as folklore and "a curious mixture of obvious naked imposture", saying, "Five ministers, a few lairds, and a number of farmers signed this account, in which there is not a single suspicion breathed that the business was merely a practical joke.

[15] Academics, such as historians Lizanne Henderson and Ole Grell, wrote that Telfair's pamphlet was intended to communicate to a "less sophisticated audience" and counteract what was felt among clergymen of the period to be the dangerous influences of skepticism, atheism and deism.