Having heard Hugh White, of the Relief church at Irvine, preach in Glasgow at the April sacrament of 1783, she wrote him a letter expressing her high approval of his sermons, and stating that no preacher she had ever previously listened to had so fully satisfied her spiritual needs.
In May 1784, the magistrates banished the sect from the burgh, and following the supposed guidance of the star which led the wise men to Bethlehem, they settled on the farm of New Cample, in the parish of Closeburn, Dumfriesshire.
Mrs. Buchan, whom they named their "spiritual mother", professed to have the power of conferring the Holy Ghost by breathing, and also laid claim to certain prophetic gifts.
The following account of them by Robert Burns, the poet, may be accepted as strictly accurate: "Their tenets are a strange jumble of enthusiastic jargon; among others she pretends to give them the Holy Ghost by breathing on them, which she does with postures and gestures that are scandalously indecent.
[1] It is affirmed that Robert Burns had an attachment to a young woman, Jean Gardner, who joined the Buchanites, and that he spent a whole night and day in vainly endeavouring to persuade her to return.
[3] Scots playwright Hamish MacDonald and Dogstar Theatre brought the tale of Elspeth Buchan and her followers to the stage after discovering the story in a local guidebook.