The thread about Leith’s lost “Eagle Buildings” and what connects them to the building of the Forth Bridge

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

I saw a photo tweeted by the excellent Scran resource and was struck by the coincidence that I had looked the place up only a few days before when I had come across some other photos of it on Flickr.

https://twitter.com/Scranlife/status/1308652327373606912?s=20&t=RiEzrm-6XhDoBt2_yhUtig

The Eagle Buildings were at 5 Tower Street in Leith, next to the Sailor’s Home (now Malmaison Hotel).

Here they are in 1992, when it was being used as a workshop and store by a shopfitter. The photographer suggests demolition was in 1997.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cagiva1994/14016906377/

Most of that “sandstone” front was mock and was actually a showcase of the Portland cement wares of its occupants, Currie & Co. Ltd, Building-Trade Merchants in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leith and across the Scottish central belt.

Currie & Co, Ltd. had been incorporated in April 1898 by the merger of two similar building supply and cement merchant businesses owned by John Patrick Currie:

• Currie & Co. of Glasgow, founded in 1873, headquartered in Wellington Street. Subsidiary companies included the North British Asphalt Company, the North British Coal and Firewood Company and the Eagle Portland Cement Co. This is the eagle connection; it was a brand to sell cement.
• Joseph A. Currie & Co. of Edinburgh and Leith, founded in 1875 and headquartered in Bernard Street in Leith. This business had been bought in 1893 by John Patrick on the death of his brother Joseph Allan at the age of only 42.

This 1911 advert reveals that they had a lineage going back to the late 18th century through A. M. Ross & Sons, slate merchants in Glasgow.

The headquarters had moved from Glasgow to 19 Rose Street in Edinburgh around this time, that building too was called the Eagle Buildings and it remains so to this day. If you crane your neck and look up as you pass, you’ll see an eagle watching over you high above in its “eerie”.

Joseph Allan Currie was born in Cupar, Fife, in 1851. At the age of only 21 he was appointed manager of the Waltham Abbey Gas Works in London. He returned north and settled in Leith two years later, bringing with him a new trade of Portland cement merchant. Cement was not manufactured in Scotland at the time, but was imported from the Medway. Leith was therefore the perfect base for such a venture. Joseph Allan added plaster of Paris, pavement stone, lime, fireclay and earthenware to this business, becoming a successful builders merchant, growing the business to become one of the largest in Scotland. In 1894 his company was reported as being the largest suppliers of roofing felt in the region; an increasingly popular product due to the increasing cost of roofing slate and timber.

His obituary described him as having “indefatigable energy, strong personality and business tact“. Joseph was remarkable as being the sole suppliers of Portland cement for both the Forth Bridge works and the ill-fated first Tay Bridge.

The construction of the Forth Bridge required some 20,000 tons of Portland cement, which was manufactured on the River Medway and was brought by sea to South Queensferry. Here it was transferred to an old hulk that Currie had purchased called the Hougomont; a ship that had been built in Burma as a convict transport for Australia. The Hougomont could store 1,200 tons of cement, which had to be stored for a certain number of days before it was used. When smallpox broke out amongst the workers in 1886, the Hougomont was moved to Port Edgar and used as an isolation hospital, helping the outbreak to be quickly dealt with.

John Patrick Currie – born 1848 – continued to run the business and became the largest Scottish building merchant and cement distributor, Scottish agents for I. C. Johnson & Co. Isaac Charles Johnson and his business partner had painstakingly reverse-engineered existing cement products, improved them and then produced a different product that they were careful to make sure was not subject to existing patents.

An 1894 description of the company in a trade publication states:

The commodities which Messrs. Currie & Co. deal in principally are: Portland cement, Scotch and Irish limes, pavement, freestone, crushed granite, Arran sand, slates, fireclay goods, barytes, umber, plaster of Paris, whiting, &c. In all these lines Messrs. Currie & Co. hold large stocks, and are ready to meet any demands with promptitude. Their standing is accepted as a guarantee of quality, and they spare no effort to maintain their high reputation for reliable material. The business in every department receives the direct personal attention of its founder and sole proprietor, Mr. John P. Currie, a gentleman whose commercial capabilities are well demonstrated in the success that has attended this influential concern. The business in which Mr. Currie is now so actively engaged derives its support from a thoroughly representative and increasing connection, and continues to develop.

It seems that the Curries named nearly all their properties Eagle Buildings, with at least 3 in Glasgow.

John Patrick died at home in Edinburgh in March 1919 at the age of 71. After his death, the company seems to have moved its headquarters to another Eagle Buildings, this time in Dock Street, Dundee. By this time it was an agent for the Cement Marketing Company, which would eventually rename itself after its most famous product; Blue Circle Portland Cement. The company was still trading in 1953, after which the trail in newspaper archives goes cold.

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The Carolina pale crawler tale that got my attention

A creepy tale from North Carolina is making the rounds on social media and causing a huge stir in the paranormal community. Remarkably, this one comes with details, a genuine 911 distress call, and police reports. This isn’t your average ghost tale. It is considerably weirder. Trying to debunk it would be a lost cause.

I started hearing bits of this story in the past few days. It was described as the story of a cryptid that jumped in a truck. It seemed outrageous. Considering how difficult it is to find reliable sources online these days, the Carolina Case Files YouTube channel has a real life presenter who was really at the location and had really gathered the pieces. They delivered a solid report. Their video (necessary viewing) is linked below, but here is the story:

A young man driving a pickup truck was travelling on Route 210 north near Currie, NC just before 11 PM on July 31, 2021. While still moving, he places a call to Pender County 911 to report that he saw what appeared to be a man on the roadside, bleeding from the head. The witness, clearly upset, reported seeing red streaks on the torso, with the man just staring at the driver as he passed.

A half a minute later, as the dispatcher continued to talk to the driver, there was an audible thump on his end. He swore and yelled that something was in the bed of the truck. Then he screamed, “It’s not human, it’s not human!” and he accelerated. The dispatcher continued to ask for information as he tells her he slammed on the brakes, knocking the thing over the hood and onto the road.

He took off down the road again. The dispatcher tried to get him to say what he thought the thing was, but he couldn’t. He rejected her idea that it might have been a turkey, insisting that it didn’t have feathers but was pale, light-colored. He continued on, admitting to the dispatcher he was too shaken and freaked out to stop, until he got to a store on Route 421 several minutes later. During the call, he ticked off landmarks to indicate where he was. He waited several minutes at the store for the arrival of police and an EMT crew.

The officers had him take them to the spot where he saw the bleeding man and had the encounter with the mystery thing in the truck. There was nothing found. The truck, however, apparently had scratch marks on the roof.

Story known for years

The story has just spread widely on social media, showing up on websites and social media, even though it took place in 2021. The incident was known in the area, spread by friends of the driver or the responders. However, the witness didn’t want to tell this story; he wanted to forget it. Carolina Case Files followed up on the details and tracked him down, convincing him to recollect what happened. They posted the video below on September 13, 2025 including interviews with the witness and the sheriff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acK1v75u6CM

The witness, still wishing to remain anonymous and referred to as “T”, recounts the story with additional detail about the first encounter – what has been interpreted as a Civil War ghost soldier near the Moore’s Creek Battlefield – and the subsequent truck incident. The two entities are assumed to not be related. Paranormalists, however, contend that there is a history of spooky encounters in this area making it a window area.

The driver states that he could see the thing in the truck when he turned on the bed lights. Its head was at the back window. He described it as having a white face with sunken eyes and skin stretched over the skull. After it was ejected from the truck, he saw it stand up on the road. He says it had an excessively thin “scrawny” long body, like a human but stretched out, about 7-feet tall.

Comparing the official record with the story, some inconsistencies emerged. Carolina Case Files made a follow-up video noting an error they made in the time stamp of the call, and explaining that in the 4 years that had passed, the witness no longer had the photo evidence because he wanted to move past this incident forever. The host, Rusty Martin, assured the audience that this was definitely a recorded incident, just as described. No hoaxing. They had obtained the 911 recording and police reports through regular investigative channels. They also recreated the trip along the same route while playing the extended version of the call. The timeline matched. The police apparently had used a drone to search for reported entities but found nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbKXep5LTk

BroBible, a site I normally refuse to link to because it’s ad-heavy clickbait, actually did a decent summary of the case here.

“And all I see is this just this super scrawny long body just fly over my truck in a ball, rolling,” T recalls. “As I’m swerving to the left, I see it stand up. And it is easily taller than that truck. I’m 5′ 10”. The truck is about 2 inches taller than I am. And this thing was easily, like, maybe 7 feet. And, as I pass it, I look in my mirror, and I see it bolt to the left into the woods.”

“It looked like somebody took a normal human and stretched them out, starting with the limbs,” he says. “Abnormally long legs and arms. And it just took off into the woods.”

The Rake

It’s one thing to claim to see a roadside ghost – one of many thousands of similar experiences reported worldwide. I have nothing to say about that other than it’s interesting. But the truck entity is really intriguing. If not for the recording, I’d have a hard time imagining anything like the second part of this account really occurred. We can speculate all day about what reasonably might have happened. That’s not the point. The point is the story is being interpreted as an encounter with a pale crawler, a rake, a shrink-wrapped humanoid monster. And people are eating it up.

I’m not going to dance around the fact that rakes are made up monsters. There is a whole genre of hairless elongated humanoids including Slenderman, gray aliens, the “tall man”, etc. Its name comes from its rake-like claws. We know the rake is fiction. It was created in 2005 when writers on 4chan collaborated to create a monster. And it caught on. It became a pop cryptid, usually supernatural, always menacing. It’s a form that people seem to “see” a lot, just like the hairy man. Stories, art and videos are shared everyday about the array of pale crawlers. That form fits this story exactly.

I don’t know what this driver saw, and we likely will never know. This tale does not make the rake real. Could a deer or another animal have run into his truck? Was he already so upset that he misinterpreted the awful incident that followed the first? How can we account for his description of the monster’s face and height? We can’t. We can only speculate. I won’t do that.

This story has legs; it will inject megawatts of energy into the haunted lore of this area. There is little value in making the effort to “explain” it because most people don’t want an explanation. They want the story. This gripping, amazing account is what it is: a real life paranormal tale.

Post Script 28-Sept-2025: I hear a lot of people commenting that this is a hoax. That’s always a possibility. If it is a hoax, it involves several people over a long time. The evidence at least shows that this story was circulated as early as December 2024. So Carolina Case Files would have had to make up a series of facts and make it match with existing times and places. And the Sheriff would be lying. That’s a big deal. Police reports aren’t available online, and likely because the person wished to remain anonymous, that report it’s floating around for everyone to see. If additional evidence were to show up that disputes the claims – such as local residents reporting it was a manufactured tale, or that some aspect of the interview video were faked – then the likely conclusion shifts.

Sometimes the skeptic looks ridiculous by saying “it’s a hoax!”, accusing someone of making it up when the hoax would involve a considerable number of people whose reputation would be on the line. That’s why I don’t see hoax as an obvious answer here. I think something happened to this guy; we just don’t know, and may never know, what that was.

7-Oct-2025: Now the story has made it to several other sources and even Snopes has checked into it. As usual, it takes a week or so to rise to wider coverage. So, yeah, all you doubters, the caller didn’t hoax this, as I stated above.

29-Oct-2025: Check out the Skeptoid episode that covers this story.

#Currie #ghost #humanoid #ItSNotHuman #MooreSCreek #NorthCarolina #PaleCrawler #PenderCounty #Route210 #theRake #truckAttack

https://sharonahill.com/?p=10391

More wild flowers.

#Balerno #Currie #Scotland #flowers #photography