Pharmacies are quite the setting for a horror story. There’s easy access to medicines that can be compounded as a cure in one quantity, and a poison in another.

The 1858 Bradford poisonings are infamous for what can go wrong when you mix in the wrong ingredients, with a pharmacist accidentally giving a confectioner arsenic to mix into peppermint humbugs that poisoned over 200 people.

But as pharmacy staff and patients get ready for a Halloween weekend of horror and spooks, one of Scotland’s oldest pharmacies has become the central location for a newly published folk horror novel.

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Thomas Hetherington’s Chemist and Druggist, now a Well Pharmacy on Moffat’s High Street, has a fictious basement in one of Pòl Miller’s stories in his new Scottish Horror Stories Volume One novel.

With the book split up into six stories across six towns in Scotland, Hetherington’s pharmacy features in the short story Longevity for the undead that links the pharmacy to the town hall.

Paisley-based author Miller works in environmental engineering but has written in his spare time for over 30 years, publishing everything from travel articles to a biography on Marc Bolan.

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But after deciding to write a Scottish horror uncovering ancient nightmares, unexplained phenomena, and vengeful spirits, he chose the pharmacy to be featured in his novel because of its legacy as a landmark in the town.

“Moffat was famously a spa town in the 1800s with the Moffat Water,” Miller told C+D. “It was a place the rich went for recuperation.

“I’ve been going to Moffat for several years and checked a few things about Hetherington’s before writing about it because you can’t be an outsider writing about someone’s hometown and writing something wrong,” he said.

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“It’s one of many business that have been around since the heyday of the 1860s and the Moffat spa waters.”

The title of the story is a nod to the spa waters supposedly giving life-preserving properties to the public.

“The pharmacy has a fictitious basement that runs right across the road to the town hall,” said Miller.

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And this sets the scene for the characters to confront what’s changing them to prevent a catastrophe that “threatens all humanity”.

“The Moffat waters have been mixed with a cocktail that will change people,” he added.

Hetherington’s pharmacy features in the book just after Scotland’s “oldest surviving pharmacy” celebrated its 200th birthday in June.