The earliest printed notice is George Woods's, in 1811. Nearly opposite the turning to Kirk Marown, he wrote, stood the walls of Old Kirk, formerly called St Trinion's, said to have been erected in consequence of a vow made by a shipwrecked person, and the ruinous state of the building was ascribed to the malice of some unlucky demons who, for want of better employment, amused themselves with throwing off the roof. Joseph Train gave the tale in full in 1845, in an appendix note headed The Buggane of St Trinion, citing Woods for the vow and a Tour of 1836 for the tradition that the church was never finished. A mischievous buggane, or evil spirit, tossed the roof to the ground as often as it was on the eve of being finished, accompanying his achievement with a loud fiendish laugh of satisfaction. The only attempt to counteract him that tradition had conveyed was made by Timothy, a tailor of great pretensions to sanctity of character, who undertook to make a pair of breeches under the roof before the buggane could begin his old trick. He seated himself in the chancel and worked in great haste, but before he had finished, the head of the frightful buggane rose out of the ground before him and asked whether he saw its great head, large eyes and long teeth. Timothy kept stitching, and to each question replied that he saw. He put the finishing stitch into the breeches and jumped out of the church just as the roof fell in with a crash, ran with the buggane's laugh behind him and its extended jaws at his heels, and leaped onto consecrated ground where the buggane had no power to follow. The angry sprite lifted its great head from its body and pitched it at the tailor's feet, where it exploded like a bombshell. Timothy was unscathed, and the church of St Trinian remained without a roof.

A. W. Moore reprinted Train's text in 1891 as the story of the most notorious of these fiends in Man, and Jenkinson's guidebook set it beside the Reverend Cumming's more sober suggestion that St Trinian was a corruption of St Ninian, since the church had belonged to the Priory of Whithorn in Galloway. Sophia Morrison retold it in 1911 with the monks choosing their site in the broad rough meadow between dark Greeba mountain and the high road, the buggane's haunt in the mountain above, and a little tailor called Tim who took cloth, needle, thread, thimble and scissors to the church on the first evening after the new roof was put on and worked by candlelight while a head with a mane of coarse black hair and eyes like torches rose through the pavement, followed by shoulders, arms, a body black as ebony and wrinkled like a blacksmith's bellows, and a cloven foot, each greeted with I see, I see, until he threw the burning snuff of a candle in its face and finished his breeches.

The buggane is the least fixed of the Manx spirits. W. Walter Gill wrote in 1929 that the name covered almost all apparitions of the gloomier sort, black dogs in particular, and that some of them swelled up and changed their shape while you looked at them. This one is fixed to a place, the roofless church in the field by the Douglas road, and has a name for its adversary and a piece of tailoring for its plot. The two features of the tradition that are oldest, on the printed record, are the vow that built the church and the demons that unroofed it, both in Woods in 1811. The tailor and his breeches are Train's addition of 1845, from a source he did not name beyond a tour of 1836.