JK Rowling’s ultra-popular Harry Potter book series says little about the ultimate fate of its villain’s body. The evil wizard Voldemort is defeated, yes, and his corpse crashes to the floor “with a mundane finality”. But after that? There’s no word about where he’s buried.

A Google search for “Voldemort’s grave” will, however, return more than 100,000 results, most of them pointing to Greyfriars Kirkyard – a modest graveyard in the middle of Edinburgh, best known as the final resting place of Greyfriars Bobby.

Go there. Follow the muddy trail that’s been cut through the grass by visiting tourists. Before long you’ll find it: a grave which bears the name Tom Riddle – the name by which Voldemort was known before he became the wizarding world’s big bad.

This is a real grave. But the man memorialised here is no wizard. He was a general, and he died in the year 1806, aged 72. His two daughters survived him only by relatively slim margins, one passing away just two years after her father, and one about 13 years later.

A hundred years on, and a popular book series has made his grave into a tourist attraction. It is mentioned favourably on TripAdvisor. Tourists pose in front of it in costume, with toy wands. Some days there is a queue of people waiting to take photographs in front of it. Letters (predominantly addressed to the fictional character of Tom Riddle) are left so routinely that Edinburgh Council must remove them.

Until recently, Thomas Riddell was a relative unknown. Now, more people know him as a fictional character than as a real person with a story of his own. And yet the things which are left by his grave are often the same things left at the foot of other tombstones: flowers, cards, or teddy bears gently wilted by the rain.

In death, his life is overshadowed by the story of a character whose name he inspired. His real legacy will remain largely unknown, uncelebrated. While Tom Riddle’s history is documented in exacting detail, Thomas Riddell’s is all but forgotten.