Scottish Ghost Stories

by James Robertson

Genres: Ghost; Horror

Synopsis

Inheriting the tradition of Hugh Miller, the nineteenth century folklorist and stonemason (whose own haunted life is the subject of the opening chapter), James Robertson has, where possible, researched the original or oldest written source and visited the site of each story to compile the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of the Scottish supernatural. Some of the stories gathered here are deservedly famous, such as those associated with Glamis Castle or the tale of Major Weir, while others ('The Deil of Littledean' and 'The Drummer of Cortachy') are less familiar or even contemporary accounts related to the author personally - but all are equally intriguing and fascinating reflections of the culture and period to which they belong.

Neither a wary sceptic nor a fanatical believer, but an advocate of the validity of individual experience of the strange and unexplainable, James Robertson's Scottish Ghost Stories is an imaginative and chilling recasting of an established Scottish ghost-hunting and story-telling tradition - a homage to the particular mystery and character of a land which continues to produce ghosts whether from den to glen, Highlands to Lowlands, Catholic to Protestant.

Release date: June 6, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 288

Sample

‘It is all very well for you who have never seen a ghost to talk as you do, but had you seen what I have witnessed, you would
have a different opinion.’


WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

THERE ARE PLENTY OF ghosts, wraiths, apparitions and other strange phenomena in these pages, but the reader will search hard
for a single explanation of what exactly a ghost is. I make no claim to know. I am a sceptic in most things – in the behaviour
of the living as much as that of the dead – and so I am inclined to believe some of the stories gathered here more than others.
But I am also highly sceptical of that kind of absolute certainty which categorically denies there can be any such thing as
a ghost. My own experience, and that of many other people who are themselves sceptics, with no reason to invent a piece of
ghostly theatre, is that there are things in this world that we do not fully understand or cannot fully explain. It may be
that there is a ‘rational, scientific’ explanation that will unfold in due course. It may equally be that reason and science
are not the keys to every locked door; it may be that our ancestors had access to doors now locked and bolted to all but a
few of us. It is, in the end, up to the reader to judge, judge, remembering only this: the greatest of sceptical philosophers, David Hume, showed that we can know things only through experience, but that even experience proves nothing. What, then, if our experience shows us things we cannot explain except by saying: ‘I only know that it happened’? I am neither for nor against ghosts: but undoubtedly some of the things you are about to read happened to the people who experienced them.


So much depends upon the credibility of the source, and upon the credulity of the recipient. Sometimes one reads between the
lines a quite different story from the one being told. A good example is the incident related by Father Charles McKay to the
Countess of Shrewsbury in a letter dated 21st October 1842. In 1838 McKay had left Edinburgh to take charge of the Catholic
missions in Perthshire. On arrival in Perth, he was called upon by a woman named Anne Simpson, who had been anxious to see
a priest for more than a week:


On asking her what she wanted with me, she answered, ‘Oh, Sir, I have been terribly troubled for several nights by a person
appearing to me during the night.’ ‘Are you a Catholic, my good woman?’ ‘No, Sir, I am a Presbyterian.’ ‘Why, then, do you
come to me? I am a Catholic priest.’ ‘But, Sir, she (meaning the person that had appeared to her) desired me to go to the priest, and I have been inquiring for a priest during
the last week.’ ‘Why did she wish you to go to the priest?’ ‘She said she owed a sum of money, and the priest would pay it.’
‘What was the sum of money she owed?’ ‘Three and tenpence, Sir.’ ‘To whom did she owe it?’ ‘I do not know, Sir.’ ‘Are you
sure you have not been dreaming?’ ‘Oh, God forgive you! for she appears to me every night. I can get no rest.’ ‘Did you know
the woman you say appears to you?’ ‘I was poorly lodged, Sir, near the barracks, and I often saw and spoke to her as she went
in and out to the barracks, and she called herself Malloy.’


Subsequent to this conversation, Father McKay made inquiries and found that an Irish woman named Malloy who had recently died
did indeed owe three shillings and tenpence to a local shopkeeper. The priest duly paid off the debt and the woman’s ghost
did not bother Anne Simpson any more.


Now it may be that this is a genuine ghost story. Certainly Charles McKay was sincere in recording the whole case. But, reading
it now, one cannot help thinking that he was the victim of a confidence trick. Anne Simpson knew the identity of the ghost; she knew her name was Malloy and that she was a Catholic; she also knew the amount the ghost supposedly
owed, although apparently not to whom it was owed. She often saw and spoke to the woman: surely it is more than likely that
she knew about the money before Malloy died. Three shillings and tenpence was a not insignificant sum in 1842. Perhaps she
and the shopkeeper came to an arrangement, that she would approach the newly arrived priest with her tale in an attempt to
recover the lost debt. Again, the sociology is fascinating: was the religious and cultural divide in early 19th-century Perthshire
being deliberately exploited?


A friend of mine who stays near Carluke in Lanarkshire, a man of absolute integrity and of that serious thoughtfulness that
so often marks the Scottish character, told me that not long after moving into his present home he had an unnerving experience,
which he cannot explain but knows took place. He was in the kitchen, standing at the sink, when a terrible frisson of bitter cold passed through him. It was as if another person’s body, freezing in temperature, had walked by him and half-through his own body.
He was very upset, but decided to say nothing to his family for fear of worrying them. A few days later, in exactly the same
spot, the very same thing happened. At this point a mixture of fear and courage combined to make him confront whatever it
was that was happening. ‘Look,’ he said out loud, ‘I don’t know if you’re trying to frighten me, but you’re succeeding,’ and
then added with some vigour, ‘Now bugger off and leave me alone!’ He never had the experience again. In contrast to the Perthshire
tale, I am inclined to believe there was a paranormal element to the Carluke one, partly of course because it was told directly
to me.


As stories grow old, extra details and odd little growths become attached to them, like sea-plants and crustaceans to a rusting
hulk. Some of the stories in this book go back several centuries: there are of course no surviving witnesses, and sometimes
no surviving written sources. In these cases, the original ghosts have often become symbols – of moral judgment, revenge,
supernatural justice. It is no surprise that many of them come from a period of intense religious, political and social upheaval
in Scotland – the 17th century – and that the same elements reappear in different places, the same characteristics are attributed
to different hauntings, and that very often one story is connected by family or location to another. But where possible, I
have gone back to the nearest or oldest sources for the full details. Some, like the case of the Rerrick poltergeist, are
amazingly well-documented. Others, like the story of Major Weir, are a mass of hearsay and the product of a wilful, fanatical
belief in the Devil and all his works. Whether one accepts the truth of one, or both, or either of these stories, they are
fascinating documents of the period to which they belong. The sociology of ghosts is often as interesting a subject as the hauntings themselves.


More recent stories are, as one would expect, subjected to a more critical eye by those who collect them. In the 19th century,
ghost-hunting was all the rage, and was often conducted with a kind of spurious scientism which, far from giving the stories
credibility, tends now to make the collectors’ motivations look highly suspect. Some of the so-called great ghost experts
not only gathered tales so lurid and bizarre that it is hard to take them seriously, but also saw ghosts themselves on every
lonely by-road, in every supposedly haunted house or castle, and in every place they investigated, with a regularity that
would be truly wonderful were it not so far-fetched. As Eric Russell in his book, Ghosts, said of the dean of ghost-hunters, Elliott O’Donnell, the most effective story-telling style was to create a kind of Chinese
puzzle whereby one narrator introduced another who might introduce another, and so forth, hustling the reader with confidence
and gusto from marvel to marvel, giving him no time for reflection and the scepticism that might arise. ‘Infallibly,’ wrote
Russell, ‘if O’Donnell seeks a ghost, he finds it whether it is noonday upon a San Francisco street, night in the Welsh mountains
or upon Wimbledon Common … For Elliott O’Donnell, the Other World was here and now, informing, permeating the “real” world,
so that it would be impossible to draw a boundary line.’


Other writers have recycled stories without bothering to research the original sources, and distortions and factual errors
have crept in. Some of the stories in this book are famous – those associated with Glamis, for example, or the tale of Major
Weir – while others are less well-known or completely new. But in every case, as far as possible, I have researched primary material and visited the sites of the stories. I have also acknowledged
my written sources: it seems only fair, and nothing is more likely to reduce one’s faith in a tale of ghosts than the discovery
that what one is reading is not only second-hand, but copied almost word for word from another work without acknowledgement. A guide to Scottish hauntings published in the 1970s was particularly remiss in using many of the stories of the 19th century
Scottish geologist and man of letters, Hugh Miller, in virtually his own words, without once mentioning his name.


There are famous stories missing from this book, sometimes because they are so famous. Mary King’s Close below the Edinburgh
City Chambers, for example, does not feature here, although as recently as June 1995 a man who spent a night there for charity
captured a strange image on video, which might have been the head of a dog reputed to haunt the close three hundred years
ago. Edinburgh Castle, Stirling Castle and St Andrews are all famed for their ghosts – headless drummer, green lady and helpful
monk respectively – but they and many other Scottish spectres do not grace these pages. The fact is that one could fill several
books with all the ghost stories that Scotland has produced – and continues to produce – over the years.


If there is a particular Scottishness to these tales, it may lie in the religious ideology that underlies some of them, but
it is also found in their sheer diversity, for Scottish society, past and present, is full of variety. There are stories from
the Highlands and the Lowlands, which are distinguishable not just by location but by the culture they reflect. It seems right,
therefore, that I should acknowledge Hugh Miller, who saw himself as the inheritor of two cultures – the ‘Celtic’ of his mother and the ‘Saxon’ of his father – as a principal influence on, and
inspiration for, this book, and to conclude by encouraging readers to discover for themselves one of the great polymathic
minds of 19th-century Scotland.


ON A COLD NOVEMBER afternoon in 1807, a young mother was sewing by her fire, with her five-year-old son playing at her side.
The small but comfortable house in Cromarty in which they sat had been built a century before by one John Feddes, a buccaneer
who had made his living raiding Spanish ships off the South American coast, and who was the grandfather of the young woman’s
husband. Outside, the weather was bleak and sullen, but with little wind and only a heavy swell breaking in from the east
to indicate that conditions at sea were at all hazardous. Harriet Miller had no reason to fear for her shipmaster husband,
who was one of the most skilful sailors on all the east coast of Scotland, and who had survived the worst of weathers in his
many years sailing between the North and the port of Leith. In any case, she had just received a letter from him, sent from
Peterhead, in which he wrote of a fierce gale that had forced him into harbour, but also of his intention of setting out on
the next leg of his journey to Edinburgh: ‘We have had verry Bad Weather lets hope will get Beater my kind Love to your Self
and our dear little Ons.’ He had been away for nearly three months, collecting kelp among the Hebrides for the chemical industry,
and both Harriet and the boy Hugh were well used to his long absences from home.


There was a sudden gust in the street outside the house, and the front door, which was not locked, fell open. The mother sent
the boy to close it again. And here, let Hugh Miller himself take up the story:


What follows must be regarded as simply the recollection, though a very vivid one, of a boy who had completed his fifth year
only a month before. Day had not wholly disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a grey haze spread a neutral
tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at the open door,
within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand
and arm were apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance; and, directly fronting me, where the body
ought to have been, there was only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond.


The lad was ‘fearfully startled’, and ran shrieking to his mother, telling what he had seen. The house-girl was next despatched
to close the door, and she too, no doubt infected with the child’s panic, reported the presence of the dissevered hand. But
when Harriet herself went, there was nothing. She was, however, a superstitious woman, and not one to make light of her son’s
tale. And in a few days there seemed to be an explanation for the apparition. For at almost that very hour, as far as could
be told, the father, his sloop and all hands were lost in heavy seas somewhere off the Buchan coast. ‘The supposed apparition,’ wrote Hugh Miller years later in his autobiography, ‘may have been merely a momentary affection of the
eye … But if so the affection was one of which I experienced no after-return; and its coincidence, in the case, with the probable
time of my father’s death, seems at least curious.’


It was not the only time the young Hugh saw something strange in that old house (which still stands, and is now in the care
of the National Trust for Scotland). Often he clamoured for the story of his great-grandfather the pirate, and how he had
come home from the Spanish Main to find the sweetheart of his youth a widow, and had married her. One day, playing all alone
at the foot of the steep stair, something extraordinary caught Hugh’s eye on the landing above: there stood John Feddes (or
so the child instinctively assumed):


a large, tall, very old man, attired in a light-blue greatcoat. He seemed to be steadfastly regarding me with apparent complacency;
but I was badly frightened; and for years after, when passing through the dingy, ill-lighted room out of which I inferred
he had come, I used to feel not at all sure that I might not tilt against old John in the dark.


All his life, Hugh Miller would be susceptible to the influence of the supernatural, and it is possible that this preoccupation
contributed to his premature death. ‘I am old enough to have seen people who conversed with the fairies,’ he once wrote in
a letter to Robert Chambers, ‘and as for ghosts, why, I am not very sure but what I have seen of ghosts myself.’ An unruly
and violent boy who left school after a fight with the master, he first learned the trade of a stonemason, and worked throughout
the Highlands and in Edinburgh for some years before ill-health turned him to less physical, though hardly less demanding, work
as a writer. As a youth he developed an interest in natural history and fossils, wandering the shores around Cromarty and
splitting open rocks with an old hammer that had belonged, his mother told him, to his pirate ancestor. Later, through diligent
self-education and the exercise of a vigorous imagination, he was to become one of the best-known figures of early Victorian
Britain: a geologist and palaeontologist, journalist, essayist, editor and moralist, and one of the foremost champions of
the Free Church when it broke away from the Church of Scotland in 1843. In his writings he displayed all the rationalism and
rigour that one might expect of a self-taught scientist who remained a devout Presbyterian. Yet he never cut himself off entirely
from the powerful hold that an early fascination for myth, legend and the paranormal had exercised upon him: his first important
book – and in many ways his most interesting one – published in 1835, was called Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, and it remains a major source for folklorists even today. And at various other points in his life, it would seem, the other-worldly
would make itself felt upon this great and humane intellect.


His mother Harriet, according to the account given by Miller’s wife Lydia to his biographer, would supply many of the tales
for Scenes and Legends: ‘Her belief in fairies, witches, dreams, presentiments, ghosts was unbounded, and she was restrained by no modern scruples
from communicating her fairy lore, or the faith with which she received it, to her son.’ In the wake of his father’s death
at sea, the gloomy atmosphere was further darkened by the widow’s infatuation with the netherworld, and by the fact that,
struggling to earn enough for her son and two little daughters (who would both die of fever before their teens), much of her fireside work entailed the sewing of
shrouds for the dead. Having heard tale after tale of mysteries, signs and wonders, Hugh would be put to bed in the same room,
where he would drift off, to the click-click of his mother’s work, and dreams would mingle with reality. Lydia blamed Hugh’s
mother for fostering in him an ‘inability to distinguish between waking and sleeping visions … There was plenty of affection
but no counter-balancing grain of sense of a kind which would qualify those tremendous doses of the supernatural.’


Hugh, then, grew up with a fascination for the morbid and the bizarre, doubtless brought on in part by his father’s drowning.
When a dead seaman was washed up on a nearby beach, he went to examine the body: ‘The hands and feet, miserably contracted,
and corrugated into deep folds at every joint, yet swollen to twice their proper size, had been bleached as white as pieces
of alumed sheep-skin; and where the head should have been, there existed only a sad mass of rubbish.’ On another occasion,
as a young man, he took himself at midnight up to the old graveyard of St Regulus on the outskirts of Cromarty. Here were
the ruins of an old chapel, and beneath it, accessible only by a hole cut into the ground, the crypt of the Urquharts of Cromarty
Castle, which was then used as a charnel-house by the local gravediggers. Miller lowered himself on a rope down into the pit,
lit a torch he had brought with him, and sat out the night alone amid the bones and debris of the dead.


Writing of the old traditions of the country lyke-wake, the vigil over the newly dead, he remarked:

The house of mourning is naturally a place of sombre thoughts and ghostly associations. There is something, too, in the very
presence and appearance of death that leads one to think of the place and state of the dead … But by what process of thought
can we bring experience to bear on the world of the dead? It lies entirely beyond us, – a terra incognita of cloud and darkness; and yet the thing at our side, – the thing over which we can stretch our hand, – the thing dead to
us, but living to it, – has entered upon it; and, however uninformed or ignorant before, knows more of its dark, and to us
inscrutable mysteries, than all our philosophers and all our divines.


Miller’s imagination crossed into that unknown land frequently, disturbing his peace of mind, sometimes enabling him to produce
brilliant tales of ghosts and apparitions.


His friend and fellow-geologist, Robert Dick of Thurso, recalled another strange incident that perhaps illustrates how thin
was the dividing line between the sceptical and the credulous Miller:


I mind, after an hour’s work on the rocks together at Holborn Head, we sat down on the leeside of a dyke to look over our
specimens, when suddenly up jumped Hugh, exclaiming, ‘The fairies have got hold of my trousers!’ and then sitting down again,
he kept rubbing his legs for a long time. It was of no use suggesting that an ant or some other well-known ‘beastie’ had got
there. Hugh would have it that it was ‘the fairies’!


When still an apprentice at the age of twenty, Hugh was working with his master near the old burial ground of Kirkmichael,
not far from Jemimaville in the Black Isle. He was keen to visit the ruined chapel and tombs, but the whole of every day was
given over to hard labour, and he had no time before sunset. One night, falling asleep rapidly from the exhaustions of the
day, he dreamed he was approaching the chapel over a piece of marshy ground on a fine midsummer evening. This is the account
he gave to one of his earliest patrons, George Baird, Principal of Edinburgh University:


[The burying-ground] was laid out in a manner the most exquisitely elegant. The tombs were of beautiful and varied workmanship.
They were of a style either chastely Grecian or gorgeously Gothic; and enwreathed and half-hid by the flowers and foliage
of beautiful shrubs, which sprung up and clustered around them. There was a profusion of roses, mingled with delicate blue
flowers of a species I never saw except in this dream. The old Gothic chapel seemed roofed with stone, and appeared as entire
as the day it had been completed; but from the lichens and mosses with which it was covered, it looked more antique than almost
any building I remember to have seen. The whole scene was relieved against a clear sky, which seemed bright and mellow as
if the sun had set only a minute before. Suddenly, however, it became dark and lowering, a low breeze moaned through the tombs
and bushes, and I began to feel the influence of a superstitious terror. I looked towards the chapel, and on its western gable
I saw an antique-looking, singularly formed beam of bronze, which seemed to unite in itself the shapes of the hour hand of a clock and the gnomon of a dial. As I gazed on it, it turned slowly on
its axis until it pointed at a spot on the sward below. It then remained stationary as before. My terror increased, – the
images of my dream became less distinct, and my last recollection before I awoke is of a wild night-scene, and of my floundering
on in the darkness through the marsh below the burying-ground. A few weeks after the night of this dream, one of my paternal
cousins in the second degree was seized by a fever of which he died. I attended his funeral, and found that the grave had
been opened to receive his corpse on exactly the patch of sward to which the beam had turned.


Though Miller the sceptic described this as a mere ‘prophecy of contingency’ – that is, ‘one of those few dreams which, according
to Bacon, men remember and believe because they happen to hit, not one of the many which they deem id. . .