Haunted Scotland Read online

  What turned out to be a rather more immediate vision of the future was experienced by an Edinburgh taxi-driver on a nightshift in the winter of 2002. Working nights can be very disorientating as it disrupts normal sleep patterns, but this cab driver, whom I shall call Bert, told me you get used to it. ‘You just have to make yourself go to bed as soon as you knock off,’ he said. ‘The money is good, and, if you’re feeling totally knackered, you can always pull over for a wee sleep.’

  It was during one of these ‘wee sleeps’ that Bert had his first and probably his most startling premonition. ‘Normally Saturday nights are hectic between midnight and two a.m., when things ease off,’ he explained. ‘It was early December. I’d taken the night before off for the wife’s brother’s engagement party. I was feeling a bit rough, so after I’d dropped a fare off at the Scotsman Hotel, I parked the cab in Blair Street, just off the High Street, for a wee bit of shut-eye.

  ‘It was really weird,’ he continued. ‘I don’t believe in all that psychic baloney, but I started getting all this stuff about a building on fire. I was walking along the Cowgate towards the Grassmarket, and a man ran past shouting out something about towering infernos. When I turned around, there was a wall of flame coming. I started running. The heat was suffocating and I woke up choking.’

  When Bert woke up, he says everything in Blair Street was silent. At the foot of the hill he could see the Cowgate, but there was no one around. ‘I looked at my watch and it was five a.m. I must have been asleep for at least a couple of hours.’

  It was not until the following evening, however, that the Cowgate, under Edinburgh’s South Bridge, ignited into flame. A fire had broken out in La Belle Angèle nightclub, rapidly spreading to the Gilded Balloon Fringe venue, part of the former 369 Art Gallery building. The flames quickly took hold of the adjoining terrace, lighting up the sky for miles around and smothering Edinburgh’s Old Town in acrid smoke.

  No fewer than nineteen fire crews, the majority from Lothian & Borders Fire Brigade, were called upon to get the blaze under control, and both the Cowgate and South Bridge remained closed for several days thereafter.

  ‘I was away on the south side dropping a fare off at Prestonfield when I heard the news on the car radio,’ said Bert. ‘It made me feel pretty peculiar, I can tell you.’

  Since then, Bert has had similar flashes of second sight, but is increasingly reluctant to talk about them. When I saw him five years ago, he told me how he had collected a bearded man with reddish hair in the Grassmarket and driven him to the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood.

  Bert had recognised him as Robin Cook, the Labour politician and former UK government minister. ‘He told me he’d been having his portrait painted by a local artist and just been to see the finished work in her studio,’ said Bert. ‘He was a good bloke. I really took to him although I’ve never voted Labour in my life.’

  Months later Bert had a dream in which he saw Cook standing with a woman on the summit of a high mountain. They were admiring the view when Cook collapsed. When Bert awoke, he dismissed the image from his mind. However, that very evening the news broke that Robin Cook had indeed died from a heart attack while climbing Ben Stack in Sutherland.

  ‘It was deeply shocking,’ said Bert. ‘What staggered me most was he was only fifty-nine. I guess his opposition to the Iraq War must have really stressed him out.’

  Although Bert more often than not considers his gift a curse, he has learned to live with it. ‘I meet a lot of complete strangers and know at once when something bad is going to happen. What am I supposed to do about it? What can I do about it? If I warn them that something dreadful is about to happen, it’ll only upset them and you can’t interfere with fate. I don’t know why I have these visions. I didn’t ask for them.’

  14

  CASTLES IN THE AIR

  In the case of the phantom car, however, the impatient driver, having waited for a minute or two, goes cautiously forward and finds absolutely nothing before him – the road is clear. The other car cannot have turned round and gone back the way it came, for there is no room to do so; it has simply disappeared.

  Gavin Maxwell, Raven Seek Thy Brother (1968)

  As much to do with their size as with their Gothic ostentation, Scotland’s historic country houses, mansions and castles lend themselves unconditionally to tales of hauntings and spine-chilling spectral visitations. Overall, Scotland shares all the trappings of a Transylvanian film set. When a building is old or careworn it goes without saying that it holds secrets, but life, as we know, moves on. Gloom is a transitory condition, but sometimes it can come back to haunt us with a vengeance.

  In Argyll, the current Laird of Lunga House at Craignish is the irrepressible Colin Lindsay-MacDougall, the latest in a long line of rumbustious seafarers who have occupied this strategic spot since the sixteenth century.

  The MacDougalls, bitter enemies of Robert the Bruce, were a constant force to be reckoned with, and with such a turbulent pedigree it is only to be expected that Lunga House has a few stories to tell. First-time visitors frequently remark on the front hallway being full of people when, in the reality of the moment, there is nobody there. Arriving home after a long drive, the laird’s sister, Anne, recalls going straight into the morning room and finding it occupied by an animated crowd.

  She was tired, and, assuming her brother was having a party, she reluctantly threaded her way across to the warmth of the fireplace. When she turned around, the room had emptied.

  Sharply intelligent, Anne was also known to be prescient. Another such family anecdote involves her and her husband Jonathan; after their honeymoon in the Outer Isles, the two of them were invited to stay with some neighbours of her brother’s at Ardfern. Their bedroom was to the rear of the house, and towards dawn, Jonathan was awoken by what he at first assumed to be car headlights shining onto the wall opposite their bed, casting shadows of tree branches.

  Since there was no access for a car at the back of the house, he concluded that this had to be impossible. Sitting up in bed, he was further astonished when a piper emerged through the wall of an adjoining room. It was a military piper in full uniform, but although he appeared to be playing a set of bagpipes, there was no sound. The atmosphere in the room became leaden and oppressive. Jonathan looked on, not knowing what to do until, as fast as the image had revealed itself, it evaporated into the ether.

  Anne, being in bed beside Jonathan, also witnessed the apparition, which she later described as emerging within a swirl of light. ‘It was the sensation of doom that I found most unsettling,’ she said afterwards. ‘You felt that something really awful had happened.’

  Anne’s half-sister, Louise, is convinced that it had something to do with Anne’s father, who had been an officer with the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. He had taken part in the invasion of Sicily during the First World War and had died from his wounds in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. ‘I think it was probably him trying to get a message through to her,’ she said.

  The majority of manifestations in old country houses concern the loss of loved ones.

  South of the city of Aberdeen, close to the village of Ellon, is Haddo House, ancestral seat of the earls and marquesses of Aberdeen. Nowadays opened to the public by the National Trust for Scotland, its sumptuous Victorian interiors seem almost too comfortable to house a ghost.

  But loss creates a vacuum. In 1909, Lord Archie, youngest son of the seventh earl, was killed in a car crash at the age of twenty-five.

  Much loved, his body was brought home to Haddo for interment in the family chapel. His portrait, dressed as a pageboy when his father was Governor General of Canada, hangs on a wall, and there have been sightings of a young man fitting his description lurking in the shadows of the library in the north wing. Trust tour guides speak of hearing his footsteps in the corridors.

  Another historic house maintained by the National Trust for Scotland stands on the outskirts of Forres in Morayshire. Brodie Castle has been th
e home of the family of the same name since they were given their lands in the twelfth century, but although known to have been one of Scotland’s original Pictish/Celtic tribes, all of the early family records were incinerated when the original castle caught fire in 1645.

  In 1727, Alexander, the nineteenth Brodie of Brodie, was appointed Lord Lyon King of Arms, a heraldic post directly accountable to the monarch, but successive generations have concentrated on improving their domestic inheritance and running out of money in the process, an all too common story among the Scottish aristocracy.

  When Ninian Brodie and his wife Helen inherited the estate after the Second World War, therefore, they faced the problems which every twentieth-century stately home owner sooner or later has to confront. The costs involved in repairing and maintaining an ancient Scottish castle can be crippling.

  Nevertheless, the Brodies set about restoring the old place with enthusiasm and brought up their children in a family wing before opening the main house to the paying public in 1972. It was around this time that Martin Hunt, founder of the Edinburgh-based public relations company Tartan Silk, was first invited to lunch and given a personal tour of the public rooms by Ninian.

  Martin was enchanted by the twenty-fifth Laird of Brodie, a distinguished figure of great charm who had formerly been an actor with the Old Vic Theatre Company. Just as they were about to enter the dining room, however, Ninian was called away to answer a telephone call and suggested that Martin have a look at his mother’s sitting room in his absence. In another turret, the room was sunny and elegant but, on entering, Martin found that one of the chairs was occupied by a soldier dressed in a light khaki uniform. In particular, he noticed that the man’s boots were splashed with mud, a light clay in colour.

  To begin with, he assumed he must have intruded upon a family member, but since the figure remained motionless and said nothing, Martin rapidly concluded that it must be a very cleverly made wax model, probably set up for the recent opening of the castle. He therefore made no mention of it over lunch.

  In 1980, Brodie Castle was purchased by the National Trust for Scotland with an endowment from the Brodie family, and it was not until then that Martin made a return visit, accompanied by two young children whom he had briefed beforehand about the wax model.

  ‘Everything was more or less exactly as I remembered it,’ he recalls. ‘Ninian asked for my opinion on the changes made by the National Trust, and I told him that we were disappointed not to see the wax model of the soldier in his mother’s sitting room. He looked at me as if I were mad and said he had no idea what I was talking about. When I explained, he was adamant that there had never been a dummy in that room.

  ‘But I’m certain it was there,’ says Martin. ‘I later asked Ninian’s daughter Juliet about it, and she concurred with her father. There had never been anything of the sort in that room. So if it wasn’t a dummy in uniform, who or what was it?’

  When asked to describe the uniform Martin is adamant about it being khaki. In that case, it could therefore not have belonged to a Cumberland Redcoat from the 1745 Jacobite Rising; nor could it have been the Lord Lyon Brodie himself. The uniform was far more contemporary, which suggests a much more recent candidate.

  In 1898, Captain Alastair Brodie was killed in action at Magersfontein in South Africa during the Boer War. He was aged twenty-eight and an Adjutant with the second Battalion, the Seaforth Highlanders. Seventeen years later, his younger brother Douglas was killed in action during the First World War. Both men would have worn khaki and both sons fit the description of the solitary figure in uniform whom Martin saw back in 1972.

  To the south-east, as the glens of Angus finger into Perthshire, is Bamff House, where wild boars roam free in the tangled woodland and where the laird, Paul Ramsay, has recently introduced beavers into the river. Singularly remote from the maelstrom of urban existence, the estate has been compared to Jurassic Park, but yet again there is a story of a much-loved younger son who died fighting for king and country. His name was David Ramsay of the Scottish Horse Regiment, and he met his end during the Second World War, a tragedy from which his parents never fully recovered. Although the generations have moved on, his smiling face still looks out from a silver photograph frame in the drawing room. On the walls of his bedroom, his watercolour paintings of landscapes and owls perpetuate his memory.

  Guests often sleep in David Ramsay’s bedroom overnight. With its busy Colefax & Fowler wallpaper, it provides a compact and welcoming enough space in this most hospitable of households, but some are more sensitive to David’s continuing presence than others.

  Invited to stay for the weekend, an Edinburgh-based lawyer claims to have had his bedclothes ripped off as he slept. Sufficiently alarmed, he made a rapid departure the following morning and has never returned. He prefers not to talk about it but fortunately his host and hostess find the incident highly amusing.

  ‘No, we didn’t set him up,’ I was told. ‘He’s just the sort of person who David would have enjoyed spooking.’

  Family fortunes are capricious, as many of Scotland’s oldest dynasties know only too well.

  Nestling into a leafy ridge overlooking the Carse of the River Tay as it wends its stately way from Perth towards Dundee is Fingask Castle which, with a few hiccups, has been the home of the Threipland family for 500 years. Staunch Jacobite supporters, their estate was confiscated by the Crown after the 1715 Rising, but repurchased in 1783 by Sir Stuart Threipland using his wife’s money. After that, it was held by their descendants until the 1920s, when it was disposed of by the present owner’s grandfather.

  The Threiplands’ unwise political choices have meant that over the past 400 years they have lost and retrieved Fingask on four occasions. Having been sold and bought back again in 1968 and 1993, the present owners, Andrew and Helen Murray Threipland, are all the more determined to secure the future of their family home.

  With its ancient topiaries, statues and medieval Holy Well of St Peter, the Fingask estate has therefore been transformed into a popular venue for wedding celebrations held in a purpose-built marquee in full view of the castle. Andrew and Helen also host the Fingask Follies, a delightful series of annual evening entertainments which take place in the castle’s drawing room.

  But Fingask was a very different place back in the early 1920s, when the estate was bought by Sir John Henderson-Stewart, sole proprietor of Alexander Stewart & Sons, Scotch Whisky Distillers of Dundee. As the Deputy Chairman of Sheffield Steel Products, he had amassed a significant fortune and been created a baronet in the 1920 Birthday Honours List. His purchase of Fingask Castle from Andrew’s grandfather was seen as providing him with the landed respectability he so desperately craved.

  Alas, as the British economy fluctuated so did Sir John’s wealth, and the aspiring laird soon found himself facing financial ruin. The year was 1923 and, in a bold measure to alleviate his predicament, he decided to sink all that remained of his money into chartering a ship to send cases of Scotch whisky to America, a country in the early throes of Prohibition. Prior to the ship’s sailing, Sir John had instructed the captain that no news was good news.

  He must have had a premonition because the cargo of Scotch was impounded on arrival by the USA customs authorities. An urgent telegram was sent to Sir John, arriving at Fingask Castle by taxi on 6 February 1924.

  Sir John was last seen alive by the taxi-driver who delivered the fateful news. The following day the baronet’s lifeless body was discovered by two businessmen whom he had summoned to a meeting at the castle. It was patently clear that on the arrival of the telegram, Sir John had put a gun to his head and shot himself. He was forty-four years old.

  Although the Henderson-Stewart baronetcy passed to his son, the castle and estate were sold to cover Sir John’s debts. Since then Fingask Castle has had three owners, but as darkness falls it has been a commonplace occurrence for its occupants to hear what sounds like a diesel taxi turning on the gravel sweep and driving off slowly into t
he night.

  15

  KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY

  They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

  Love and desire and hate:

  I think they have no portion in us after

  We pass the gate.

  Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis (1921)

  One and a half miles from the ferry terminal at Craignure on the island of Mull is Torosay Castle. Originally a smaller house stood here but it was demolished in 1850 when the eminent Scottish architect David Bryce was employed to build the baronial-style palace that exists there today. In 1865, the Torosay estate was purchased by Arbuthnot Charles Guthrie, the prosperous younger son of a successful banking family, and, on his death, the property passed to his nephew, Murray Guthrie.

  By all accounts Murray Guthrie was a renaissance man and it was he who enlisted the services of Sir Robert Lorimer, another great Scottish architect, to create three Italianate terraces and a Statue Walk to connect the castle with its original walled garden. These he decorated with a series of nineteen life-sized limestone statues by the Italian sculptor Antonio Bonazza.

  The Statue Walk at Torosay has therefore long been admired by those fortunate enough to visit Mull, providing a tranquil escape into an island Arcadia. But since the house and grounds were opened to the public in 1975, visitors have often been equally distracted by the stately lady dressed in green who silently steps out in front of them before inexplicably vanishing around a corner of the pathway.

  Today, Torosay is owned and occupied by Murray Guthrie’s great-grandson, Christopher James, who smiles to himself whenever he hears that the green lady has been seen again. She is, in fact, his great-great-aunt, and he and his wife and children feel entirely comfortable with her presence in and around their home.