Haunted Scotland Read online

  When Augusta died, she bequeathed Knockdow to the Clan Lamont Society, which for financial reasons was unfortunately unable to take on the responsibility. For a while the estate passed to Augusta’s next of kin, but it was eventually sold in 1990 and has since remained unoccupied.

  Before that, however, Bill remembered wonderful cricket matches on the lawn and formal dances taking place in the hall beneath its circular gallery. ‘For me Knockdow has always had a really good feel about it,’ he said. ‘That’s why Augusta has never wanted to leave.’

  Although he had never known her during her lifetime, Bill told me he had once stepped into the kitchen at Knockdow House and encountered an elderly woman with two younger companions, one slim, the other rather more plump. ‘Of course, nobody else could see them, but they were as clear to me as you are now,’ he insisted. ‘I had no idea who they were at the time, but when I described them afterwards to somebody who had once worked at the house, she immediately identified the older woman as Miss Lamont. The younger ones were kitchen staff. The description I gave of them fitted perfectly.’

  Needless to say, there was no sign of Augusta or her maids when our little party toured Knockdow House, but all of the time we were there, Bill seemed anxious to give me a ‘transfer’, to see if there were any spirits present. For a moment his face glazed over in preparation to enter a trance but, having had no previous connection with either the house or Lamont family, I firmly declined his offer.

  So far as I was concerned, if Augusta wished to introduce herself to me she would do so on her own terms and when it suited her.

  ‘She really loved Knockdow,’ said Mary Lamb. ‘All she really wanted towards the end of her life was to know it would be looked after.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be worried about here,’ added Bill. ‘But isn’t it good to know she’s still keeping an eye on things?’

  2

  STONE TAPES

  ‘For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old?’

  Charles Dickens, Master Humphrey’s Clock (1841)

  It was during the Perthshire Open Studios Week of 2008 that I first encountered Gordon McNeill-Wilkie. In his everyday existence Gordon is a specialist in dry-stone walls and garden features such as the monumental stone sofa-bench on show at Lethendy House where his partner, the painter Luisa Ramazzotti, was exhibiting her oil portraits.

  When I mentioned I was in the process of writing this book, he casually informed me that he was both a faith healer and an exorcist. Slim, with intense blue eyes, he further indicated that he was willing to talk to me openly on the subject. Having found others similarly blessed reluctant to do so, I naturally jumped at the opportunity.

  ‘Such gifts are easily misunderstood, but if you worry about what people think of you then they own you,’ he said wisely. ‘It’s certainly not been easy for me, but once I learned to accept my situation, everything fell into place.’

  Gordon was born in 1960 and grew up in Perthshire, where his father was the manager of the Green Hotel at Kinross. ‘When I was very young, I used to have nightmares full of sights and sounds and smells,’ he explained. ‘I often experienced the sensation of leaving my body and flying, and I vividly remember trying desperately to maintain my concentration in case I fell.’

  As he grew older, he struggled to shut these thoughts out of his consciousness, but, playing in the woods on the banks of Loch Leven, he was continually aware of the energies surrounding the plants, the trees and the people he encountered. In an attempt to suppress such feelings he turned to macho pursuits such as martial arts. He married and joined the army, enlisting in 15 Para (Scottish Battalion) based at Yorkhill in Glasgow. But when his best friend was killed in front of him in an accident, it affected him deeply.

  Shortly after this terrible experience, Gordon met a psychic who gave him a tarot reading in which the death card appeared again and again. She told him not to worry about this, but within months his wife had also died.

  Understandably traumatised, Gordon began reading every book he could find relating to the occult and spiritualism, but none provided him with the answers he needed.

  That was over twenty-one years ago and when Gordon remarried, he and his second wife moved to live at Bankfoot, where his elderly neighbour, as it transpired, was a practising Buddhist. One day this man, whom he liked enormously, came to see Gordon and confided in him that he had been diagnosed with a serious medical condition. Gordon was intensely shocked, but became even more perplexed when the man said to him, ‘I’m a healer, but I can’t heal myself. Will you help me?’

  At first, Gordon was speechless, but the man went on to explain to him that he had recognised the healing ability in him. ‘It’s not something you do; it’s what you are,’ he explained. ‘It’s not a skill you acquire; you are born with it.’

  After some initial hesitation, Gordon placed his hands over the old man’s lower back and felt a trembling sensation. After five minutes, he was told to stop.

  ‘That’s it gone now,’ said the man gratefully, and walked off saying, ‘Now you know. This is what you can do.’ He was later diagnosed as having fully recovered.

  ‘I felt a huge surge of emotion after that,’ said Gordon. ‘I’d recently read Conversations with God, three books by Neale Donald Walsch. In my head I kept hearing the words, “If there were any gift that I could give you, it would be fearlessness.” I knew I had to take myself seriously.’

  To start off with, of course, there were doubts. Was it just a case of feeding his own ego? Finally, Gordon decided that he had no choice. He had to do something about it, and told himself everything was possible. He wanted the full party pack. As Jesus said, ‘These things I have done, so ye will do also.’

  Ironically, all of this was going on just as Gordon’s life was once again starting to fall apart. Remarried, with three young children, his marriage failed.

  ‘Everything was going wrong for me. I even had my car stolen,’ he told me. ‘I moved to live at Inver, near Dunkeld, and having nowhere to go in the evenings but the pub, I soon found myself healing some of the locals. I got a job as a personal trainer at the Dunkeld Hilton, and then a chiropractor friend suggested I open a clinic.’ Gordon had previously not considered himself to be an exorcist, but soon found that people were coming to him with psychological problems. This was compounded when a white witch, whose name he prefers to withhold out of respect for her privacy, came to see him from Edinburgh and regressed him.

  ‘Afterwards, she became my mentor,’ he said. ‘She made me understand that I was not a source, but a conduit. In this game your biggest enemy is your ego.

  ‘The human soul is huge,’ he continued disarmingly. ‘It contains the body, not the other way around. Every lifetime is burned into your soul’s memory bank. You take this information (which can be accessed) with you from lifetime to lifetime.’

  Gordon does not believe in the Devil, as such, but he does acknowledge the existence of evil spirits and demons. One of his more memorable exploits was when he was asked to clear the interiors and grounds of Ashintully Castle, near Blairgowrie.

  ‘I came across a group of spirit witches, or medicine women, as I prefer to call them, and moved them away from the old mausoleum,’ he recalls. ‘I thought nothing of it at the time, but on the road home in the car I found myself looking over my shoulder all the time, as if there were passengers in the back seat.’

  At home in their sitting room that night, he and Luisa were seated at opposite ends of a sofa, when the cushion between them compressed and the room turned bitterly cold.

  ‘My knees were freezing and I began to wonder what we had brought home with us,’ he recalled.

  Then th
e shadow of a girl with very black hair materialised at Luisa’s feet, with yet another woman, presumably the girl’s mother, standing directly in front of them saying:

  ‘An’ fit are ye gonnae dae noo ye’ve cleared the hoose an’ cleared the chepel? Fit ye gonnae dae wi’ us?’

  ‘There was no sense of a threat,’ said Gordon. ‘I knew immediately that they were in that rut where there is no concept of time, so I explained very gently to them what I had done and told them that I could help them to go to a better place.’

  ‘Mebbe we’ll just stay here,’ the older woman responded.

  ‘Both were frightened by what they’d been told about Hell,’ he explained. ‘You would be too if you’d spent all of your mortal existence being persecuted. So I was just wondering what I should do next, when a ray of brilliant white light showed through the window. Instantly, the daughter stood up and was carried away. Instantaneously, the mother leaned forward to give me an icy hug and off she went too. It was really very extraordinary and the room then warmed up.’ A year later, Gordon was asked to return to the castle to clear the dungeon.

  ‘During that first clearance I knew I was out of my depth,’ he mused when retelling me the story. ‘This time it was different.’

  The dungeon lay under the castle and, being below water level, the vaults had been regularly flooded. Gordon had also been told that in medieval times prisoners were frequently put there to drown.

  ‘This time I felt much more confident about what I was going to do,’ he said. ‘The dungeon entrance lay below a hatch on the ground floor, and, as I entered the hallway, all of the dogs belonging to the castle started rushing around and barking in a frenzy. I began by opening the windows and, as I raised the hatch and peered into the space below, a piece of citrine I’d placed in my shirt pocket fell into the void. It had an unexpectedly calming effect. The next thing I knew, I was lowering myself through the opening.

  ‘The first thing I noticed was the fetid air. Next, I felt my throat being squeezed, but this is quite a common occurrence in such circumstances. I knew that whoever it was that was doing this, would stop as soon as I’d completed the clearance.’

  Gordon revealed that a lot of what he does involves procedures, prayers and rituals which to those of a cynical disposition might appear a trifle absurd. ‘This is because you have to convince whatever it is that you are up against that you mean business. Coming from the past, they understand rituals.’

  He had therefore taken with him a replica Japanese ceremonial sword made of steel and embossed with a gold dragon, and he boldly called out, ‘Begone foul evil spirits all, this is my word so heed the call!’

  Immediately the energy in the dungeon shifted. In the very same instant, Carol, the lady of the house, who was standing in the room above, witnessed nine black shapes fly out of the hatch and evaporate through a window towards the light.

  ‘It gave her quite a shock!’ said Gordon. ‘But at least she knew I was doing my job!’

  Gordon was adamant about differentiating between ghosts and what he called ‘stone tapes’. His theory was that in every old building where negative events take place, energies are absorbed electromagnetically into the stone, and these energies can be replayed. ‘When, for example, somebody sees an apparition pass through a wall, it’s not a ghost at all, it’s a stone recording,’ he insisted. Both good and evil spirits have the means to interact with human beings. A ghost, even when it has been shown the light, is able to come and go as it pleases, whereas a stone tape is a hologram, nothing more. He went on to explain that if somebody dies in a state of imbalance, they will pass over, while some of their negative traits may possibly remain behind. These can attach themselves to the living. ‘Sometimes when people experience mood swings, it can be because this negativity has latched onto them. That’s where an exorcist needs to step in.’

  Whenever Gordon gives a consultation, he previously aligns his operational space with crystals for protection. ‘It’s important that clients are welcomed into a comfortably furnished room,’ he says. ‘But hidden in the system there are things to protect them, me and the house.’

  To help him, he makes use of obsidian, lapus lazuli, rose quartz, good for balancing the emotions, and citrine, the ‘stone of the divine’, which has four main functions – it ‘absorbs, transmutes, dissipates, and grounds negative energy’.

  When Gordon volunteered to give me what he calls a ‘Wash Down’, he had me first remove my shoes and wristwatch. Watches, he explained, absorb the bad experiences of life. If you have worn a watch for a period of years, it is a good thing to have it cleansed.

  The Wash Down itself is a process by which he claims somebody is introduced to their full potential. It involved me clasping a piece of angelite in my right hand and a piece of lapis lazuli in my left. Having relaxed in a vintage Parker Knoll chair covered with a white cloth, I was instructed to close my eyes. In the background, I listened to a soundtrack of Enya, while Gordon enunciated various prayers.

  The Wash Down took a fleeting four minutes. To be honest, I found it both relaxing and enervating in equal measure, creating an inner sense of calm which surprised me. In my analytical state of mind, I had not expected that. Moreover, I was introduced to my spirit guide who, I was told, would become responsible for my future wellbeing.

  ‘You are now empowered to fulfil all of your innermost wishes,’ said Gordon.

  As I drove home that night I somehow found this extremely reassuring.

  3

  SECOND SIGHT

  It would be a gain to the country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be.

  Cardinal Newman, ‘History of my Religious Opinions from 1833 to 1839’ in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865)

  My grandmother was the seventh child of a seventh child, which in the Celtic tradition made her fey or psychic, and there is a story in the family (as I am sure exists in every Scots family) that one night she had a dream in which a childhood friend came to her bedside to say goodbye. On coming to consciousness, she immediately awoke her disgruntled husband to tell him about this. The next day a telegram arrived to confirm that their friend had died in the night.

  Second sight is infinitely more closely allied to the Celts than to any other race, although it also occurs in tribes of Red Indians, and in the folklore of Australian Aboriginals and the Maoris of New Zealand. Why Scots and Irish should specifically be singled out for the gift might suggest some sort of unique genetic provenance buried deep within their Celtic birthright.

  Premonitions are commonplace throughout Scotland’s long and lawless story. As early as the twelfth century, Thomas of Ercildoun predicted the union of Scotland with England; in 1388, the second earl of Douglas dreamed of his own death before the Battle of Otterburn; in 1513, a ghostly spectre seen at the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh warned of the impending catastrophe at Flodden.

  In Supernatural Scotland, I wrote of my friend Swein MacDonald of Ardgay, in Sutherland. Swein died at the age of seventy-one in 2003. He too was possessed of the Highland gift of second sight, warning of the 1993 Braer oilfield spill on Shetland only days before it occurred. With Swein, all of the clichés were in place. He was a seventh son born on the seventh day of the seventh month. He predicted the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer, the birth of Prince William within a year of their wedding, and the subsequent break-up of their marriage.

  A portly, red-faced crofter with a shock of white beard, Swein enjoyed his whisky and there was a childlike naivety about him. I visited him whenever I found myself in the vicinity of his smallholding overlooking the Dornoch Firth, and always came away with the conclusion that he was as baffled by his powers as were the rest of us. Swein’s predictions were simplistic, but touched a chord. His readings, as he called them, were calculated to reassure rather than to disturb. In the bar of a local hotel he was denounced by a stranger who called him a crook and a fantasist. Swein
responded by warning him to be careful what he said because in a year’s time he would have no shoes. A month later, this same individual was driving towards Tain when his car collided head-on with another vehicle. The unfortunate man spent the ensuing three years of his life in a wheelchair.

  But there was no malice about Swein. Often he totally failed to comprehend the significance of what he predicted. On more than one occasion he told me that he found the burden of his gift deeply troubling.

  Another such individual with an extraordinary gift was Henry Torrance, whom I had been sent to for advice when researching a project on the Knights Templar. He was immensely knowledgeable on matters both spiritual and occult, and we rapidly embarked upon a firm friendship, to the extent that I would occasionally invite him to accompany me when I went on excursions.

  On one occasion, we had driven to have lunch with a mutual friend in Innerleithen and we were passing through the village of Clovenfords, west of Galashiels, when Henry requested I pull over to the side of the road. There was an urgency in his voice and I was concerned. He was elderly. At first I thought he had been taken ill.

  ‘Can’t you see them?’ he asked in an agitated voice.

  ‘Who?’ I replied.

  ‘There, in that field. Those poor children.’

  I looked across the fence towards a copse beside the Caddon Water. The sun shone hazily, but the enclosure of trees at the water’s edge appeared gloomy, in dark shadow. So far as I could see, there was nobody there.

  ‘They look so sad,’ continued my old friend. ‘So frightened.’

  ‘But I can’t see anybody,’ I protested.

  He looked disappointed. This was most unlike him. A man of substance in that he weighed around twenty stone, Henry was used to being in control.

  ‘You probably think I’m mad,’ he said reproachfully after a pause. ‘But I can assure you they are there. Clear as daylight. But it seems I’m the only one who can see them.’