Haunted Scotland Read online

  We had had a similar conversation once before when he had asked me if I believed in faith healing. A retired Edinburgh banker, survivor of a German prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War and awarded a Military Cross, Henry was not somebody one might expect to be preoccupied with the occult. But he was perfectly serious.

  Ever since his childhood, he confessed to me, he had seen things that nobody else was aware of.

  ‘At first I thought it was perfectly normal,’ he said. ‘It never occurred to me that it was a gift or a curse, or whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I’m somewhere I haven’t been before and I know something is wrong. That’s when they appear, figures from the past, or at least, that’s what I assume them to be, almost as if they’re wanting to tell me something. What should I do? I can’t ignore them. They don’t mean me any harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. They need help. That’s why I became interested in faith healing in the hope of finding out what I can do for them.’

  Poor Henry. His thirty-eight-year marriage had ended in separation and a painful divorce. Increasingly, those close to him regarded him with amused tolerance. He was harmless, they told me.

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to him if he turns all silly,’ his son insisted, when I mentioned I had seen his father on the steps of the Edinburgh College of Parapsychology.

  But I did not consider him silly. I was intrigued, and often looked in on his Bruntsfield flat for a chat and a coffee. On this occasion, I had volunteered to drive him to Walkerburn for lunch with some mutual friends.

  ‘Please don’t say anything about this when we get there,’ he pleaded. ‘They already think I’m a bit dotty. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to stop. I just needed to have a proper look at those poor people.’

  He was courteous and kind, and I was curious. ‘What did they look like?’ I asked.

  He closed his eyes as we set off again. ‘There were at least a dozen women with several children, four or five maybe, all pretty emaciated. Their clothes were ragged and grubby. They looked half-starved.’

  Nothing more was said on the subject. We had an amusing lunch with our friends where, so far as I can recall, the conversation centred on labrador puppies. I drove Henry home afterwards and, having delivered him to his door, promptly forgot all about the incident, that is until three months later, when I ran into him by chance.

  I was walking along Melville Crescent when he hailed me and strode purposefully towards me with his hand outstretched. ‘I just wanted to let you know I finally got to the bottom of those wretched people we saw when you drove me to lunch with George and Helen,’ he said.

  ‘You saw,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Yes. Well, at least you didn’t appear to think I was entirely potty. At least, I hope not.’

  I nodded. ‘I always keep an open mind,’ I said.

  ‘And so you should. If only others followed your example,’ he said with a sigh of resignation. ‘Anyway, let me tell you what it was all about.’

  On returning to Edinburgh, Henry had immediately telephoned his close confidant Marion McNaught to ask her advice. A well-respected historian, Marion was used to such enquiries and having confirmed a map reference, began a search. Time-slips, for that is what this must have been, occur throughout and across the centuries, visible only to those susceptible to them, and on the spot where they took place. Before long she had come up with an explanation.

  Enclosed within an envelope of rolling hills, there was once, long, long ago, a small encampment at Caddonlee. It was a simple life in that era, safe from the intrusion of the outside world, or so it was thought. All about was lush pasture land. The local community had their own livestock and were blessed with a plentiful supply of water from the River Tweed. They kept themselves to themselves. With no roads or even footpaths, strangers rarely strayed into their territory.

  But alas, nobody noticed the Roman soldiers until they were upon them. Sent on a punitive mission to suppress the hostile elements of the locality, no questions were asked. It was slaughter on sight. That day the river ran red with blood and the corpses of the innocent; slaughtered men were left to rot where they dropped.

  Further down the glen a group of women were tending to their chores with their children. Hearing distant cries they had at first assumed that it was their menfolk rounding up the cattle. It was only when they returned to the village at sunset that the full extent of the devastation became apparent. At this juncture, they too were set upon by the legionnaires and put to the sword.

  ‘Souls caught in limbo almost always belong to those who have met with a violent or unhappy end,’ explained Henry. ‘All those emotions – anger, frustration, despair – create a void in which departed spirits become lost, sometimes for centuries. All that those poor people wanted me to do was to help them to find their way to the light.’ He went on to tell me that he and Marion had returned to the river bank with a Bible and spent the afternoon in prayer. After a while, the prevailing sense of gloom had dispersed and a warm sun touched their faces. ‘After all those centuries I was able to show them the light,’ said Henry with satisfaction. ‘It enabled them to pass over to a better place.’

  Henry died peacefully in his sleep four years ago at the age of ninety-two, but every time I drive along the A72 between Galashiels and Walkerburn, I think of him.

  4

  AN AWAKENING

  Two orders of being, the visible and the invisible, pause on the doorstep of this grey hour, and which is going to advance upon you you hardly know.

  Neil Miller Gunn, The Other Landscape (1954)

  As was emphasised by Gordon McNeill-Wilkie in Chapter Two, the gift of clairvoyance can become a curse. It takes courage to come to terms with it and to lower the barriers. Nobody enjoys being made fun of. Nor does anyone relish being accused of self-delusion.

  Joan Charles has worked in personal and intuitive development for over twenty-five years. A cheery, stylishly dressed personality with bobbed blond hair, she is a regular contributor to lifestyle magazines, writing on such subjects as intuition, self-discovery and psychic awareness. Based in the town of Gourock, where she was born, her own self-awareness began when she was seven years old and she found herself looking into a mirror as if from outside herself.

  ‘I didn’t have a clue what it was all about,’ she protested. ‘I was a very timorous and highly strung child. I simply didn’t understand the sensations that I was experiencing. There was no one to help me so I decided to put whatever it was on hold until I was eleven.’

  Joan remembered going home from school over her lunch break one day to walk the family dog. When she arrived at the front door, she heard somebody calling out her name, yet there was nobody in the house. The voices continued until she was twenty-four, by which time her mother had died of cancer and Joan was married with four children. Around this time she and her husband separated, but she insists that the voices were not the only pressures on their relationship. ‘It was not the best of marriages,’ she recalled regretfully.

  However, it was only after her marriage had come to an end that she summoned up the courage to start visiting ‘spirit churches’. Her next move was to buy herself a book on tarot reading. ‘I knew almost at once that I didn’t need a book,’ she said. ‘I could manage very well without one.’

  And it was this realisation that persuaded her to become involved with alternative therapies. For a time she worked in a health clinic, and several of her clients remained with her when she set up on her own after it closed down. ‘I started to give readings to audiences in Glasgow,’ she explained.

  Soon afterwards, she was approached by an agent who suggested she put together a stage act. Almost before she knew it, she was performing in pubs and clubs, which in turn led to her running corporate courses on intuitive leadership and being signed up to write a column on star signs in the Sunday Post.

  Training groups in team-building, self-belief, awareness and intuition came
easily to Joan, especially when engaging with children. ‘Once people open themselves up to the possibilities available to them, they become infinitely more confident in their own powers. I learned that lesson very early on in my own life. But you have to be prepared for every kind of eventuality. Things may not always turn out the way you want them to.’

  She remembered one reading in particular. A girl came to ask her for advice, and Joan told her that she could see black bin bags stuffed full of money. It had something to do with the girl’s husband. The girl was startled and alarmed by this, and told Joan defensively that her husband worked for the local brewery, and had been given the money by his boss.

  Joan had then informed the girl that she saw the money being transferred into a series of Tesco carrier bags, and that a body would be found floating in the River Clyde.

  ‘The girl was horrified,’ said Joan. ‘She turned completely white and left in a panic. I never heard from her again, but I can’t help what comes to me when I do a reading. I only hope she managed to sort things out.’

  Joan remained silent while she thought about this. ‘Everything flashes before you in your mind’s eye,’ she continued solemnly. ‘Sometimes I feel like an interpreter for the dumb. It’s not that simple either way. I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers. You have to look for symbols, and you try to do your best to work out what’s going on, but sometimes it is impossible to translate what you see into making sense. It’s often very stressful.’

  However, calling in a medium can definitely solve problems, as Jacqueline Heriot can confirm. I was in St Andrews and had arranged to meet her in the St Andrews Castle Visitor Centre, where, as one might expect, the past confronts the present in this old university town with dramatic impact.

  But the castle ghosts were not what Jacqueline wanted to talk to me about, at least not to start off with. ‘I’ve always believed in serendipity,’ she began vaguely. ‘If you are really genuinely interested in something, information comes to you.’

  Having returned from South Africa to live in Scotland some years earlier, Jacqueline had at first moved into a house at Strathkinness, close to St Andrews, but when some friends put their former spinner’s cottage in the village of Ceres up for sale, she decided to make them an offer. Much to her delight, it was accepted.

  ‘Ceres is a really pretty place with a village green,’ she said. ‘The people who live there really take care of their houses.’

  Once Jacqueline’s offer was accepted, her friends invited her over to celebrate with a bottle of champagne. ‘I was overjoyed,’ she said.

  That was certainly true at the time, but the sense of euphoria did not last for long. As she lay in bed on her very first night under the cottage roof, she felt her face being gently stroked.

  ‘It felt like someone’s breath,’ she recalled, shivering. ‘At first I thought I must be imagining it, but after that first night it became a regular occurrence. It was almost as if somebody had climbed into bed with me. Night after night, I’d just lie there, waiting for it to happen again.

  ‘I use candles a lot,’ she added. ‘I particularly like tea lights, and one morning as I was clearing up in my bedroom before going to work, I dropped several used ones into the wastepaper basket. Of course, it was a wicker basket, so all the soot filtered through the bottom and onto my white carpet. It was so annoying. I tried to clean it up with carpet cleaner, but that simply made it worse with dirty streaks, so I decided to leave it until later.’

  But when Jacqueline returned home that evening, she was astonished. The carpet was pristine white and there was no sign of the stains. ‘I can remember thinking, that’s great,’ she recalled, ‘the carpet cleaner must have worked.’

  Nevertheless, the sleepless nights continued and they soon began to take their toll on her.

  ‘When I went into work I’d apologise to my boss, saying that I wasn’t functioning properly. I’d hardly slept for about two months. I used to leave the bedside light on all night, but that only made it more difficult to sleep. It was probably something to do with the strain I was under, but my back started to play up. I thought I was managing it, but then as I was trying to fall sleep one night, I felt this strange rubbing sensation, as if somebody or something was pressing into the small of my back.’

  Not long after this, Jacqueline was sitting on her bed using her mobile phone to send a text message when her legs were pulled from under her and she felt herself being pushed onto the floor.

  ‘That was too much,’ she complained. ‘I shouted out loud that I didn’t mind whoever it was being there, but they had to leave me alone as I had to work for a living. Otherwise, I’d have to leave!’

  By then, Jacqueline had become a tour guide for Historic Scotland at St Andrews Castle and, aware of her worsening predicament, one of her colleagues produced a newspaper article about Brion Keppie, a Bathgate-based psychic.

  ‘So I telephoned him,’ said Jacqueline. ‘I told him that I thought that there was a presence in my home, and he came to see me.’

  Brion wore a striped business suit and glasses and carried a briefcase, which was not at all what Jacqueline had expected. He nevertheless set about his work.

  To begin with, he said he felt nothing untoward about the atmosphere in the rooms, but, as soon as he entered Jacqueline’s bedroom, the mood changed.

  ‘He’s given me his name,’ Brion told her. ‘He’s called James Macpherson. A long time ago he worked as a porter on the coach and horses which used to travel through the village. He says they used to stop off to see the folk who lived here at the time. He’s only back to visit old friends.’

  Brion concentrated further. ‘Now he’s showing me symbols of travelling trunks and a sailor’s haversack, which suggests that he’s leaving. He’s telling me that he cleaned your carpet for you. He doesn’t want you to leave because he remembers how happy you were that first night when you came here to drink champagne with your friends. He says he’s sorry for making you fall off your bed. He says he was bored.’

  The invisible dialogue continued, with Macpherson telling Brion that he was not a regular caller; that it might be another thirty years before he returned. At this point, Brion turned abruptly to Jacqueline and asked who it was that played bingo?

  Jacqueline was mystified. ‘Bingo? Nobody I know plays bingo!’ she protested.

  ‘But somebody must,’ said Brion. ‘I’m having bingo tokens thrown at me. I can see word counters and an elderly lady. Is it your grandmother?’

  ‘It was then that I remembered,’ Jacqueline told me. ‘When I was a child, my paternal grandmother regularly came to visit me with a cousin of about my own age. She’d bring a bingo game to occupy us. Nobody else could have known about that.’

  ‘It’s because of your back,’ Brion informed her. ‘Your grandmother says she is sorry if she frightened you the other night when she came into your bed. She was only trying to send you warmth. It had nothing to do with Mr Macpherson!’ ‘It was altogether extraordinary,’ confessed Jacqueline. ‘I certainly hadn’t told him that I’d hurt my back.’

  Although the outcome of Brion’s exorcism was that Jacqueline’s mind was eventually put at rest, she did eventually sell the cottage and has since returned to live in Strathkinness. And she still works for Historic Scotland at St Andrews Castle.

  Searching the internet, I have found no fewer than eight clairvoyants listed in Scotland under the umbrella of UK Psychics. They range from tarot readers and astronomers in Kirkwall and Aberdeen to the Christian Spiritualist Church in Bathgate.

  This latter intrigued me, so I telephoned the number given and spoke to the Reverend Mhairi Derby-Pitt, who told me that the Bathgate Christian Spiritualist Church was founded in 1946 by Charlotte Whelan, her grandmother. Charlotte, according to the Reverend Mhairi, was an extraordinary and remarkable woman who, rather spectacularly, was the seventh child of a seventh child of a seventh child.

  ‘I was brought up on Christian Spiritualism,’ explained
the Reverend Mhairi, who, with her father, the Reverend Bernard Brian Derby-Pitt, today oversees a congregation of around 300. ‘What you have always to remember as a pastor is that you have a duty of care,’ she says firmly.

  The Reverend Mhairi and her father are both fully ordained as ministers, which qualifies them to conduct legal marriages. I found this fascinating as, up until then, I had been unaware that virtually anyone can legally be ordained as a minister providing they are in some way affiliated to a church. In America, you can even be ordained online.

  However, the Reverend Mhairi is also fully qualified as a ‘Spiritual, Aura, Colour and Crystal Healer and Trainer’ and is registered with the Greater World and Institute of Spiritualist mediums.

  ‘I’ve been operating as a medium since I was twelve years old,’ she told me. ‘I’ve walked and talked with spirits all of my life.’

  And such powers, it transpires, have even involved a spot of private detective work. Up until shortly before I spoke to her she had been working closely on the Peter Manuel murder case with author Hector MacLeod.1

  Manuel, an American-born serial killer, is known to have murdered seven people in Lanarkshire and southern Scotland between 1956 and his arrest in January 1958. Six months later, he was the second last person to be hanged in HM Prison Barlinnie. It was yet another dark and shocking episode in the history of Scottish crime.

  ‘It’s hard to understand why people do bad things,’ says the Reverend Mhairi. ‘My father and I have been consulted on a number of murder cases. They are always particularly difficult to deal with because there is so much emotion involved with those who have lost loved ones.’

  5

  MULTIPLE OCCUPANCY

  The ghost that got into our house on the night of November 17, 1915, raised such a hullabaloo of misunderstandings that I am sorry I didn’t just let it keep on walking, and go to bed.