Haunted Scotland Page 5

  Nannie Campbell was unable to explain it, except that perhaps she had been sensitive enough to ‘tune in’ to a service from bygone days. ‘She was very definite that it was a real experience,’ said Alison.

  Whatever touches us, whatever appears to us, does so because whatever it is, or whatever it was, was once physically there. Think of it in terms of a hologram; everyday incidents caught in time and in general not in the least way threatening. Instead, we should count ourselves lucky to be chosen. And especially if there is more than one of you involved. Despite the popularity of ghost tours, the odds of manifestations being experienced at the same time by more than one person are, I am assured, rare.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and the German cabaret producer Lutz Deisinger and I were returning to Edinburgh by car, having had lunch with a friend in the small village of Dull, west of and above Aberfeldy. It was the first time Lutz had been to central Scotland and, as we were navigating the twisty road towards Weem, he caught sight of the bulk of Castle Menzies rising against its backdrop of wooded hills.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Castle Menzies,’ I replied. ‘It belonged to a Highland clan for 400 years. Bonnie Prince Charlie stayed there for two nights on his way north to fight at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.’

  By this stage we had pulled up in front of the entrance driveway and could see that it was open to the public. ‘Let’s have a look,’ he suggested.

  The car park was completely empty and when we arrived in the front hall, the lady seated at a small kiosk table covered with souvenirs looked flustered. ‘We’re closing in twenty minutes,’ she told us, glancing at her watch. ‘Opening hours are between two and five o’clock, but you can have a quick look around if you wish.’

  Despite her distracted welcome, she seemed pleased to see us. ‘It’s been very quiet today,’ she confided.

  The interiors of Castle Menzies could never be described as opulent, but the rugged thickness of the walls is impressive, and there is a dusty, lived in long ago atmosphere about the rooms. Restored and managed by the Clan Menzies Society, it survives as a typical example of a Highland stronghold that has seen better times.

  After inspecting the old kitchen, we made a quick tour of the upper rooms. In one of them was a four-poster bed covered with a beautiful antique blanket. On the first floor we found a long drawing room hung with portraits of various Menzies chiefs. As we were inspecting the paintings, two women and a small child joined us. As they passed, one of the women turned and smiled, but said nothing. The child ran ahead excitedly. All three of them appeared to be relaxed and happy.

  Time rushed past and since it was almost five o’clock, Lutz and I descended the stairway to the front hall, where the lady behind the table was preoccupied with tidying up. After selling us a couple of postcards, she said, ‘That’s good, I can close up now.’

  ‘Don’t forget the people upstairs,’ said Lutz.

  ‘What people upstairs?’ She seemed surprised.

  I explained that we had passed two women and a child in the drawing room, and she looked worried. ‘But there’s been nobody else here today,’ she protested.

  ‘Yes there are,’ I said. ‘They were on the floor above when we last saw them.’

  Lutz nodded in confirmation, and she left the desk to go upstairs and see for herself. We could hear her footsteps clattering around on the floorboards above, and shortly afterwards she reappeared. ‘There’s definitely nobody else here,’ she announced crossly, adding, ‘You had me worried for a moment.’

  Lutz and I looked at each other in amazement. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s not our problem.’

  Outside, our car was the only vehicle in the car park. It had started to drizzle, so we headed towards the A9 at speed.

  7

  THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS

  For many lang year I hae heard frae my grannie

  Of brownies an’ bogles by yon castle wa’,

  Of auld withered hags that were never thought cannie,

  An’ fairies that danced till they heard the cock craw.

  Richard Gall, ‘The Hazlewood Witch’ (c. 1800)

  It is now over twenty years since the writer and sportsman Maxwell Macleod purchased a seventeenth-century mill conversion on the banks of the River Almond in Midlothian. At the time he was employed as a freelance journalist, writing articles for a string of newspapers, and had become perfectly accustomed to working late into the night. ‘I was concentrating on a news story,’ he recalled. ‘I had drunk no alcohol, and the only “flaky” thing going on was that I was nearing a deadline and working at full pitch, so therefore slightly jumpy. I’d also been drinking copious cups of coffee and needed to answer the call of nature.’

  Answering the call required Maxwell to go upstairs to a bathroom where, as he was about to step through the door, he found a strange woman standing beside the radiator, no more than a pace away from him. ‘She was at right-angles to me and wearing a grey dress of a cheap kind, with a grey lace apron and white shawl,’ he said. ‘The shawl seemed to be integrated into her bonnet, which she was holding in place with her left hand. Her right hand was at her side.

  ‘She had a long nose,’ he added. ‘I couldn’t see her eyes, but I got the impression she was agitated by my company. This was no misty might-have-been hallucination. She was standing under a bare light bulb as clear as day.

  ‘Height? No more than five foot one, and she seemed to be standing on something a little below floor level. There was a certain shakiness about her. Her age? She was perhaps in her early sixties, not much older.’

  Unperturbed, Maxwell stood his ground and called out softly to his resident housekeeper, who was in her room downstairs. ‘Anna, come here now!’

  There was no response from below, so he shouted out more loudly, ‘Anna, come here NOW!’

  Anna shouted back that she had gone to bed, but Maxwell persisted. ‘ANNA!’ At this point, the apparition vanished into thin air.

  ‘As you know, I’m not the sort of person who sees ghosts,’ asserted Maxwell indignantly. ‘I was working full time as a newspaper reporter at the time. I knew about writing what I saw, no more, no less. I don’t make things up.’

  But as anyone in journalism will tell you, professional newspaper reporters always check out their stories before going into print. On further investigation, therefore, Maxwell discovered that he was far from being alone in having encountered the lady in the cap and apron. It soon emerged that she was something of a local celebrity.

  ‘Long before the mill was transformed into a dwelling house, it incorporated a shop,’ he explained. ‘The lady I’d seen was the shopkeeper. Dozens of people around here have run into her.’

  That may well be true, but Maxwell admits he has not had the privilege of seeing her since that first encounter. Perhaps he gave her too much of a shock.

  Hauntings, whether we believe in them or not, are rarely life-threatening and it never fails to puzzle me when people speak of being terrified by a ghost. Why should they be? With the exception of poltergeists and perhaps a handful of comic-strip demons, lost souls are rarely out to get us. We have nothing to be afraid of unless our conscience tells us otherwise.

  Nor should we expect the spirits of the past to perform to order. It exasperates me when I hear of friends who have deliberately set out on a ghost hunt and been disappointed when nothing occurred. It just does not work like that.

  Admittedly, there are places and situations where the likelihood of the past overlapping with the present is more probable – period homes filled with the passing of generations; settings of cruelty, violence and despair. The love and the hate generated within such walls can be overwhelming. But you cannot expect to buy tickets. At least not for the unexpected.

  The Citizens Theatre in the Gorbals of Glasgow is a location resonating in end-of-an-era charm, and you can actually feel it: the anxiety behind stage; the excitement of the curtain rising; the applause of an opening night, and the
murmur of the audience as it disperses when the curtain falls. But this is show business and what would you expect otherwise?

  Dating from 1878 but renamed the Citizens Theatre with an egalitarian flourish in 1945, the theatre’s commitment to low-priced tickets has made it one of the most innovative stages in Europe. As a regular supporter during the 1980s, I marvelled at the intimate arena with its sloped seating levels, thinking it hard to find anywhere more compelling for the ghosts of the stage to linger. But then again, it does not work like that.

  Working first with Philip Prowse, then the equally brilliant Robert David MacDonald, Giles Havergal was director of the Citizens Theatre from 1969 until 2003, and is adamant that he never encountered anything of a supernatural nature over that period. ‘I always found the interiors far too benign and welcoming to be haunted,’ he says, which coming from such a perspicacious individual was not what I had expected to hear.

  However, it does confirm that not everybody is susceptible to the twilight world. Irrespective of creativity, there are those who are infinitely more receptive to shadows than others and in theatrical circles, the Citizens is famous for its rarely glimpsed occupants.

  A typical anecdote, for example, concerned a long-serving member of staff who, finding herself trapped in the Upper Circle during a power cut, was led to safety below by a silent figure wearing a monk’s habit. At first she had assumed he was a member of the cast, but afterwards found that no such character existed in the play being performed that night.

  Audiences seated in the Dress Circle during the 1970s were often intrigued by the costumed ‘actor’ who sat boldly on the balcony and glared at them while ignoring what was taking place on stage. More recent members of staff have commented on the lady in the Victorian gown who glides elegantly from the Dress Circle Bar towards the Circle Studio dressing rooms. A security guard on his late-night rounds ‘distinctly felt the swish of her dress as she overtook him in the Props and Costume Department’.

  Far be it for me to imply that such sightings are mere flights of fancy, although you might expect there to be mind games under circumstances where emotions have run high through the passage of time. For example, in religious seminaries and retreats where the devout congregate for seclusion and prayer.

  One such retreat is the Cistercian Abbey of Nunraw in East Lothian. Founded as a nunnery, it remained in private ownership for the best part of four centuries before being reclaimed by the Cistercian brotherhood from Ireland in 1945. Since then the old red-stone visitor centre and the spacious, airy cloisters built by the monks themselves, have provided a haven of peace and tranquillity for anyone in search of spiritual solitude.

  Nobody asks questions and there is always a bed for the night on the basis that visitors make a contribution in proportion to what they can afford. In addition, the monks are kindly and non-judgemental, and always at hand to listen. It was therefore to Nunraw that Elizabeth Davies escaped when her marriage ran into trouble, and she has been a devotee of the monastery ever since. However, to this day she can vividly recall the first night she stayed over in the guest dormitory.

  ‘It was mid-winter, and we were three ladies, myself and Ruth and Jane, and one man, whose name I can’t remember,’ she explained. ‘For some time we all sat with Father Benedict drinking coffee in front of the fire before retiring to our rooms, the man to the men’s dormitory, and Ruth, myself and Jane to ours.

  ‘There were three of us occupying the bedroom, and we all woke up simultaneously,’ she continued. ‘My bed was beside the door, and although I was still half asleep, I could hear Jane’s voice saying anxiously, “There’s somebody in the room. He’s beside you.”’

  Elizabeth had looked up to find a luminous figure wearing what appeared to be an old duffel coat looming over her. What was even more alarming was that she could clearly see the bedroom door and door knob glowing on the far side of him, as if he were transparent.

  ‘I began to say my prayers,’ she said with a shudder as the memory returned to her. ‘But I kept one eye open, and as I recited the words out loud, the vision faded back through the open door and I could see a shadow walking up the stairs towards the men’s room. We all looked at each other in amazement. We’d all of us seen the same thing, so nobody could have accused me of making it up.’

  Detractors sometimes dismiss such phenomena as the natural aberration of our sensory powers, but is this a good enough reason to do so? Aristotle famously observed that human beings share five common senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. We also know that beyond these lie instincts such as self-awareness, which create all kinds of unanswered questions. Why, for example, does the hair on the back of a neck involuntarily tingle in response to a poignant tune or an emotional lift? How is it possible for amputees to feel phantom pain in limbs which are no longer there?

  Science has a long way to go before it arrives at an honest and uncompromising understanding of the supernatural. And in the meantime we can only rationalise what we can.

  Scholars have argued the causes of good and evil since time immemorial. There are loads of logical explanations, but nothing is ever that simple. Wickedness leaves its scars not only on its victims but on its perpetrators. When bad things happen, repercussions follow.

  On a lonely stretch of the Dumbarton Road in Dunbartonshire an encounter with the Black Lady of Dalquhurn brings immediate death to anyone unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, you might well ask how anyone knows about this if no one has lived to tell the tale?

  Well, it seems a John Neil from Renton did live to tell the tale, and spilled the beans in his last breath. However, the mystery becomes even more obscure when it emerges that the Black Lady of Dalquhurn is, in all probability, not a lady at all, but a man.

  Up until 1989, the so-called ‘Tomb of the Black Lady’ sat just inside a gateway to the railway siding of the former Dalquhurn Bleach Works, fifty yards from the River Leven. How or when it came to be identified with the Black Lady is unknown, but clues to the ownership can be taken from the tombstone inscription which was recorded in the Country Reporter of 10 December 1969:

  HIC SITUS EST

  GEORGIUS SCOTT

  AUDENTO FILIUS

  MERCATORI

  NUPER GLASGUENSIS

  ANNOS QUINDECIM

  IN INDIA COMMEMORATI

  STATIM POST REDIITI

  IN BRITTANNIUM

  LONDON OBIIT:

  SEXTO DIES NOVEMBRI

  ANN: MDCCLXVII

  AETATIS SUA XXXVII

  RELIQUIAS EIUS ILLINC

  (FR)ATRIBUS CAROLO ET

  GULIELMI

  (LATA). HIC CONDI VOLLUIT.

  (Note: letters in brackets were found to be illegible.)

  Translated, this reads: ‘Here is buried George Scott, son of a gallant merchant, late of Glasgow. He lived for fifteen years in India, and died immediately on his return to London, Great Britain, on 6 November 1787. His age was 37 years. His remains brought by his brothers Charles and William from latter place (London?), he wished to be preserved here.’

  Local historian Graham Hopner has meticulously researched the subject and has reached the conclusion that George Scott was one of three brothers – George, William and Charles – all of them born at Dalquhurn Cottage. Their parents were Lawrence and Margaret Scott, and Charles, having accumulated a small fortune from the bleachworks, purchased Dalquhurn House from the Telfer Smollett family in either 1774 or 1775.

  In 1969, an article featured in the Country Reporter led four anglers on the River Leven to claim that at the end of a night’s fishing they had been touched by a weird and ethereal white form which afterwards had vanished in the direction of Dalquhurn. Soon afterwards, another correspondent wrote in to say that his wife had seen a mystical figure resembling a woman, standing upriver from George Scott’s tomb. Other reports soon followed, all involving a woman in black.

  The legend of the Black Lady has been circulating around the Rent
on district for well over 200 years. But who was she, this Black Lady? And what connection did she have to the final resting place of George Scott?

  One possibility is that the Dalquhurn tomb, which measures sixteen feet square, might contain more than one occupant. There is the suggestion that Scott might have returned from India with a companion, a lady friend or even an ayah with whom he had formed a relationship.

  Such speculation, however, was discounted when it was confirmed that only one body was interred in the Scott mausoleum. So was George Scott perchance a transvestite? Or was it simply that he wore his hair long, in the fashion of the eighteenth century?

  In 1991, a Balloch businessman, having purchased the site of the Dalquhurn Bleach Works for redevelopment, applied for permission to remove the tomb. Nobody can confirm for certain what then took place, but following a prolonged correspondence with the local authority, it seems that George’s grave was desecrated and his skeleton deposited a few miles away, in the Alexandria Cemetery.

  When word of this got out there was outrage among the local community, especially when some Renton schoolchildren were found playing with human bones. By this stage, an impasse had been reached between the businessman and the council, and what made matters worse was a ruling that since the tomb was on private, not public, land, there were no legal requirements for it to be maintained irrespective of the last wishes of its occupant.

  Since then, the site of the tomb of the Black Lady has remained untouched, which is not so surprising when you consider that generations of Renton weans have been told that if they do not behave, the Black Lady of Dalquhurn will get them. Meanwhile, the grisly relics of George Scott are being stored in Alexandria. Is it any wonder that the Black Lady of Dalquhurn, whoever she or he might be, walks the Dumbarton Road at night looking for the despoilers of his or her last resting place?