Inverary Castle, seat of the Dukes of Argyll

HAUNTED CASTLES, CROWS AND GHOSTS – SCOTLAND AND ITS EERIE PAST


As we approached Tulloch Castle black crows swept in a coordinated mass around the 13th century castle tower shrieking like banshees pursued by the devil. Tulloch Castle’s ghost is a young woman known as the Green Lady. Her place of haunting is Bedchamber 8 and she usually appears when it is occupied by a solitary male.

In the recent past a petrified guest burst into the castle’s public rooms late at night, sweating, trembling and hysterical. He awoke he said, to find the Green lady kneeling on his chest with her hands tightly clasped around his neck. He insisted on checking out of the castle immediately and subsequently sold his story to the News of the World where it appeared on the front page!

Glamis Castle, childhood home of the late Queen Mother and one of the most beautiful castles in Scotland was described to me by a Scot as ‘really weird’. Its phantoms are many and legendary and include Janet Douglas, wife of the 6th Lord Glamis. Running foul of King James V, she was accused of witchcraft. After a lengthy incarceration in a pit in Edinburgh Castle, she was burned alive on Castle Hill. To this day her spirit haunts the chapel at Glamis; the sun shining right through her transparent figure as she kneels praying in one of the chapel pews.

The crypt in Glamis Castle was for me a particularly eerie place. With its 10 foot thick walls, suits of armour, animal trophies and low barrel-vaulted stone ceiling it is straight out of the Middle Ages and an apt setting for a haunting. In a secret chamber within its walls, the Lord of Glamis and the Earl of Crawford, known as Earle Beardie are said to have played cards with the devil. 300 years after the infamous card game the chamber was sealed but the spectre of Earl Beardie continues to appear.

For those skeptics who believe that disembodied heads floating in mid-air, headless horsemen and drummers, phantom pipers and ghosts are merely a figment of the imagination, read those oft quoted words of the bard William Shakespeare,

 "There are more things in Heaven and on Earth than you have ever
  dreamed of in your philosophy”……

From Anne, “World Travel with Anne”