Haunted Scotland (14 page)

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.

The story goes that in 1936, Christopher’s great-grandmother Olive Guthrie was seated in her drawing room when her housekeeper rushed in to say that she had just seen Mrs Mary Crawshay,
Olive’s sister, walking down the drive wearing her characteristic long green cape.

‘If you’d told me that Mrs Crawshay was coming to stay, I’d have prepared her room for her and put a hot-water bottle in her bed!’ she scolded her mistress crossly.

Olive Guthrie stared at the housekeeper in open amazement. At that precise moment she had just received a telegram informing her that her sister had died.

Mary Crawshay has since settled in happily at Torosay, and is regularly encountered by bemused visitors with no previous knowledge of her history. So far as anyone needs to be concerned, she is,
after all, just one of the family.

It may have something to do with islands, but an equally benign apparition is to be found on Orkney at Skaill House on the Breckness Estate at Sandwick. Rising stark and white
against the surrounding flat landscape, this classic Orcadian dwelling house was built for a bishop, but after he was ousted in the
Reformation, successive lairds, twelve of
them to date, have individually enhanced the property and made it what it is today.

Open to the public between March and September, Skaill House has recently been extensively renovated, and with two self-catering apartments for rent, one upstairs in the house and the other on
the ground floor, you might imagine that its owner would want to keep its supernatural residents to himself, but not at all.

If anything, they have become something of an attraction. When guests are woken during the middle of the night by somebody sitting on the corner of their bed, they know that they have nothing to
be scared of. It is only Ubby.

In front of Skaill House is Loch Skaill in the middle of which, according to local sources, a reclusive man called Ubby created a man-made island.

Day after day, he rowed his small boat loaded with rocks and stone into the middle of the loch and tipped his cargo overboard until an islet was formed. When it was sufficiently large for him to
inhabit, he built a shelter on it and lived there until he died.

Nobody knows exactly when he died, but when the wind whips up and the loch water gets choppy, he was known to come ashore and take refuge in the big house. In recent generations, nobody has ever
actually seen his ghost, but his presence in and around the house is widely welcomed.

‘Ubby often comes to visit us,’ confirms Mary Connolly, who manages Skaill House for the Macrae family. ‘He certainly doesn’t mean any harm. He just likes us to know that
he’s here.’

Castles need to have their guardians. There are those that are embedded in the bricks and mortar. Some only reveal themselves when their habitat is threatened, such as in that hilarious film of
1935,
The Ghost Goes West
, in which the resident ghost runs
amok when an American millionaire buys his ancestral home and transports it brick by brick across the
Atlantic.

The author Nigel Tranter, a great champion of castle restoration, once told me how he had been taken to inspect Inchdrewer Castle in Banffshire. As he was being shown through the door, a
gigantic white dog rushed past him from inside the building. Since the castle had been closed for several weeks it was assumed that the animal must have been locked in by accident. Moreover, nobody
knew who it belonged to and when a search was made, it was nowhere to be found. Tranter then went on to discover that Inchdrewer Castle was believed to be haunted by the ghost of a lady in a white
dress, a member of the Ogilvie family who had once owned the castle. In moments of panic, it seems, she was by some existential power able to transform herself into a large white dog.

There are happy and unhappy hauntings. The less well-known stories, such as that of Mary Crawshay at Torosay, are the outcome of contentment in life and the return of a spirit
to where it wants to be. Others, unfortunately, relate to violent incidents, grievances and misfortune. I am not sure whether any of this applies to the unfortunate Helen Gunn of Braemore, but she
certainly had every reason to be angry.

It was a haute couture clothes shoot for the newspaper
Scotland on Sunday
that took the fashion designer Chris Clyne to Ackergill Castle, near Wick, in 1989. She was accompanied by two
models and the photographer Rob Wilson, and they were the guests of the castle’s owners, John and Arlette Bannister.

The setting was superb. Beyond and below the window of the room she was given, Chris could see the North Sea, swelling and restless in Sinclair’s Bay, where a P&O ferry was sheltering
within canon range. The atmosphere and elegance of the
fifteenth-century fortress provided a perfect backdrop for both Chris’s casual country dresses and her equally
feminine evening gowns. She was delighted, and John and Arlette could not have been more accommodating.

They had made their joint fortune through packaging and had been on the point of buying a building in London when a chance visit to Sutherland brought them to Ackergill. It was love at first
sight and within two years they had transformed this crumbling fortress into an immensely successful residential conference venture.

Such places were built to adapt with the times. Over the centuries, Ackergill Tower has constantly had to withstand the conflicts of the eastern Highland clans, and for a time was even
garrisoned by Oliver Cromwell. And more than 500 years ago, Helen Gunn of Braemore was imprisoned within its walls by Dugald Keith, her ardent admirer.

A marriage had been arranged between Helen and another suitor, but on the eve of the wedding ceremony, she had been snatched away by Dugald Keith, who removed her to Ackergill. What took place
between them within its walls we shall never know, but being determined not to succumb to his advances, Helen chose instead to fling herself from the battlements.

A commemoration stone on the shoreline below marks the spot where she died, but dressed in green she continues to walk the turrets of Ackergill at night, as Chris Clyne was to observe when she
looked out of her bedroom window after dinner.

‘At first I mistook her for one of my models,’ said Chris. ‘She was of middle height and slim, and her black hair was loose and hanging across her shoulders. She was standing
on her own and gazing into the distance. I was beginning to wonder what on earth she was doing out there at that time of night when she stepped forward and disappeared.

‘I didn’t know what to think. I leaned out of the window to try and make out where she had gone, but there was no trace of her. What I do vividly remember is
that she was wearing this wonderful rich green dress and I was so taken by the colour that I matched it up and used it in my summer collection.’

16

Call them what you will, satanists, necromancers, magicians, princes of darkness, warlocks or witches, they abound in the annals of Scotland’s antiquity. Over the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, over 4,000 souls were accused of all kinds of abominations and put to death for their alleged wicked deeds. A small plaque and serpent fountain on the
esplanade of Edinburgh Castle marks where over 300 alone were burned.

In 1736, however, the law changed and under the watchful censorship of the Presbyterian Kirk an accused could only be imprisoned for ‘pretended witchcraft’. As one might expect, this
ruling was cruelly exploited, and, through lack of education and pure naivety, luckless victims were lured into the trap.

If you disliked your neighbour, or coveted their possessions, the simplest recourse was to out them as a witch. Whether anyone believed you or not, it hardly mattered.
Everybody loves to hate a bogeyman. The stigma stuck.

As recently as 1944, Helen Duncan, a Perthshire-born woman, was imprisoned under the 1736 Witchcraft Act for revealing in a séance that a ship had been sunk by the German Navy. Worse
still, eleven years after her release she was re-imprisoned for conducting yet another séance.

In this day and age it seems absurd, so much so that a petition was recently presented to the Scottish Parliament demanding she be granted a full pardon which, needless to say, is unlikely to
bring much comfort to Helen, since she died over fifty years ago. Perhaps her spirit will feel vindicated, but I do not believe you can make amends for the wrongs of the past by gratifying the
current fancies of the living. Yet, having said that, I do believe that Helen Duncan deserves her pardon.

Both black and white witches continue to practise their arts as furtively as they were obliged to in the past, many of them for reasons they are loath to reveal. Whether any of us are aware of
it or not, the practice of witchcraft and demonology is not only ubiquitous, but thriving, to some extent encouraged by the phenomenal success of JK Rowling’s
Harry Potter
books.

I have a friend, for example, who annually employs a white witch to sweep her home of bad karma. ‘It’s a precaution,’ she says. ‘Infestation isn’t nearly as
threatening as it used to be, but it nevertheless puts my mind at rest.’

In her case it seems to work, but I’m not convinced that it is entirely successful. Necromancy has a vindictive way of clinging to its earthly habitat.

Motorists driving along the B862, their eyes fixated on Loch Ness,
barely notice the low-lying one-storey bungalow that crouches on a rise above
them.

Yet less than 100 years ago this unprepossessing dwelling with its two surrounding acres of land became notorious as the power-base of the occultist, magician, mountaineer, poet and drug addict
Aleister Crowley. During his occupancy, it is said that Boleskine House was surrounded by evil.

So who was this sinister and controversial figure? And why did his presence in this isolated spot make such an impact far beyond the eastern shore of Loch Ness?

Aleister Crowley was born into a wealthy Methodist family in England in 1875, and by all accounts enjoyed an indulgent, reckless childhood, even claiming to have lost his virginity at the age of
fourteen. At Cambridge, according to his memoirs, he luxuriated in a voracious sex life with both men and women, and, at one stage, even joined the Plymouth Brethren, although how he reconciled
them with his libidinous behaviour is anyone’s guess.

His epiphany, however, arrived at the age of twenty-three. Asleep in a hotel in Stockholm, he awoke to a sensation of ghostly terror which simultaneously turned into the purest and holiest of
spiritual ecstasy. This somehow persuaded him to enrol with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a movement run by the occultist Samuel Liddell Macgregor Mathers, who believed that he was in
touch with a group of superhumans known as the Secret Chiefs.

As a community, the Golden Dawn embraced the entire gamut of spiritual knowledge, amalgamating astrology, divination, tarot, numerology and ritual magic, and in addition claimed a spiritual
provenance with the Rosicrucian Brotherhood and Kabbalah. Initiated into the order as Brother Perdurabo, Crowley was told by his appointed ‘guardian angel’ to build an oratory. With his
inheritance, he bought Boleskine House, a small
eighteenth-century farm building in Inverness-shire. Crowley was then only twenty-four years of age, floppy-haired, strikingly
handsome and infinitely more charismatic than the bloated, manic figure that he would later become.

Writing in
The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
, a book published in 1922, he noted:

Boleskine’s owner was determined that his home should become a focal point for magical energies, and although we will never know for certain what took place there, the
evidence suggests that Gnostic masses were practised, the model for the orgies so vividly described in Dan Brown’s best-selling mystery novel
The Da Vinci Code
. Such goings-on, coupled
with the pack of bloodhounds Crowley kept in the kennels, inevitably gave rise to all manner of speculation.

It comes as no surprise therefore to learn that Crowley’s coachman rapidly turned to drink, and that, almost immediately after her appointment, his housekeeper packed her bags and fled.
When the local butcher called to collect an order and unwittingly interrupted Crowley during a ritual, the latter is said to have scribbled the names of the demons Elerion and Mahakiel on his
order. Later that day, while cutting up the meat in his back shop, the unfortunate man somehow managed to slice into one of his arteries. He died on the spot.