Haunted Scotland (15 page)

Overbearing and conceited, Crowley was expelled from the Order of the Golden Dawn in 1900 and, in the decade that
followed, travelled to India, Mexico, and Egypt. This
meant that he was more often abroad than at Boleskine, but the rumours of demonic rites persisted. Villagers would allegedly close themselves into their houses at night and prayers would be said
whenever he was expected to return.

Boleskine House was sold in 1913, shortly after Crowley was appointed head of the English-speaking branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Order of the Templars of the East, also famous for its
unnatural sex rituals. For the duration of the First World War, he based himself in America. On returning to the United Kingdom, however, he was ostracised for having written a series of
anti-British articles.

In 1920, Crowley moved to the Mediterranean island of Sicily, where he set up the Abbey of Thelema, but, after accusations of black magic, he was expelled. Never one to give up, he was elected
World Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis at the age of fifty. Four years later, he published his seminal work
Magick: In Theory and Practice.
When he died in 1947 at the age of seventy-two,
Aleister Crowley had travelled a very long way from Loch Ness. Even so, his name will always be indelibly stamped on the district. When the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page purchased Boleskine
House in the 1970s, its past associations, he claimed, were a major selling point. In an interview with journalist Steve Pender in 1975, Page revealed that the lure of witchcraft was
irresistible.

‘I don’t really want to go on about my personal beliefs or my involvement in magic,’ he explained. ‘I’m not interested in turning anybody on to anything that
I’m turned on to . . . if people want to find things, they find them themselves. I’m a firm believer in that.’

Although Aleister Crowley’s spectre has long since dimmed, it did undergo a modest revival in the 1960s when his face was
featured on the album sleeve of the
Beatles’
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. Possibly because of this, he achieved a certain celebrity status among the hippy community, and when Neil Oram’s
twenty-four-hour long play about a mystic,
The Warp
, featured on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1980, strange goings-on were re-enacted on the banks of Loch Ness.

Occultism, as I observed earlier, is far from being a dormant phenomenon. With the decline of the orthodox churches, paganism is on the rise again throughout America and
western Europe. Although practices and beliefs may be, by definition, diverse, and for the most part not to be taken too seriously, covens and sects are currently more active than they have been
for centuries. Moreover, they are to be found in the most unexpected places.

Jan Spalding was not intentionally drawn towards sorcery, but in her mid-thirties she found herself still a spinster and living with her widowed mother in the main street of a small village in
Stirlingshire. Her father had died, or at least that was the understanding. He had, in fact, eloped with an accountant’s daughter half his age, and Jan and her mother Pru chose not to talk
about it.

And to some extent that was why they had moved to live in Stirlingshire, where they knew nobody and nobody knew them. It was a fresh start, and Jan, with her academic qualifications, was easily
able to secure a teaching post at the local preparatory school.

More importantly, she loved the job and only occasionally yearned for the social distractions of a big city. The village, meanwhile, was pretty, and the terraced cottage which she and her mother
occupied was warm and extremely comfortable.

But Jan was also only too well aware that her life was passing her by. Her looks, she suspected, were fading; wrinkles were
proliferating around her eyes. Despite attempts
to diet, she was steadily putting on weight.

And it was with this in mind that she decided to join a leisure complex that had just opened up in a not too distant location, and it was here that she met up with and befriended Rachel and
Alice. The three women were much of an age and soon became inseparable, to the extent that one evening, after a sweat in the leisure club sauna, Rachel and Alice invited Jan to join their
coven.

At first she thought they must be joking. However, it soon became apparent that they were in deadly earnest.

Oh why not? she decided, and, the following Saturday, the three of them set off on their bicycles and into the Trossachs for what she was told would be an induction ritual. This induction
ritual, much to her mild embarrassment, involved swimming naked in a loch by moonlight, and encircling a large oak tree while the two other women joined hands and chanted incantations. Fortunately
for them, it was in the height of summer and the midges had momentarily retreated.

‘From now on we share our powers,’ announced Rachel and Alice, handing over several books on pagan ritual and a modern witchcraft guide. Jan blushed as she zipped up her anorak. She
nevertheless felt secretly rather proud of herself.

From then on, the excursions took place every month, along with weekly visits to the health club. Pru, Jan’s mother, remained happily at home in front of her television set, and, kindly
soul that she was, never asked where her daughter had been, no doubt assuming that were it of any importance she would be told.

Mother and daughter were content enough, but that was to end abruptly when Norman Lovet arrived in the district. Norman was a widower of sixty who had taken early retirement to write a novel.
For this purpose, he had rented a small former shooting bothy and, despite insisting that he was in search of solitude, his
eye was one day caught by the glimpse of a woman
buying milk from the village shop. On further investigation, he was to learn that she was Miss Jan Spalding, a teacher at the village school. The designation ‘Miss’ sent a shiver of
anticipation up his spine.

To be fair, Norman had been faithful to his late wife for over thirty years, only once dallying with an air hostess on a business trip to Singapore. Prior to his marriage, however, he had been
considered a bit of a catch and notched up an impressive portfolio of conquests before succumbing to the charms and substantial bank balance of his employer’s daughter.

That, of course, was the problem. Throughout his career Norman, his marital duties preoccupying every minute of his spare time, had been kept far too busy to philander. Now that his wife was
gone – taken by breast cancer at the age of fifty – he had all the time in the world to feel sorry for himself, and, despite the creative urges which drove him to spend hours of torment
in front of a word processor, he was bored.

And that was when the trouble began. On the pretext of delivering a package to the wrong address, Norman had one afternoon called upon Mrs Pru Spalding in the hope of encountering her daughter.
Jan was not in at the time, but Pru had made Norman suitably welcome. There followed flowers, and in gratitude Pru invited him to Sunday tea to meet Jan. Having been formally introduced, the
courting commenced in earnest, with Norman entirely oblivious to the fact that Jan was not even remotely interested in him.

It was most unfortunate. He had never previously been spurned by the opposite sex, and Norman’s persistence soon became an embarrassment. As the days passed, it was inevitable that Rachel
and Alice should be drawn into the fiasco.

Sensing their friend’s growing irritation with the constant phone calls and the notes of endearment that were pushed under
her front door almost every other night,
they proposed that something be done about it.

‘Why don’t we cast a spell over him?’ suggested Rachel. ‘I’m sure we can look up some ancient curse to sort him out. There must be something we can do. His sort
have been around for centuries.’

That weekend, once again exploring the Trossachs, the three women unloaded their picnic and, consulting a book of spells, set about the bewitching of Norman Lovet.

‘In the night and in this hour, we call upon the ancient powers. Bring them to we sisters three. A eunuch will he henceforth be.’

None of them took any of this particularly seriously, and when they had finished chanting aloud under the night sky, they all three rolled around on the ground convulsed in laughter.
‘That’ll teach him,’ cried out Alice. ‘That’ll teach him to meddle with the Trossach witches.’

The following day was a Monday, and Jan set off bright and early for school as usual. On her way, she glanced over towards the bothy and experienced just a slight twinge of guilt. There was no
sign of movement, so she relaxed. However, later that morning she received a call from her mother, who sounded distraught.

‘I thought you should know about poor Norman,’ said Pru in a voice charged with emotion.

‘What’s happened, Mum?’ said Jan with a mounting feeling of dread.

‘It’s just too terrible to talk about,’ said Pru. ‘It’s Norman, the poor man. He was crossing Farmer MacEwan’s field yesterday afternoon, you know the one
we’ve all been warned to avoid, and he got trampled by that great brute of a bull. It’s just too dreadful. I’ve seen the district nurse and she says he’ll never be able to
father children!’

17

The massive oil painting had hung in its heavy gilt frame over Great-aunt Alison’s fireplace for as long as Sandra could remember. She had never paid much attention to it
when she was a child, but now that the old lady was dead, Sandra had come to take stock of the gloomy Victorian house in Woodside, on the outskirts of Aberdeen. For such a prominently placed
picture, it appeared strikingly modern amid its period surroundings of flock wallpaper, faded chintz and wilted pot plants. Only its frame kept faith with the early twentieth-century decor.

A sense of guilt gripped Sandra Pottinger as she and her great-aunt’s executor, a gauche young lawyer in a striped suit, explored the print-hung corridors and poked about among the dusty
rooms, several of which seemed not to have seen the light of day for years. A pang of guilt enveloped her. Over the past ten years she had been far too busy with her own life
bringing up her children and making ends meet to maintain contact with the old lady. At least, that was her excuse. Now it was too late. Sandra knew she should have made more of an effort over
Great-aunt Alison. She had been the last of that generation, and as her nearest relative, all of this, the house and its contents, now belonged to Sandra. Knowing this simply enhanced the
realisation that she had hardly known her grandmother’s younger sister.

As she appraised the bulky Victorian wood furniture, the porcelain bric-a-brac, threadbare rugs and heavy curtain drapes, it seemed that all that she and the lawyer could think about was how
much was everything worth. How horrible to think that once you are gone, that is all there is to it; an entire existence, relegated to an auction saleroom to generate cash.

By now, Sandra’s conscience was really playing up. Great-aunt Alison had barely been cremated and here they were, these virtual strangers behaving like predatory vultures, evaluating how
much the house and its treasures would fetch; the treasures of an old lady’s entire lifetime; treasures Sandra had never expected to inherit.

Alison Bradie was in her nineties when she died, and little if any contact had been maintained with her since the death of Sandra’s mother fourteen years earlier. There had been the
generous gift of some silver when Sandra married, a nuisance to keep clean but nonetheless welcome. Being reluctant to travel, Great-aunt Alison had not attended the wedding. Christmas cards had
nevertheless been exchanged annually, and when the children were born, Sandra had sent photographs.

Of course, Sandra had known the house well when she herself was a child, but in all innocence had never asked any of the questions she should have about Great-aunt Alison. All she
knew about her was that she had never married, a stigma for her parents’ generation that you did not talk about; that in her middle age Great-aunt Alison had worked as a
housekeeper for a wealthy bachelor who, when he died, had left her his house with a small private income. Perhaps Sandra was imagining it, but she was sure that there had been some sort of mystery
about Great-aunt Alison’s early life. It had never been mentioned by the family, although Alison and her sister, Sandra’s grandmother, had remained close until the latter’s
death.

When Sandra’s parents moved to live in the south of England, it became too much of an excursion for them to return regularly to Aberdeen, and Sandra had no recollection of Great-aunt
Alison ever visiting them in Surrey. As the years flew past, she had almost forgotten that Alison existed, that is until the solicitor’s letter arrived. Her death had come out of the blue,
but as it transpired, proved a timely blessing.

There were school fees and the mortgage to pay. With her husband Paul being passed over for advancement in the sports promotion agency where he worked, every little helped.

As Sandra continued her inspection of the house, she once more succumbed to a great well of regret. Great-aunt Alison had certainly lived to a good age; she had had a good innings, as people say
when they can think of nothing else.

But that did not make Sandra feel any better. Great-aunt Alison was the last link with her own mother’s past. Despite her inheritance, and the money it brought her, Sandra was only too
aware that this was somebody she felt she had never really known, and would never now have the opportunity to know. How selfish we are when we are young, she murmured under her breath as the
thoughts accumulated.

It appeared that, latterly, Great-aunt Alison had occupied only a bedroom on the first floor, and the stone-flagged kitchen with
its ancient Aga in the basement. The
public rooms were closed up.