by Aaron Mahnke
In 2001, a British psychologist named Dr. Richard Wiseman wanted to get to the bottom of stories like these. He managed to find and screen over two hundred participants for an unorthodox experiment. The screenings were designed to weed out anyone who might have knowledge of the stories told about Edinburgh Castle and its haunted past. Once Dr. Wiseman and his team had verified all of the volunteers, they set to work.
Wiseman and his assistants proceeded to take small groups of volunteers on tours through various parts of the castle. Admittedly, there were elements of these experiments that weren’t the most ethical. In fact, some volunteers were actually shut up alone inside certain rooms. Dr. Wiseman said it was their chance to make personal observations without anyone around. But no matter how safe it might have been, I can’t see how locking a person in a castle dungeon could be anything other than traumatic.
One woman reported that her time alone inside one of the castle vaults was filled with odd experiences. She reported heavy breathing that seemed to move closer and closer to her the longer she was in the room. She also said she saw flashes of light in the darkness. It goes without saying that she exited the vault completely and utterly terrified.
Others heard voices and caught glimpses of shadowy figures. One entire group of volunteers unanimously claimed to see the ghostly figure of a man slowly move across the end of a tunnel. They said he was dressed in old-fashioned clothing and wore something unusual over his torso.
It was a leather carpenter’s apron.
PRYING EYES
There’s a common idea about castles: that all those thick stone walls and floors make great hiding places for horrible secrets. After all, few castles were as orderly and perfectly structured as most modern homes. Whether it’s a hidden dungeon or the bricked-up body of a victim, the strong walls of a castle can act like a prison, holding in centuries of suffering, tragedy, and death.
If the stories are to be believed, there’s one castle in particular that holds a secret that’s darker than most. Darker, because rather than playing host to some ghostly vision or spiritual inhabitant, this one is said to have been the home of a flesh-and-blood monster. It has been the subject of speculation for nearly two centuries and has intrigued the minds of locals and luminaries alike. And the name of the castle? Glamis.
Glamis Castle was built in the village of the same name on the supposed site of the murder of King Malcolm II in the eleventh century. By the late 1300s, the castle had been granted to the Lyon family. Sir John Lyon, you see, was married to the king’s daughter, which apparently came with perks. And if Monty Python has taught us anything, those perks probably also involved huge…tracts of land.
Today, the castle is featured on the back of the Scottish ten-pound note, and it’s famous for being the setting of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, although the historical Macbeth predates the castle by centuries. But it is also the setting of a legendary tale about a fifteenth-century earl who loved to play cards.
According to the story, when the earl’s houseguests refused to join him for an illicit game on the Sabbath, he erupted in anger. He made a threat about being willing to play with the Devil himself, as long as he got to play cards. And that’s when a stranger showed up at the castle door. This stranger—who turned out to be the Devil, of course—proceeded to play cards with the earl, beat him, and then take his soul. Historians are unsure which fifteenth-century earl was the focus of this story. And of course, there’s no documentable evidence of anyone having their soul taken away in a card game, so take it all with a grain of salt.
But I mentioned dark secrets, didn’t I? Sorry…let’s get back to that. You see, beginning sometime in the 1840s, rumors began to spread about a family secret. The Lyon family, they said, was hiding something horrible. So horrible that only the earl himself knew what it was. But there were whispers. Details that hinted at what the secret might be.
We can probably thank Sir Walter Scott—the famous novelist, poet, and playwright—for making the secret public. In 1830, he published an account of a visit he made to Glamis back in 1790, and in it he made note of a secret room. He knew little else, of course, but he couldn’t help mentioning the words “secret room.” And the public ate it up.
Whatever and wherever this room is, the access to it either was hidden very carefully or had just been removed entirely. Think Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I suppose, just without the giant snake. A room that only a select few ever get to see, or even know about, and the knowledge of which is passed down from one generation to the next.
Now, this isn’t an impossibility. Some of the walls of the castle are up to sixteen feet thick, which makes it easy to see how a small room could be tucked away in there. There are even records of small chambers being built within the walls. One such room is recorded near the Charter Room, located at the base of the main castle tower. In a lot of ways, one of the main reasons for a castle’s construction was privacy and safety, so hidden rooms—even if they weren’t an early trend—were certainly a common occurrence.
As to what lay hidden inside the secret chamber of Glamis, though, no one except the earl himself knew any of the details. But of course, that didn’t stop others from trying to find it, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident.
Back in 1850 the earl and his wife played host to a number of guests for a large celebration. One morning the men went off hunting and left their wives and daughters behind. Bored, the earl’s wife suggested a game: let’s find the secret room.
Hundreds of white rags were brought out, and everyone was tasked with the job of tying one rag in each window they could find. Up and down the castle, these women ran about finding windows and placing rags in them. And then, when they were sure they’d finished the job, they headed outside.
As a group, they walked around the perimeter of the castle, looking at every window, and noting the rags that hung in them. Finally, as the story goes, the women found it: a window on the tower could clearly be seen without a white rag hanging from it. The party all ran back inside to check their work. Surely someone had missed a window. But try as they might, after examining the tower a second time, they couldn’t find the mistake.
The window was in a room they couldn’t reach.
UNFIT FOR THE TITLE
Naturally, people wanted to know what was hidden away in the castle. Sir Walter Scott had made the rumor popular, and stories like that of the white rag mystery only fanned the flames. Plus it didn’t help that the earls—from the eleventh earl all the way down to the fifteenth—were famously elusive about it all.
In 1903, Claude Bowes-Lyon, who was the thirteenth earl, said this about the secret: “If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret, you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.”
Five years later, an article about the secret appeared in a historical journal called Notes and Queries. The author claimed to know more, revealed to him in the 1840s. According to him, the secret room held, and I quote, “a monster, who is the rightful heir to the title and property, but who is so unpresentable that it is necessary to keep him out of sight and out of possession.”
Just what sort of monster are we talking about here? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? A couple of rough descriptions of the monster of Glamis have survived through the years. One, from the nineteenth century, claimed the monster resembled a human toad. It was said to leave the secret room at night and wander the battlements, an area still referred to today as the “Mad Earl’s Walk.”
Another description gives us more detail. In the 1960s, British writer James Wentworth Day was staying at the castle as a guest of the sixteenth earl when he was told the story as it had been passed down to the earl. What he told Wentworth Day is the most detailed description we have on record.
The story confirmed earlier rumors. “A monster was born into the family,” the ea
rl told him. “He was the heir, and a creature to behold. It was impossible to allow this deformed caricature of humanity to be seen—even by their friends.”
The earl went on to describe the deformity that this rumored heir suffered from. “His chest was an enormous barrel,” he told the writer, “and hairy as a doormat. His head ran straight into his shoulders, and his arms and legs were toylike. However warped and twisted his body, though, the child had to be reared to manhood.”
A physically deformed heir to the title, hidden away to save face—if this was really true, it at least made sense as to why each successive earl was entrusted with keeping it all a secret. Their eligibility for the title and castle were at stake, as was—in their minds at least—the honor of their family name. It also makes you question who the real monster of Glamis was: the deformed child, or the father who was so ashamed of him that he locked him away from the world.
So, as you can imagine, anyone who got too close to this secret ended up in some form of trouble. When the twelfth earl found out his wife and her friends had searched the castle for signs of the hidden room, it’s said that he divorced her and sent her away. She never spoke of her experience again, and died many years later in Italy. And she wasn’t the last.
Fifteen years later, in 1865, a workman was searching for something in the castle when he stumbled upon a door he’d never seen before. Maybe he was new to the castle, or maybe he’d just never fully explored it. Whatever the reason, here he was, staring at a mysterious door. So he did what any of us would have done in his place: he pushed it open.
Behind it stretched a long, dark passageway. He summoned up some courage and stepped through, taking a few steps down the corridor. There was a shape at the end of the hall that he wanted to get a closer look at. Before he could figure out what it was, though, the shape moved, and the workman—frightened for his life—bolted back down the passageway and out into the open. And then he reported everything to his boss.
The very next day, the workman was told in very strong language that he should move to Australia, of all places. He was handed paperwork with the details of his emigration, all paid for and arranged by the earl himself. He was never seen again in the castle.
Another story is told of a young doctor who visited the castle for professional reasons. His visit required spending multiple nights, so at the end of the first day he was led to the Blue Room and left to himself. He settled in, unpacked, and was getting ready to turn in for the night when he spotted a portion of the carpet that looked…well…odd. So he lifted it up off the floor and peeked beneath it.
What he found, according to the story, was the wooden square of a trapdoor set into the stone floor. Curious—and clearly a lot braver than I could ever claim to be—the doctor forced the trapdoor open and then lowered himself down through the opening. Below, he found a passageway. After following it for a few paces, it came to an end at a blank cement wall.
The doctor claimed that this wall looked solid, but was in fact still wet, as if the cement hadn’t dried fully before he discovered it. He even claimed to have pressed his finger into the surface and watched it give way. If the cement was there to cover an opening, then he couldn’t help but wonder: what was behind it?
He climbed back up into his room and went to bed with a good many questions on his mind. When he awoke in the morning, though, he found an envelope on the floor near the entrance. Someone had slipped it under his door during the night. So he picked it up and tore it open.
Inside he found two things: payment for his services, and a note announcing that a carriage was ready to take him to the train station. He was required to leave immediately.
A DARK BURDEN
There’s irony in the idea of a haunted castle. These buildings, by nature and design, are meant to be places of safety and refuge. A literal fortified home, if even on a grand scale. They were built to last centuries, and to keep the people inside them safe from any outside threat imaginable.
But instead, many of these stone fortresses have become home to more than just nobility. They’ve collected tragedy, intrigue, oppression, even murder. And as a result, the undeniable echoes of dark history walk their halls to this very day. Now, rather than worrying about outsiders breaking in, there’s a new, more frightening threat.
A threat within the walls.
Surely, though, these stories can’t be true. Yes, it’s widely accepted that Edward IV’s sons were imprisoned and killed, and quite possibly by their very own uncle. The discovery of those skeletons seems to support that legend. But without similar proof, most other stories will never be anything more than speculation and whispers. Evidence is always required to give truth a voice.
All that said, some historians think they have the answer to the Glamis mystery, and they trace it back to the eleventh earl, Thomas Lyon-Bowes. You see, in 1821, his son and daughter-in-law recorded the birth of their first son, also named Thomas. But the records show that little Thomas died the same day as his birth.
The young couple went on to have another son the following year. They named him, like his older brother, Thomas. Now, maybe it was a desire to carry on that family name. Maybe it was a way of honoring their loss. I don’t think we’ll ever know. But from that day on, according to some, there were two boys named Thomas in the castle, not one. One lived in the light, and the other was a captive, hidden away in the shadows.
Sixty years later, on April 1, 1882, a number of British newspapers ran a sensational story. The claim was that the Glamis secret had finally been solved, that a person kept in a secret room had passed away. This person, according to the article, had been old, and the body had been carried out for burial. Sadly, nothing more was added to the description.
It’s interesting to note that all of the stories—the 1850 exploration with white rags, the workman, the doctor, all of it—all took place between 1821 and 1882. Outside those dates, there are simply no stories of the monster of Glamis. That, in itself, is more than compelling.
One last tale. I don’t have a precise date on it, but it was published in the 1880 edition of All the Year Round, so at the very least, we know it took place prior to that. The story goes that a woman known throughout London society as a celebrated artist had once visited the castle for the very first time. She was given a luxurious room to stay in overnight, and found it to be very modern and comfortable for such an ancient place.
The morning after her first night of sleep, she came down for breakfast and joined her hosts at the table. The earl’s wife politely asked how she’d slept.
“Very well, thanks,” she answered. “Up until four o’clock in the morning, that is. Your Scottish carpenters seem to come to work very early. I suppose they put up their scaffolding quickly, though, for they are quiet now.”
The hosts fell completely silent. After a moment, the earl reminded her of the bonds of friendship, and asked her to never speak of that event again. According to him, there were no carpenters working in the castle.
And there hadn’t been for months.
WHEN YOU SEE the body, the first thing that strikes you is just how much detail you can see. The hair standing up on an arm. The dirty fingernails. The pull of the skin over the knuckles. It has a way of making the body seem permanent and real.
And it is real, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that most bodies don’t look this good after death, even when they’re relatively fresh. Which is what makes this particular body all the more amazing. Yes, he was a man from County Laois in Ireland, and yes, there’s no doubt he was dead. It’s just…well, he looks really good for his age.
The Cashel Man, as they call him, is roughly four thousand years old. He’s older than the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen by six centuries, and yet here he is, making eye contact and showing off the pores of his skin. All thanks to the preserving power of an Irish peat bog.
These “bo
g bodies,” as they’re called, tend to be easy books to read, telling a clear story to archaeologists. Age, social status, even their occupation. But the most important detail is how they died, and nearly all Irish bog bodies share one common cause of death: human sacrifice.
Some were run through with a sword. Others were clubbed over the head. Some were even strangled with a length of rope. All of it, though, was to send a message to the gods. Life was precious, so to willingly give up one of their own was a powerful way of making a point. It was a primitive email to their deities, typed in all caps, bold, and underlined.
Ireland is a beautiful country with a dark past. Long before the Troubles of the last century—before the country was divided, even before British rule itself—Ireland was already a land full of dark tales and frightening lore.
And like the Cashel Man, many of those stories have refused to stay buried.
HILLS AND HALLS
Ireland is a country that lives up to its reputation. The Emerald Isle is just as overwhelmingly green and lush as you might expect. In the countryside, rolling hills seem to go on for as far as the eye can see. In places like Dublin, ancient buildings play host to laughter and song.
But there’s a deep history that swirls around those green hills and dark halls, like a cold wind. And while many of them have drifted beyond the boundaries of Ireland to influence global folklore, those are just a few samples from a much deeper—and much darker—well.
Of course, we all know of the banshee, the female spirit that is said to enter our world through one of the many ancient stone mounds, or sîdhe, that dot the Irish landscape. They come to announce impending death, and the legends say that if you can hear her cries and wailing, you or someone you love is not long for this world.
