James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (1933)
The concept of time racing behind and ahead of us is far from being a twenty-first-century anomaly. From the puzzles of Leonardo Da Vinci to the notional machinations of novelist HG Wells and the recent television series FlashForward, based on Robert J Sawyer’s novel, mankind has eagerly grasped at the prospect of revisiting the past and controlling the future. Yet when the past goes so far as to stand up boldly in front of us, our basic instinct is to dismiss what we see as a trick of the mind.
Given that astronomers are capable of analysing the past by peering into the outer layers of the universe light years away, why should it be so very peculiar for the rest of us to catch glimpses of people and events from another age when time occasionally turns in on itself? Perhaps the fundamental problem is that those other ages are already generously documented in stone and print, or caught in sound or on film, making it hard for us to take holograms seriously.
So we make light of our fantasies, attributing them to a hyperactive mindset and this, in turn, encourages our innermost terrors to surface before we can think them through.
In his first term at Heriot Watt University, Adrian Shaw, then aged twenty, found himself sharing accommodation with Fin Armstrong, a fellow student from Northern Ireland. The room allocated to them was on the first floor of a Victorian tenement in Johnston Terrace, which in turn faces the Tolbooth St John’s Highland Church, today the headquarters of the Edinburgh International Festival Society.
‘Our flat was above an office belonging to Edinburgh Council,’ recalled Adrian. ‘The building backed onto the recently opened Witchery Restaurant, and the windows to the rear looked over the roofs of the West Bow.’
Although both lads were from Northern Ireland, Adrian had not known Fin previously but described him as a very typical Ulster Protestant from County Armagh. ‘His family were devout church-goers and very rigid in their commitment to their faith.’
To begin with, the two students were wholly preoccupied with settling into academic life, attending lectures, hanging out in bars and making new friends, but it soon became apparent to Adrian that Fin had a darker side.
‘With that dour Irish accent, he would sometimes talk about seeing dead people in the street,’ said Adrian. ‘It all became a bit creepy.’
They were sharing a room with two single beds, and, shortly after they moved in, they started to hear strange noises in the night. ‘It was as if somebody had walked into our room and we could hear them sitting down heavily. But there was nobody there.’
This went on for weeks. Then one night Fin announced that he thought he could see something. When Adrian asked him what it looked like, he said that whatever it was appeared to be very tall, but he could only make out the outline. It was one-dimensional.
Adrian was beginning to find all of this a trifle unnerving when events reached a climax.
‘As usual, I was half-asleep when the door to the room opened and I thought I heard something or somebody enter,’ he said. ‘I sat up in bed and listened hard. Whoever, or whatever, it was, was walking around the room in a circle. Then I sensed a heavy weight sitting down on the end of my mattress.
And this time I could hear heavy breathing and smell its breath, sickly and putrid. The next moment I heard Fin calling out to me urgently from across the room telling me I really needed to get out of my bed.
‘When I turned on the light I could see Fin sitting up in his bed and looking petrified,’ recalled Adrian. ‘Needless to say, I was out from under my blankets in a flash, and when I asked him what he had seen, he said that whatever it was had had the body of a man, but the head of a dog. If it hadn’t been so real, I’d have laughed out loud.’ The very next day, he and Fin began looking for somewhere else to live.
‘No, we definitely weren’t on drugs,’ insisted Adrian firmly. ‘Neither of us was into that.’
For a while they wondered if it might have had something to do with being so close to Castle Hill, where all those witches were burned at the stake in the sixteenth century. They also went to the library to try and identify what Fin thought he had seen, but the closest thing they could find was a cynocephalus, a drawing of Saint Christopher with the head of an Egyptian dog.
‘I know it sounds ridiculous, but when you’ve been through something like that you become desperate for answers,’ said Adrian.
‘Cynocophali are associated with pagan religions, but why one should have been lurking in our Edinburgh flat is anyone’s guess. Something horrible must have happened there some time in the past.’
Johnston Terrace, coiling up the southern slope of the Castle Rock, with the Grassmarket below, culminates in a row of tenements where Castle Hill meets the Royal Mile. On the street front is an eclectic selection of shops, but in the dwelling spaces above are lodgings through which generations of tenants have passed.
Knowing Adrian not to be prone to flights of fantasy, I was intrigued and decided to investigate the matter further. At first it seemed an impossible task, but, undaunted, I spent a couple of days scrolling through rolls of microfilm in the records department of the Central Library and, much to my amazement, finally came up with a confidential cases record which somehow made everything fall into place.
It was a sad little story and the outcome was unsatisfactory in that, in an age lacking in forensic knowledge, nobody was able to explain exactly what had occurred.
According to the document, it seems the Royal Museum of Scotland had only recently taken delivery of a set canopic jars. These impressive clay pots each feature an animal head and are associated with the Four Sons of Horus, traditionally the guardians of the internal organs of the deceased.
As it transpired, a young Egyptologist had been officially assigned to look after the collection and, in an age when security was vastly more lax than it is now, must have decided to take one of these jars, a particularly fine specimen featuring a jackal’s head, back to his lodgings in nearby Johnston Terrace.
What next occurred we shall never know. Suffice it to say that when the young man’s absence was noticed a few days later, his lifeless, decaying corpse was found in his lodgings, spreadeagled over a chair. His hair had turned white and his eyes were bulging. Clutched tightly to his chest was the canopic jar with its lid removed.
His landlord, who made the discovery, promptly suffered a nervous breakdown. After a full police investigation, the postmortem verdict attributed the young man’s death to a heart attack. The jar featuring the jackal’s head was discreetly returned to the museum, but the contents, whatever they might have been, had vanished.
A less terrifying, but more poignant story is told by the artist and cabaret impresario Andrew Brown who, when he purchased an apartment in Edinburgh’s New Town, knew that the building had a substantial history. Adjoining the Royal Scots Club in Abercromby Place, the spacious first-floor rooms once formed part of the Royal Caledonian Club. Renovated and luxuriously restored, the property had for many years been occupied by Edinburgh’s elite, but joining forces with the recently formed Royal Scots Club, shortly after the end of the First World War, served as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers.
Now, Andrew has survived a lifelong habit of entertaining friends into the small hours of the morning. His parties are always lively and eclectic and, after one such marathon, having finally dispersed his guests around 5 a.m., he awoke to find a bandaged male figure squatting on the floor beside his four-poster bed.
‘I can’t take this any more,’ groaned the apparition and, rising unsteadily to his feet, staggered unsteadily over to an open window and threw himself out of it.
Although still barely awake, Andrew sprang from his bed and raced over to the by then closed window to see what had happened. Peering out, he found everything in the garden below peaceful and undisturbed. ‘There was no sign of a bandaged corpse anywhere to be seen,’ he said in astonishment. ‘When I explained what had happened to one of the staff at the Royal Scots Club, he tol
d me that just such an incident had occurred back in 1918. The poor man was suffering from shell shock and had killed himself.’
But hauntings are not always associated with tragedies. Old rooms retain just as many happy memories as sad. Contented lives can have an equally powerful impact on their surroundings, and the majority of souls caught up in time-slips have led ordinary, unexceptional lives.
It was in 1970 that Christine Ross, who had moved to Edinburgh to work in graphic design, purchased a tenement flat in Comely Bank. ‘It was completely empty when I moved in, but as soon as I walked through the front door I knew that it had been well cared for,’ she recalled.
‘The interiors were just as they must always have been, with the original cornice work and lovely old varnished comb work doors with brass handles. When I asked the lawyers, I discovered that it had previously belonged to a Mrs Duthie, who had lived there for all of her married life and had stayed on after her husband had died.
‘Although we never met, I think Mrs Duthie must have been a very ordinary lady,’ mused Chris. ‘The feeling I had about the flat from the very beginning was that it had been occupied by a couple for several years, but that Mrs Duthie must have been on her own there for a long time afterwards. Everything was just as it should be.
‘It seems very odd looking back on it now, but from the very start it never felt as if I was alone. I never saw anybody, but I could always feel a presence; a coolness. It didn’t bother me much. In fact, I found it rather reassuring. Sometimes I’d move a piece of furniture, or knock something over, and I’d find myself saying, “Sorry, Mrs Duthie!”’
Christine did not mention anything about this to anyone. It was her own private joke. She had recently qualified in teacher training and started a job at Telford College. And as she had never before owned a home of her own, it proved very convenient when Alison, a friend and fellow teacher, rented a room from her.
‘Alison lived there for a year and had a Norwegian boyfriend,’ Christine said cheerfully. ‘Before she moved out, she and her friend sat down and told me they knew they wouldn’t have to worry about me because they knew there was somebody else living with me too!’
‘You mean Mrs Duthie?’ Christine had replied, and all three began to laugh.
That was the first indication she had been given that others were aware of Mrs Duthie. However, shortly after Alison moved out, Mary, a friend with two small sons, aged three and five, had asked if they could come to stay for a weekend. Mary’s husband was varnishing the floors of their home and wanted them out of the way.
Christine naturally agreed, but, on the morning they were expected, Mary telephoned her to say that David, her five-year-old, had informed her that he was nervous about staying overnight because he knew that the flat was haunted. Nobody other than Alison and her Norwegian boyfriend had ever mentioned this before. Christine was amazed.
‘It’s all right, Mary, it’s only Mrs Duthie,’ Christine had reassured her friend.
This, of course, only made matters worse. ‘I don’t know what Mary must have thought of me, but I assured her I’d have a word with Mrs Duthie,’ she said.
Naturally, she had no idea if this would work and to begin with she opened all of the doors and windows. She then informed Mrs Duthie in a loud voice that a small boy was coming to stay and would she mind going away for the weekend?
The family duly arrived and the next morning Christine asked David if he had felt the presence of a ghost? He said no.
‘The sad thing was that after that Mrs Duthie never returned. I went on living in Comely Bank for another five years, but the atmosphere had changed,’ said Christine. ‘I really missed her.’
6
UNEXPECTED VISITORS
. . . there are many things which we are sure are true that you will not believe. What principle is there why the lodestone attracts iron? Why an egg produces a chicken by heat? Why a tree grows upwards, when the natural tendency of all things is downwards?
Dr Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D (1786)
A full account of Jacqueline Heriot’s ghostly experiences in Ceres is given in Chapter Four, but when I had originally arranged to meet up with her back in 2008, it was in connection with St Andrews Castle, where she was employed as a tour guide.
Only by going to St Andrews can you fully appreciate the dramatic setting and scale of this extraordinary, now ruined, fortification, and its adjoining cathedral, once the largest centre of Christian worship in Scotland.
The remains of the ancient castle squat defiantly on a steep clifftop overlooking the North Sea. More or less abandoned to become a ruin by the seventeenth century, the essential visitor attractions today are the notorious bottle dungeon, the cells and the kitchen tower.
The other features are the mine and counter-mine. These were created at the time of the castle siege, when the Earl of Arran, Governor of Scotland during the infancy of Mary Queen of Scots, attempted to evict its Protestant defenders while a fleet of offshore French galley ships pounded the battlements with canon. Step back for a moment and try to imagine what it must have been like for those who held the castle during that relentless onslaught.
Given her sensitivity at Ceres, Jacqueline Heriot might have expected to find herself under intense supernatural pressure, but says she has only once seen a ghost at the castle.
‘We were closing up early,’ she said. ‘I was following my normal route, and had gone through the little gate from the Visitor Centre and onto the esplanade when I saw somebody leaning against the door of a cell on my left-hand side. Assuming it to be a late-comer, I took my time in approaching him but when I arrived at the doorway, there was nobody there.
‘At first I thought he must have gone into the bottle dungeon but when I turned to look, it was empty. You know what it’s like when your mind is on other things? I simply took it for granted there was somebody there and I can most certainly remember exactly what he looked like – he had long hair and wore a grey coat and trousers with long boots.
‘I also remember him holding what looked like a bunch of keys. If he was neither a tourist nor a member of staff, it must have been a ghost like James Macpherson at Ceres, although I never actually saw him, only felt his presence. Perhaps the man I saw at the cell door was a jailer, or even a prisoner. He certainly didn’t give the impression he’d noticed me.’
I have to admit that after the saga of James Macpherson, I found Jacqueline’s revelation in St Andrews Castle a trifle lacking in originality, but then I was introduced to Monika Delinert, a castle guide since 2000.
Monika had been taking a friend from Austria to see the siege tunnel when she says she most definitely felt a hand grasping her shoulder and pulling her backwards.
‘I thought it must have been my friend and turned to find out what she wanted. She was at least two metres behind me, so it couldn’t have been her hand on my shoulder!’
It was hardly a life-defining moment, but it bothered Monika nonetheless. For weeks afterwards, she would find herself glancing nervously behind her whenever she took parties into the siege tunnel. Not necessarily of a nervous disposition, she was beginning to question her own sanity when one of the leaders of a school tour mentioned in passing that his father had installed the original lighting in the tunnel during the 1950s.
It had been a traumatic experience, she was told. The electrician had been going about his business as usual when he too had felt a cold hand on his shoulder, causing him to fall over backwards. When he had called out in alarm, he had realised that there was nobody else there. It had terrified him to the extent that he refused ever to set foot in that passageway again.
Although I’m not particularly brave, my own reaction under such circumstances, I suspect, would have been one of curiosity rather than fear. It’s easy to say, but I don’t think that anybody should be unsettled by signals from the past. They happen all the time.
Alison Campbell, a former prod
ucer with BBC Scotland, remembers her grandmother Janetta, known in the family as ‘Nannie Campbell’, telling her of a disconcerting incident during the 1940s. Nannie’s husband, the Rev. George Campbell, was Minister of Kinclaven Parish Church, set in the pretty Perthshire countryside beside the River Tay, and they lived in the adjacent manse, with the kirkyard lying in between.
‘There was no electricity in those days – the manse was lit by paraffin lamps,’ explained Alison. ‘Nannie Campbell played the organ for the Sunday services, and members of the church choir used to come to the manse on a weekday evening for choir practice. One November evening, as the choir were due to arrive, she realised she’d forgotten to bring over their hymn books from the church. Taking a small torch – this was deep in the countryside, remember; there were no street lights – she slipped out of the manse and into the blackness of a moonless night.’
The hinges of the War Memorial gateway into the kirkyard may have creaked as she passed under the stone arch, but otherwise all was silent. She heard no noise as she followed the yellow circle cast by her torch and strode briskly up to the kirk and opened the door.
‘As she put it to me,’ Alison said, ‘“And then I stepped back with a start, because it seemed to her that the church was full of people! Not only that, but they all seemed to be wearing oldfashioned clothes from another time entirely.”
‘Nannie Campbell had a moment of panic,’ continued Alison, ‘but then gave herself a shake and told herself not to be silly; that if all these people were in church, they must be well-intentioned folk. Having reassured hereself, she walked down the aisle between the pews to the far end of the aisle, picked up an armful of hymn books from beside the organ and walked back again to the front entrance.
‘And all of the time she felt herself being watched by this congregation. She let herself out of the door, walked back across the kirkyard and got on with the choir practice.’
Haunted Scotland Page 4
