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
WARLOCKS AND WITCHES
Black Magic is not a myth. It is a totally unscientific and emotional form of magic, but it does get results — of an extremely temporary nature. The recoil upon those who practice it is terrific. It is like looking for an escape of gas with a lighted candle. As far as the search goes, there is little fear of failure!
Aleister Crowley, ‘The Worst Man in the World’, in the London Sunday Dispatch, 2 July 1933
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:
The first essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a ‘lodge’ where the spirits may congregate.
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.
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.
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