Whatever is foreseen, the image is said always to be of great detail, never a blurred impression. Often it is a funeral, and the face of every mourner is recognizable, together with knowledge of the time and the place; sometimes it is a photoflash, but of equal intensity and shock. One Skye woman, drinking a cup of tea with neighbours, suddenly fainted. When she was again conscious she at first refused any explanation, but under pressure she whispered that she had had a sudden and instant vision of the corpse of a boy whom she had seen ploughing in a nearby field. The boy died by drowning within a week.
A whole volume could be filled with such tales; they vary little, and for the most part concern simply the prophetic vision and its fulfilment.
Apart from the specific gift, or curse, of the ‘second sight’ any unexplained phenomenon is held to presage some event that is yet to come; the very opposite, if one may put it that way, of the more familiar European conception that a house is haunted by humans or happenings belonging to the past.
Two men were sitting talking in a shed on Kyleakin pier when from outside came the sound of a splintering crash as of two boats in collision. They ran out, but found nothing to explain the noise, nor had anyone else heard it. A few days later an old and partially deaf fisherman, an octogenarian, had his launch at anchor in the narrows, hand-lining mackerel, and failed to hear the approach of the MacBrayne Stornoway-to-Kyle steamer, the Loch Ness. When he turned and saw her bows towering over him he knew that he could do nothing, for he was too late to get his anchor up; he stood and waited without flinching. Just before the impact a rope was thrown to him from the forepeak of the Loch Ness, and as he caught it his boat was literally sliced in two. Old as he was he contrived to clingon to the lifeline for many minutes before he was finally hauled aboard, and his life was saved. It was accepted as being entirely natural that the sound of the collision should have been audible days before to anyone attuned to hear it.
All my life my own attitude toward what is popularly called the ‘supernatural’ had been cautious and strictly empirical. I had not once personally experienced anything that could not be rationalized and made to fit into the plainly minute and constricted framework of my own human experience and limited knowledge. I had recognized that what my senses could perceive and my brain understand was no more than a millionth, a billionth, part of even the human cosmos, but I was essentially of the faithless generation that waited for a sign. I had adopted a scientific approach which demanded unquestionable evidence before accepting and assimilating any new concept, and having read Spencer Brown on the theory of probability I had pigeon-holed several curious experiences under the temporary and pending label of ‘coincidence’.
This broadly sceptical attitude changed in May 1964 with the undeniable arrival at Camusfeàrna of what is usually known as a poltergeist. It remained our guest – a very unconventional one – for two days, and when it departed I was disappointed, for I longed to go on studying those weird phenomena that were actually testable, though inexplicable, by my five senses.
They had begun one evening at about 10 p.m. There were three of us sitting in the kitchen–living room of Camusfeàrna. Along one wall there is a homemade sofa, above which are shelves holding groceries and tinned foods, like any small village store. I was sitting at the end of this sofa nearest to the actual kitchen, a small room whose door was on my left. In front of the fireplace, at forty-five degrees to my right, was an L-shaped sofa, also homemade. On the section facing and parallel to where I was sitting was a guest, Richard Frere, who later became the manager of Camusfeàrna and its small but complex dependencies. Richard is a mountaineer of distinction, an extremely practical man, little given to fantasy. Facing the fireplace, and in profile to both of us, was Jimmy Watt, then aged twenty.
Among the grocery stores above my head – tins of green vegetables, pickles, jam-jars and so on – I suddenly heard a scraping sound, but I only just had time to look upward before I saw an object flying outward from above my head. It landed about three feet in front of me; a glass marmalade jar smashed to pieces on the cement floor. It was curious that after a moment’s pause Richard and I both said, simultaneously and somewhat disbelievingly, ‘Poltergeist!’
I climbed up and examined the top shelf, a foot wide, from which the missile had launched itself. The woodwork was deep in dust, and the jar had been standing close against the back wall. From its original position there was a clean track of its own width, clear of dust, all the way to the edge of the shelf. There cannot have been more than half an inch between the jar and the wall, allowing no space for mechanical propulsion, yet somehow it had projected itself over a distance little less than six feet.
I was alone when the next incident took place, but unless I were to distrust my senses I must say that as far as I was concerned it really did happen. I was standing in the little kitchen waiting for a kettle to boil when I was aware of a curious rustling sound in the living-room behind me. I turned to look, and saw a stack of long-playing discs fanning themselves out like a pack of cards over the floor from where they had been piled under a little table supporting a record-player. They slid outward in an orderly movement, and came to rest covering more than a yard of the floor, each neatly overlapping the next. I replaced them as they had been, and tried to produce the same effect myself by mechanical principle. It wasn’t possible; as in the case of the marmalade jar, there was not room between them and the wall for a hand or any human artifice to propel them outward.
Jimmy had been out; when he returned a little later I described to him what had happened, and was about to resume boiling the kettle to make coffee. We entered the little kitchen together, and as we did so something shot off a high shelf opposite to us, hit my face lightly, and fell to the floor. It was a baby’s plastic feeding bottle with a rubber teat, relegated, like other things for which we had infrequent use (this we used occasionally for orphaned lambs in the spring) to the high shelf above the cooker. It had cleared the cooker by two or three feet, and, like the marmalade jar, it had left a dust-free trail in its passage. This time I had the subjective feeling that this object had definitely been aimed at me; whatever was throwing things about was, it seemed to me, no longer random in direction.
The kitchen door opened from the room in which we stood, a square hall or lobby hung with rows of coats and oilskins; on the floor below them were dog beds, and rows of rubber sea-boots. In the corner of the room diagonally opposite to the lavatory door a large empty laundry hamper stood on a low table.
The following day when I went through to the kitchen I did not close the door to this room behind me. I sat down, and there came a resounding crash from the lobby I had just left. I knew there were no dogs in the house, nothing animate that could have caused that noise.
I re-entered the coat room with a certain caution. It was not difficult to see what had produced the sound; the laundry hamper had been thrown from the table and flung more than halfway across the room. It lay upside down with its lid open, within a few feet of the lavatory door. It had evidently been propelled with considerable force, for it had sailed clean over two tall pairs of rubber thigh boots that stood in its path.
That, unfortunately, was the last manifestation of the Camusfeàrna poltergeist. I waited hopefully for the least sign of its continued presence, for I was profoundly fascinated by this firsthand evidence of an unknown world; but after that last splendid gesture of the laundry hamper it was years before anything ever happened again that was not capable of easy interpretation in normal terms. The brief visit had, however, broken through a lifelong barrier composed, if not of disbelief, at least of mild scepticism; and after that glimpse of the unguessed I could not, two years later, view the curse upon the rowan tree with the degree of scorn that I would probably have accorded it before.
It was soon after the lighthouse cottages became mine that a resident of Kyleakin, not born locally, said to me with a slight constraint in her voice, ‘I suppose you know that the lighthouse island is hau
nted?’ I said that I didn’t, and she replied, ‘Well, I was told about it in confidence, but as you’ve actually bought the place now I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about it, anyway. You’d better talk to some past lighthouse keepers; I believe any of them can tell you all about it. It seems that it’s not frightening, anyway, it’s just there.’
I sought out the most easily available, and though he was a slow starter, as I should have been in the circumstances, he eventually gave me a wealth of detail that, coming from so clearly level-headed a source, left me with the conviction that there must be something on the island not explicable in ordinary terms. He referred not only to his own experiences, but to those of his former colleagues and his predecessors.
There have been experiences which must be classified as individual, but there has remained a standard, unvarying pattern common to all who have occupied the house. From somewhere just outside the walls, never seeming to be within them, comes the sound of low-pitched muttering voices, as though intentionally subdued, but rising and falling in intensity, as if in hurried argument. This may be preceded or succeeded by loud metallic clangs; these have been variously described as the sound made by an iron poker raking out a stove, or, perhaps more fancifully, as the clash of claymores or broadswords. With one exception, which was after my ownership, these things have been puzzling but never frightening.
A keeper whom we may call MacLellan was on the island for seven years, and during that time became so accustomed to the voices and the metallic clang that he came simply to ignore them. He was a Gaelic speaker, and was certain that the language spoken bore no relation to Gaelic. He emphasized that the occurrence was always during the small hours of the morning. He told me, too, that a relief keeper who spent eighteen months there had followed the advice of a predecessor, with absolute success. If, on hearing the voices for the first time, one asked loudly, ‘Who’s there?’ they would cease and never recur.
I daresay I should have paid little enough attention to these stories if I had not had more contemporary evidence. At first, having bought the lighthouse cottages, my idea was only to maintain them in good condition until I should need to occupy one or the other myself. This negative scheme developed, through the project of furnishing them minimally in order to obtain a minimal summer rent, to converting them completely into comfortable, even luxurious, houses which could avail themselves of the tourist boom in the West Highlands. There seemed to be no immediate prospect of my being required to leave Camusfeàrna, and here might be a source of income that did not necessitate my writing at a desk for eight hours a day. I went into this, as I always have with any new project, with enthusiasm.
I had recently made the acquaintance of Richard Frere. He had trained himself as a builder, a joiner, a mechanic, and much else. Work, physical or mental, was his food. When he offered to take over the structural conversion of the lighthouses, and his wife, a talented decorator, to make herself responsible for the interior decor of Ornsay, I had embarked on a programme that deserved better financial results for all of us.
This arrangement was infinitely more economical than I could have achieved from any contractor; for both of them it was a hobby, and by it I benefited enormously. On 15 May 1964 Richard and his wife Joan began the conversion of Isle Ornsay and finished early in August. By then it was a luxury house, though we continued alterations and improvements until April 1966.
In October 1964, Richard began a similar conversion at Kyleakin – to my own somewhat ambitious designs – at first with an assistant, and then alone for some weeks. (The first assistant was Terry Nutkins, who had temporarily returned to our employment, and who kept a pair of wildcats in the annexe building subsequently known as The Cat House.) Terry left in January and for some weeks Richard was alone at Kyleakin. I had regarded Richard as a test case for the existence of some unexplained phenomenon at Kyleakin, and had been careful to tell him nothing of the stories I had heard. If, I thought, so pre-eminently sane and level-headed a man were to experience anything unusual without preconditioning there would no longer be any doubt in my mind. Richard writes:
In January 1965 I returned [to the island] to spend the night and subsequent nights alone. I had my dog Hedda (Dalmatian bitch) with me, and she was never at any time worried by atmosphere or voices. I slept very soundly for the first three or four nights. At first, the weather was calm with frost; on the fourth night a southwesterly wind was blowing, which kept me awake until after midnight, and when I slept it was fitfully. I was awakened shortly after 3 a.m. by a sharp metallic clang. I heard the first voices a few minutes later. The wind had dropped, and it was raining. The voices, a curious disconnected muttering, rose and fell and seemed to be travelling down the north side of the house from west to east. So kindly was the atmosphere within the house that my only fear was that I should become afraid. Nothing would have made me go outside, but I was strangely prepared to lie and listen. It went on for about ten minutes, the clang being repeated two or three times. The voices suggested the passage of many people past the house, but I heard nothing of their movement. Believe it or not, I went to sleep again before it was entirely quiet; though, as I say, the very audible part continued for about ten minutes. This performance was repeated often, but never in stormy conditions; or, if it was, it was impossible to hear it. I always had the impression (if one can accept it to be some captive echo from the past) that here was a war-like party, arriving stealthily to deploy on the island preparatory to some battle or skirmish. By March it was all over.
Many lighthouse cottage occupants have heard the voices, and all accounts seem to agree that they are low-pitched and incoherent, but I myself have heard sharp sounds and expressions which would be meaningful if I knew the language.
There is one particular sentence in Richard’s letter which ties up closely with my searching questions to a former lighthouse keeper. ‘By March it was all over.’ No one could remember having heard the voices during the spring and summer months; it appeared to be a seasonal haunting, limited to autumn and winter. Morag MacKinnon, who used to be my neighbour at Druimfiaclach above Camusfeàrna, went to live in the house for a few weeks early in 1966, in company with a boy who was preparing the adjoining island for a further project which I shall describe later. She wrote, ‘I personally heard the voices only once. One Sunday morning at about 8.15, lying in bed, I heard what I thought was the wireless turned low, but I was puzzled that I had not heard the boy getting up. The voices were pitched quite low, alternately strengthening and fading, and were speaking in some foreign language. I got up and found that the wireless was not on and the boy still sleeping, and then I realized that the voices had stopped as soon as I had left my bedroom. Everyone else who has heard this had told me that it is not frightening, and having now heard it myself I agree, but at the same time I can’t any longer doubt that voices do speak, and that it is not in English or Gaelic’ (Morag is bilingual in these two.) ‘It certainly isn’t just an old wives’ tale like a lot of the ghost stories in these parts.’
Kyleakin is named after King Haco of Norway who, just seven hundred years before I bought the lighthouse cottage, anchored his invading fleet in the lee of the lighthouse preparatory to his last and disastrous attempt to conquer Scotland. He left his name to Kyleakin – the Narrows of Haco – and perhaps he left some ghosts as well, for the invisible inhabitants of the lighthouse island speak no tongue that is known in Scotland now.
I never heard the voices myself, because in all the time I have owned the house until now I have only spent two nights there, in July 1965, with a party of friends. I was still at the stage when I felt that I had all the time in the world; I loved Kyleakin and everything about it, and I planned to live in it later.
8
Something Old and Something New
With the supreme need for some sort of regeneration that I felt after my return to Camusfeàrna as a cripple, it was perhaps not surprising that I looked at t
he lighthouse islands with a speculative eye, probing their possibilities for some new and improbable project. I had a plan for Isle Ornsay, but it was a distant and ambitious one, requiring more capital than I could outlay, even if the Northern Lighthouse Board were to grant their permission. I wanted, at some time in the future, to form there a porpoise pool, and to study captive porpoises as dolphins are being studied in the few great oceanariums of the world. There seemed every likelihood that the dolphins’ extraordinary mental development and powers of communication were paralleled or even surpassed in the porpoise; yet, so far as I knew, the experiment had never been tried. The rock formations of Isle Ornsay lighthouse island lent themselves well to the construction of a spacious sea pool, but I recognized that this project must wait for a much later date and that it might be years before I could own talking porpoises.
For Kyleakin, however, I had conceived a much more immediate and practical scheme, something else that would be absolutely new. I intended to found an eider duck colony – or at least to establish whether or not it was possible to do so. If I succeeded I would have opened the way to a new industry for the crofting population of the West Highlands and Islands.
There will be some to whom the eider will require no introduction; to others, perhaps, who have no particular interest in ornithology, the connotation of the word will be limited to the eider-down (which rarely contains eider-down) used upon a bed in cold weather.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 35