by Hans Holzer
“I rented this cottage in February, 1972,” Elizabeth Byrd began the account of her experiences. “I found it beautifully peaceful and benign. I discovered that the cottage was built in 1459, across a courtyard from a fortified house, which goes back to the twelfth century. Not much is known about my cottage except that it was built by monks. They worked this as an agricultural area, and it was an extension of Newbattle Abbey near Dalkeith. It came to be called ‘The Town of the Monks.’ From this, the name Monkton developed.”
“During the year and a quarter that you have lived here,” I said, “have you had any unusual experiences?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth replied. “Six months after I got here I was reading in bed one night with the light on when I smelled a marvelous juicy kind of baking of meat, or the roasting of meat, which seemed to emanate from the old stone fireplace. It actually made me hungry. Of course I wasn’t doing any cooking. This happened three or four times in the subsequent weeks, but I took it in stride, just looked up from my book and said to myself, ‘Oh, there it is again, that smell.’ It wasn’t the kind of meat that you get in the supermarket: it was more like standing rib roast—expensive, gorgeous meat.”
Alanna took up the narrative it this point. “I stayed at this cottage about a year ago for the first time. Of course, I was rather apprehensive of what I might find, but I found nothing but this wonderful feeling of great happiness and content. The first time I stayed here with Alistair, we went off to bed and slept in Elizabeth’s room, and she slept in her study; it was a Saturday night. I woke up early Sunday morning and there was the sound of bells ringing. It must have been about 6 o’clock in the morning and I thought, ‘Ah, there must be a Catholic church somewhere nearby. This is obviously a call to early Mass.’ So I didn’t wake my husband, but soon I heard the sound of trotting horses, and again I thought, ‘Oh, well, that is somebody out with their horses. After all it is in the country.’ When we had breakfast, I asked my husband whether the sound of the bells didn’t wake him around 6 o’clock. He said, ‘What bells?’ I didn’t say anything, but when Elizabeth came in I asked her, ‘Doesn’t the bell wake you up on a Sunday morning? Where is your church near here?’ She said, ‘We don’t have a church here.’ Actually, the bell I heard was on the side of the house.”
“The bell has never been heard by anyone except by Alanna. There is no church within miles,” Elizabeth said.
“Last March I stayed here again,” Alanna continued. “I slept in Elizabeth’s room, and around eight in the morning I woke up to a wonderful smell of food and thought, ‘Oh, good, Elizabeth is making something absolutely delicious for breakfast,’ and it was the most gorgeous, juicy smell, a gamey smell. There was also the smell of lovely, fresh bread. I jumped out of bed and rushed into the kitchen. There was no sign of Elizabeth and nothing was cooking. It was all emanating from the bedroom.”
Now it was Ian Groat’s turn.
“In January, 1973, I was asked to spend a few days’ holiday here. On the first night I retired about 4:30. Before falling asleep, I realized that I might see things, not because Elizabeth had told me of anything in particular, but because I suspected there was a good reason why she wanted me to sleep in this particular room.”
“Did you, in fact, see anything unusual?”
“Yes,” the gunsmith replied. “The first thing I saw was a trap door slightly to the left, in the floor, and a pair of steps leading to the basement. I saw the top of the trap door and a small monk appeared and looked at me. He had climbed the steps into the bedroom and was looking around, but he didn’t seem to see me. Since he didn’t see me at all, I allowed myself to relax completely. Then I saw a procession come in. One appeared to be a high dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church. He may have been a bishop. He was flanked by monks and they seemed to be chanting. I had a very good look at the bishop. He was clean-shaven, with a very serene face, and he looked very intelligent. The procession walked past me and more or less disappeared.
“Now another apparition appeared which caused me a great deal of confusion. I had decided I could see through the floor if I cared to exercise my faculty to do so. So I looked through the floor, and what I saw were bales of hay, and then I saw what appeared to be an opening in the wall, and through it came what I took to be either Vikings or Saxons. They were dressed in rough clothing. There were three of them—an old man, bearded, with gray hair, and two others, younger and fair-haired, also bearded, and none of them had weapons. I thought them to be farmers. They came through this cavity in the wall and they raised their hands in a greeting sign, but not at me. I was more or less an observer. Then I decided, since I could see through the floor, that I could perhaps see outside the building as well, and I then viewed the building from a height. Now I appeared to be on a parallel which was outside this dwelling, looking down. I saw soldiers coming up the drive and around the corner, and they seemed to be of the middle seventeen hundreds, dressed in gray coats of a very superior material. The accoutrements seemed to be made of white webbing. They were playing their drums and keeping step with them as they marched. I gained the impression that I was seeing this standing in a tower, but there is no tower there. I tried to see more, but I didn’t, so I decided to go to sleep.”
The Monkton cottage, complete with ghost
“My landlord, John Calderwood Miller,” Elizabeth Byrd added, “bought this property in 1956 and restored it. There is a reference to it in Nigel Trentor’s book, The Fortified House in Scotland. I told Mr. Miller about Ian’s experience of having seen the hole in the floor and the monk going down and the hay, and he said, ‘That is extraordinary, because in 1956 there was a hole in the floor between where your beds are now, and we had to cover it over and make a floor.’ There was an exit down to what had been the stables where there were indeed horses. Now it is a garage and sheds.”
There was still another witness to the haunting at Monkton: Ian Adam, whom I had interviewed in London, the mediumistic gentleman who had been so helpful to me during my ghost-hunting expedition in April. Originally of Scottish background, Ian liked coming up to Edinburgh. The morning of December 27, 1972, he arrived at 3:45. Elizabeth Byrd remembers it clearly; not too many of her friends drop in at that hour. But he was driving up from Newcastle with a friend, and Elizabeth had gotten worried.
“It was a very cold night, and Elizabeth greeted us as only Elizabeth can,” Ian told me. “Immediately we sat down in her sitting room, she asked, ‘Do you feel anything here?’ but even before she had said it, I had felt that it had a very peaceful atmosphere about it.”
“Within ten minutes, out of the blue, Ian, who had never been here, said, ‘What a strong scent of rosemary! This place is redolent of rosemary!”’ Elizabeth reported Ian as exclaiming, but none of the others could smell it.
“The place was very lovely, really,” Ian said, “and I told Elizabeth I was sure there was a woman there, a very industrious lady, perhaps of the fifteenth century. She appeared to me to be wearing a sort of off-white dress and was very busy cooking, as if she had an enormous amount of work to do. She seemed young, and yet old for her years, probably owing to hard work. There was a definite sense of tremendous activity about her, as if she had an awful lot of people to look after. I had a strong feeling that the place was one of healing. I saw a man sitting in a corner on a chair; his leg was being dressed and strapped, and he was being given an old-fashioned jug, or bottle, to drink from by another man. I think it had an anesthetic in it. I remember distinctly there was a great deal of good being done in this place, as if it were a place where people came for shelter and healing, if there were accidents or fighting. It was certainly a place of great spiritual power.”
When I checked Ian’s testimony with Elizabeth, who had written down his impressions immediately after he had given them to her, she changed the description of the woman ghost somewhat. According to Elizabeth’s notes, the woman seemed between thirty and forty years of age, wearing pale gray, sort of looped up on one side
.
“Was the impression of the man being helped and of the woman doing the cooking simply an imprint of the past, or do you think these were ghosts that you saw?”
“Oh,” Ian said firmly, “they were ghosts all right.” He couldn’t hear anything, but he did smell the cooking.
“Did anything else happen during that night?”
“No. I had a very peaceful night, although I was absolutely freezing. It must have been the coldest night I’ve ever lived through. In fact, I got out of bed in the middle of the night and put a jersey over my head to protect myself from the intense cold.”
There is one more witness to the haunting at Monkton. James Boyd, by profession a sales representative, but gifted with psychic and healing powers, once stayed overnight in the same bedroom Ian Groat slept in when he had his remarkable experience. This was in early April of 1972.
“In the morning he came to me,” Elizabeth said, and reported that there was a woman in a long, dirty-white dress who seemed to be very busy about the fireplace in the bedroom. The two fireplaces in the sitting room, where we are now, and the bedroom next door, were once connected. James Boyd also told me, ‘She’s very busy and tired because she works so hard.’ He had, of course, no knowledge of Ian Adam’s experience in the house.”
Ian Groat spoke up now. “Two weeks after his visit here, James Boyd telephoned me and said, ‘Ian, I have the feeling that there is a well in that courtyard. It is all covered up, but I think if you go down that well, about halfway down, you will find a cavity in the wall and in this cavity lots of silver, household silver that was hidden in times of danger.’ I promised I would tell Elizabeth about it and I did.”
“There is indeed such a well in the courtyard,” Elizabeth confirmed, “but the tower that Ian Groat mentioned no longer exists. It was part of a peel tower, used for defense. When I told Mr. Miller about the well, he said, ‘Now that is very extraordinary. About a year ago I went down into the well, about fifteen feet, and when I looked up, the light seemed far away.’ Mr. Miller decided to go back up, as he didn’t know what he might hit down in the depths. But he did have the feeling that there was a treasure somewhere and encouraged me and my friends to look for it.”
Now that everyone had had his say, it was time to tell them of my own impressions. While the others were talking about the bedroom, I had the very distinct impression of a large, rather heavy monk witching from the doorway. He had on a grayish kind of robe, and there was a rather quizzical expression on his face, as if he were studying us. The name Nicholas rushed at me. I also had the feeling that there was some agricultural activity going on around here, with chickens and geese and supplies, and that in some way the military were involved with these supplies. These impressions came to me before the others had given their respective testimonies.
“The monk I saw had a gray robe on,” Ian Groat confirmed, “and my impression was that I was seeing events that had occurred and not people who were present at that particular moment. It was like seeing a film from the past.”
Well, if the monks and the lady at Elizabeth’s Monkton Tower are film actors, they are one step ahead of Hollywood: you can actually smell the food!
* 80 Scottish Country Ghosts
FOR A DAY IN EARLY MAY, the morning certainly looked peculiar: heavy, moist fog was covering most of Edinburgh; fires were burning in all the fireplaces of the hotel; and the electric light had to be turned on at nine in the morning. It didn’t seem to bother the natives much, not even when the fog gave way to heavy rain of the kind I know so well from the Austrian mountains. Just the same, a schedule is a schedule. Promptly at 10 Alistair and Alanna Knight called for me at the Hotel George, and we embarked on the trip we had planned well in advance. Alistair was well armed with maps of the area to the south and east of Edinburgh, to make sure that we did not lose time in going off on the wrong road. Since the Knights came from Aberdeen they were not so familiar with the countryside farther south as native Edinburghers might be, and the whole trip took on even more the mood of an adventure. At first we followed one of the main roads leading out of town, but when we got on top of a steep hill in the southeastern suburbs of Edinburgh, the fog returned and enveloped us so thoroughly that Alistair had to halt the car. We decided to trust our intuition, and between Alanna and myself, we put our ESP to work, such as it was, telling Alistair to go straight until he came to a certain side road, which he was to take. To our immense relief, the fog lifted just then and we discovered that we had been on the right road all along.
It all started with a note from Mrs. Agnes Cheyne, who wanted to tell me about an unusual spot eight miles from Edinburgh called Auchindinny, Midlothian. “I was born there in 1898,” Mrs. Cheyne had written. “I am no chicken.” The ghost who haunts the “Firth Woods” is that of a woman who was jilted by her lover and in great distress jumped from a great height into the river Esh. That, at least, is the tradition. Mrs. Cheyne’s aunt, who wasn’t convinced of the reality of ghosts, happened to be walking through an abandoned railroad tunnel running through to Dalmor Mill. At the mill, there are two old railroad tunnels left over from a branch of the Edinburgh railroad which has long been abandoned for lack of business. The tracks of course were taken up many years ago, but the tunnels have remained as a silent testimony to the colorful era of railroading. Today, the mill uses the road and trucks to do business with the outside world. It is a quiet, wooded part of the country, very much off the beaten track both to tourists and to business people, and it has retained much of the original charm it must have had throughout the nineteenth century.
The lady walked into the tunnel, and when she came to the middle of it, she suddenly froze in terror. There was a woman coming toward her, seemingly out of nowhere. Her clothes showed her to be from an earlier period, and there were no sounds to her footsteps. Mrs. Cheyne’s aunt looked closer, and suddenly the apparition disappeared before her eyes. Although she had never believed in ghosts, that day she returned home to Edinburgh in a very shaken condition.
After about forty-five minutes, we reached a narrow country road, and despite the heavy rain, we managed to see a sign reading “Dalmor Mill.” A few moments later, a branch road descended toward the river bank, and there was the mill. We ignored a sign warning trespassers not to park their cars and looked around. There was a tunnel to the right and one to the left. First we investigated the one on the right. Inside, everything was dry, and I remarked what wonderful mushrooms one could grow in it. We had scarcely walked ten yards when Alanna turned back, saying, “This is not the right tunnel. Let’s try the other one.” As soon as we had walked into the second tunnel, all of us felt an icy atmosphere which was far in excess of what the rainy day would bring about. Besides, the first tunnel was not equally cold. When we reached the middle of the tunnel Alanna stopped. “I wouldn’t want to walk through this at night,” she said, “and even in the daytime I wouldn’t walk through it alone.”
“What do you feel here?” I asked. I had not told the Knights about Mrs. Cheyne’s letter or why we were here.
“There is something about the middle of this tunnel that is very frightening. I have a feeling of absolute panic, and this started when I was halfway through this tunnel.” Without further ado, Alanna turned back and sat in the car. I am sure that no amount of persuasion could have gotten her back into that tunnel again.
* * *
Twenty-three miles from Edinburgh, in a fertile valley that was once the center of the mill industry but is now largely agricultural, there stands the town of Peebles. The surrounding countryside is known as Peebleshire and there are a number of lovely vacation spots in the area, quiet conservative villas and small hotels much favored by the English and the Scottish. One such hotel is the Venlaw Castle Hotel, standing on a bluff on the outskirts of town, seven hundred feet above sea level. It is open for summer guests only and does indeed give the appearance of a castle from the outside. Standing four stories high, with a round tower in one corner, Venlaw Castle
represents the fortified house of Scotland rather than the heavy, medieval fortress. Access to the castle, now the hotel, is from the rear; behind it, Venlaw, the hill which gave it its name, rises still further. The present building was erected in 1782 on the site of an old Scottish keep called Smithfield Castle, one of the strong points of the borderland in olden days. One half of the present house was added in 1854, in what is locally known as the mock baronial style.
Venlaw belonged to the Erskine family and in 1914 Lady Erskine offered her mansion to the admiralty as a convalescent hospital for twelve naval officers. According to James Walter Buchanan’s A History of Peebleshire, it remained an auxiliary Red Cross hospital to the end of World War I. The same author describes the present dwelling house as being “built on a commanding position with one of the finest views in the County. It is presumed that it occupies the site of the ancient castle of Smithfield, which was in existence until about the middle of the eighteenth century.”
In 1949 the house passed into the hands of Alexander Cumming, the father of the present owner, who turned it into a small hotel.
In the summer of 1968 an American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Senitt, decided to spend a few days at Venlaw Castle. “The room we occupied was at the end of the middle floor with a little turret room which my daughter used,” Mrs. Senitt had explained to me. “The very first night we were there, the room was ice cold even though it was July, and we couldn’t wait to close the lights and go to sleep. Immediately upon getting into bed, I suddenly heard a long-drawn-out and quite human sigh! It seemed to be near the foot of my bed. For the moment I froze—I was afraid to move or even breathe. If it hadn’t been for the fact that my husband was with me, I might have gone into shock. I said nothing to him, as he usually kids me about my ghostly beliefs, and I felt he was probably asleep, as he made no move and said nothing. However, after a moment I got the strongest feeling that if it was a ghost it was friendly, because I felt welcome.”