by Hans Holzer
When the Senitts left the castle a few days later, Mrs. Senitt finally mentioned the incident to her husband. To her surprise he confirmed that he too had heard the sound. He had attributed it to their daughter, sleeping in the small room next door. But Mrs. Senitt was sure that the sound came from in front of her, and the turret bedroom where the girl slept was off to a corner in back of the room and the door was closed. Also, the Senitts were the only people staying in that part of the hotel at the time.
It was still raining when we crossed the river Tweed and headed into Peebles. The castle-hotel was easy to find, and a few minutes later we arrived in front of it, wondering whether it would be open, since we had not been able to announce our coming. To our pleasant surprise a soft-spoken young man bade us welcome, and it turned out that he was the owner, the son of the man who had opened the hotel originally, and also that he was the only person in the hotel at the present time, since it was not yet open for the season. I asked him to show us the room on the middle floor with the turret bedroom without, however, indicating my reasons for this request. I merely mentioned that some American friends of mine had enjoyed their stay at Venlaw, and I wanted to see the room they’d occupied. As soon as we had entered the room, Alanna turned to me and said, “There is something here. I’m getting a cold, crawly scalp.” While Alanna was getting her psychic bearings, I took Mr. Cumming aside, out of her earshot, and questioned him about the hotel. Was there, to his recollection, any incident connected with the house, either since it had been turned into a hotel or before, involving death or tragedy or anything unusual?
Mr. Cumming seemed a bit uneasy at this question. “There are things we don’t like to speak about,” he finally said. “We’ve only had one traumatic accident. About twenty years ago one of our guests fell from a bedroom window.”
Alanna came over at this point and stopped short of the window. “There’s something at this window,” she said. “Somebody either threw himself out of this window or fell out.” But Alanna insisted that the tragedy went back a long time, which puzzled me. Was she confusing her time periods, or did a second death follow an earlier death, perhaps caused by a possessing entity? Those are the kinds of thoughts that race through a psychic investigator’s mind at a time like this. Actually, it turned out that the guest fell out of a window one flight higher than the room we were in. He was a miner who had become ill and somehow fallen out the window. His friends carried him back in, but he had a broken neck; they actually killed him by moving him.
Alanna shook her head. “No. What I feel has to do with this window in this room. It may have something to do with the original place that stood here before. I get the feeling of a fire.”
“Well,” Mr. Cumming said, “Venlaw Hill, where we are standing, was the place where, during the persecutions, witches were burned, or people accused of such.”
“I have feelings of intense suffering,” Alanna said, “and I sense some noise, the feeling of noise and of a great deal of confusion and excitement. I get the feeling of a crowd of people, and of anger. Someone either fell out of this window or was thrown out, and also there is a feeling of fire. But this is definitely a woman. I feel it not only in this room but down on this terrace below, which seems to have something to do with it.”
I questioned Mr. Cumming whether any of his guests had ever complained about unusual phenomena.
“Not really,” he replied. “We did have a guest who complained of noises, but she was mentally disturbed. She was a resident here for some time in the 1950s. I didn’t know her well; I was very young at the time.”
“And where did this lady stay?” I asked.
“Why, come to think of it, in the room next to this one.
I thanked Mr. Cumming and wondered whether the lady guest had really been unhinged, or whether perhaps she had only felt what Mr. and Mrs. Senitt felt some fifteen years later in the same area.
The afternoon was still young, and we had two hours left to explore the countryside. We decided to cross the river Tweed once again and make for Traquair House, making sure, however, to telephone ahead, since this was not one of the days on which this private manor house could be visited.
Scottish ghosts: Traquair House is full of them
Known as the “oldest inhabited house in Scotland,” Traquair House at Innerleithen rises to five stories amid a majestic park, in a tranquil setting that gives the illusion of another century, another world. It is now owned by Lord Maxwell Stuart, of a distinguished noble family, related to the royal Stuarts. There is a tradition that the magnificent gates of Traquair, surmounted by fabled animals, shall remain closed until a Stuart king is crowned again in London. This Jacobite sentiment goes back to the times when the earls of Traquair gave support to the Stuart cause, but the present laird, Peter Maxwell Stuart, is more concerned with the quality of the beer he brews. He’s also the author of a magnificently illustrated booklet detailing the treasures at Traquair House. These include, in the king’s room, the bed in which Mary Queen of Scots slept, with a coverlet made by her ladies-in-waiting. That she slept there is not surprising, since Lady Mary Seaton, the wife of the second earl, was one of Mary’s favorite ladies-in-waiting. Also, the very cradle used by Mary Stuart for her son James VI of Scotland now stands at Traquair, and in the many rooms of the house there are displayed treasures, documents, arms, and fine furniture, all of them dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when this great house was at its zenith. Much as we loved the sight of this beautiful house, so romantic on a rainy day, with the fog just lifting, we had come not to admire the antiques but to find out about its ghosts.
The caretaker, Andrew Aiken Burns, who had been at the house since 1934, took us around, painstakingly explaining room after room.
“Have you ever had any psychic experiences here?”
“Yes,” he nodded, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be asked. “It happened in 1936 in the afternoon of a beautiful summer day. I was out with my horse, clearing the brush from the front of the house, near the old ruined cottage in the field. My horse was a chestnut named Ginger, and suddenly he flicked his ears and I looked up. I saw a lady coming down the grass, dressed in a Victorian dress. She walked slowly down through the gate and into the cottage and their through the wicket gate into the garden.”
“What was so special about that? Could she not have been a visitor?” I asked.
“Well, I left my horse and went right up to see where this person had gone, and the wicket gate was shut. She had been through the gate, and still the gate was shut.”
“Did you ever see her again?”
“No. But later someone showed me some old photographs, and I recognized one is the lady I had seen walking on the grass. It was Lady Louisa Stuart.”
Lady Louisa Stuart died in 1875 at age one hundred. She is buried in a vault in the Traquair church-yard, right in back of the castle. Why would she walk the grounds? I wondered.
According to the twentieth laird, Traquair House goes back to the tenth century when a heather hut stood on the place. In 1107 King Alexander I granted a charter to the Traquairs, and he was the first of a long line of Scottish kings who stayed here. Incidentally, Traquair means dwelling on a winding river. In the thirteenth century the building was incorporated into a border peel, a defensive palisade, and it served as such during the long period of border strife. In 1491 James Stuart, the son of the Earl of Buchan, became the first Laird of Traquair, and from him the present family is descended. Over the centuries the building was largely altered and added to, to fit the changing times. What was once an austere border fortress became a Renaissance castle and eventually one of the finer residences in Scotland. During the Civil War in the seventeenth century, Traquair became what the present laird describes as “one of the great bastions of the Catholic faith in Scotland,” because of marriages with Catholic ladies. Since Catholicism was not favored in this part of the country, Mass had to be celebrated in secret. To this day, there i
s a Roman Catholic chapel on the grounds, unfortunately decorated in the most gaudy modern style and totally at variance with the rest of the house. In 1688 the house was raided by a mob from Peebles, and all the religious articles found were destroyed. It wasn’t until well into the nineteenth century that Catholicism was freely admitted into Scotland. During the rebellion of 1715, Traquair sided with Bonnie Prince Charles, which brought much misfortune upon the family.
When Charles Stuart, the fourteenth laird, died unmarried in 1861, the property passed into the hands of his sister, Lady Louisa, born in 1775. She also didn’t marry and died in 1875 after spending nearly all her time on her estate. All her life she had carried on a love affair with Traquair House. She looked after the gardens, took great pride in keeping the house itself in perfect order, and, though she was the first female head of the family in many centuries, she had the full respect of the villagers and of her servants. When she died, the question of the inheritance had to be settled by the courts. Eventually, Traquair House passed into the hands of Lady Louisa’s cousin, the Honorable Henry Constable Maxwell Stuart, who thus became the sixteenth laird. Perhaps Lady Louisa was not altogether happy with the turn of events, for she had been the last in the direct line to hold Traquair. Possibly, her spirit does not wish to relinquish her realms, or perhaps her long residence here has so accustomed her to Traquair that she is unaware of the fact that there might be another, better place for her to go.
“Has anyone else seen the ghost of Lady Louisa?” I asked the caretaker.
“Well, some other people have seen her, but they have only seen a figure and did not recognize her. Some have seen her farther up the road.”
“Why is she called The Green Lady?” I asked. I understood from my friends that the legendary Lady of Traquair was referred to by that name.
“Well, the dress I saw her wearing,” the caretaker said, “was kind of green, the color of a wood pigeon.”
“Is there such a dress in existence?” I asked. Since so much of the old furniture and personal belongings of the family were preserved at the house, perhaps the original dress still existed.
“Well, it is a strange thing: one of the old foresters here—his wife’s mother was Lady Louisa’s dressmaker. They kept some of the clippings from which the dresses were made, and when I asked her, the granddaughter showed me the materials. I recognized the color and the material of the dress the lady had on when I saw her.” Mr. Burns, the caretaker, admitted that he had some psychic abilities. Sometimes he knew things before they actually occurred, but paid it no great heed.
I asked Mr. Burns to take us to Lady Louisa’s room. There, beautifully framed on the south wall, was the great lady’s portrait. “She was friendly with Sir Walter Scott,” the caretaker commented. The room was oblong, with a fireplace on one end. Wine-red chairs, two sofas, and a strange mixture of eighteenth-century and Victorian furniture gave the room a warm, intimate feeling. On one side, one could gaze into the garden, while the other overlooked the driveway, so that Lady Louisa would always know who was coming up to see her. Alanna hadn’t said anything for quite a while. I found her standing by the garden windows. The rain had stopped, and the sun began to pierce through the clouds.
“Do you feel her presence?” I asked.
Alanna gave me a curious look. “Don’t you?”
I nodded. I had known for several minutes that Lady Louisa Stuart was at home this afternoon, receiving unexpected visitors.
* * *
Shortly afterwards, we drove back towards Edinburgh. We crossed the river Tweed again, and the rain started up once more. It was as if fate had held it back for an hour or so to give us a chance to visit Traquair House at its best.
I wondered what it was that bound all British ghosts together. Then it struck me: whether Medieval or Victorian, Renaissance, or Edwardian, they all had style.
* 81
The Ghost on the Kerry Coast
IF YOU’VE NEVER heard of Ballyheigue—pronounced just like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Bali-ha’i”—you’ve really missed one of the most poetic stretches of coastland still unspoiled by human greed. It isn’t completely untouched by habitation by any means, but there isn’t—as yet—that glass-and-concrete luxury hotel, the nearby airport, the chic clientele. Ballyheigue just sits there, a small fishing village and a majestic castle, looking out onto the Atlantic. This stretch of land used to swarm with smugglers not so long ago, as it was rather difficult for the revenue people to catch up with the wily Irish in the many bays and loughs of Western Ireland.
Now I wasn’t looking for smugglers’ coves or new sources of poteen, but the spirit that moved me to travel down the Kerry coast had been brought to my attention in a respectable magazine piece, published a couple of years ago in Dublin. The article, entitled “On the Trail of a Ghost,” is the factual report of Captain P. D. O’Donnell, about his strange experiences at Ballyheigue in 1962. The magazine, Ireland of the Welcomes, is published by the Irish Tourist Board, but this piece is the only instance of a psychic adventure appearing in its pages. Here then is Captain O’Donnell’s report:
“It all started during a normal vacation in Ballyheigue in the first, sunny half of June, 1962. Even on holidays, a part-time writer like myself is always on the lookout for new ideas, but on that vacation I was determined to get the most out of a heat wave, and to heck with writing. I relaxed in the quiet atmosphere of the almost deserted village, lazed on the lonely four-mile-long beach with the family, or joined in the beach games with the handful of visitors from the hotel.
“Then, one day—it was the 4th or 5th day of June, be it noted—I took a walk with my eight-year-old son, Frank, up the winding avenue above the cliffs to the burntout shell of Ballyheigue Castle. It was purely in deference to my interest in old castles, and to show my son the castle. I had only a vague idea of its history, but knew that from here the strong Crosbie family had once lorded it over most of the north of County Kerry. They left the country when the republicans burnt the castle to the ground during the ‘troubles’ of 1921.
“For a while we talked to an old man working nearby, and he told us the castle was never explored fully. Then with camera in hand we started. I am one for always trying different angles and unusual shots with a camera, so when our short tour among the ruins satisfied Frank, we started to take a few snaps for the record. The snap that mattered was taken inside the castle. Frank was placed standing against a wall at right angles to the front of the castle, and I stood back. It was shadowy inside the castle, but the sun was slanting strongly through a window on his right. In the viewfinder I was able to get Frank on the left and hoped also to get the view of the beach through the window on the right. The light of the sun coming through the window would be enough, I hoped—no light meters for my amateur photography.
“The story of the rest of the vacation does not matter, except to record that the days were filled with sunshine, battling the breakers, looking for Kerry diamonds on Kerry Head, enjoying the relaxation and joining in the hotel sing-song at night. What did matter, however, was when the color film came back from the developers. The snap which I have described appeared to have another figure in it, partly obscured by the square of light that was the window. This figure held a sword, and its legs were not trousered, but appeared as if clothed in hose or thigh boots! At first I thought this rather frightening, but my wife passed it off as a double exposure.
“However, when she and I examined the other snapshots, we both agreed that there was neither a double exposure nor any other negative which if it was superimposed on the ‘ghost’ picture could have produced the same effect. What then was the answer, we wondered. Was it really a ghost I had photographed?
“The events that followed, indeed, made the affair more extraordinary. I brought the snap into the office, and passed it around my friends. Two were more interested than the others, and asked to see the negative. When I went home for lunch I slipped the negative into the same envelope with the snaps
hot—much to my later regret—and they were suitably impressed. That night, however, I gave the envelope to a friend, forgetting that the negative was also inside—and would you believe it—the envelope disappeared most mysteriously. If it was only the snapshot, it would have been all right, but as the negative was with it, all was lost. At least I had twelve witnesses who saw both negative and print, so anyone who says I am a liar can call them liars too.
“Of course, I advertised in the newspapers, and even got leaflets printed offering a very good reward, but my ‘ghost’ picture never turned up. I was interviewed by a newspaper and on radio, and determined to look into the whole matter of recent Irish ghostly appearances and write a book on the subject. The news travelled, and shortly after, I had queries from Stockholm and from Copenhagen seeking to buy the Swedish and Danish rights of the photographs. They were offering sums from £25 to £30, and if I had the photo, I would probably have been the richer by much more, when other newspapers got interested.
“Why were the Danes so interested in a photograph of a ‘ghost’ from the wilds of Kerry? That story is extremely interesting. According to old Kerry records a Danish ship, the Golden Lyon, of the Danish Asiatic Company, en route from Copenhagen to Tranquebar, was wrecked on the strand at Ballyheigue on October 20, 1730. It had been blown off its course by a fierce storm, but the local story was that the Crosbies of Ballyheigue Castle set up false lights on horses’ heads to lure the ship ashore. The ship’s captain, thinking the bobbing lights ahead from other shipping, kept on course, only to become a wreck on the Atlantic breakers.
At Ballyheigue in Ireland, a ghostly sailor stays on.
“The crew were rescued by Sir Thomas Crosbie and his tenants. Also salvaged were many bottles of Danish wine, clothing, equipment, and twelve chests of silver bars and coin. The last was for the purpose of paying for goods and labor in Tranquebar, and was the cause of six people meeting their deaths. Soon afterwards, Sir Thomas Crosbie died suddenly, by poison it was rumored, and his wife, Lady Margaret, claimed a sum of £4,500 for salvage and the loss of her husband. She said it was because of his labors and exertions on the night of the wreck that he died. The ship’s master, Captain J. Heitman, opposed the claim indignantly, and moved the twelve chests of silver down into the cellar under the strong tower of the castle. However, delay followed delay, and by June 1731, he still found he could not get the silver safely to Dublin, and home to Denmark, or on another ship.