Scottish Ghost Stories

Scottish Ghost Stories

With an introduction by Helen McClory

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FLAME TREE 451

London & New York

Introduction

So you’re here, at last. You’ve stepped into this book through the great creaking doors of the cover, and you find yourself in this antechamber. As you move forward into the stories, it might do to pause and orient yourself a moment – though perhaps you have already read the collection, and have come back to the introduction to see what it might offer you, now that spoilers are no risk. Either way, you can ask yourself, what was the country you came through, can you recall? It might have been the wild moorland of the Borders where the ling bells toss in the unfettered winds, or else a ride through a grand estate, tree-lined and shady, or perhaps the treachery of a rocky strand, lapped by those eerily calm waters that mark riptides, just awaiting some young soul full of hubris to drag them out to sea. In all lands are to be found corners of strangeness and abandonment, but it does seem that Scotland in particular has a good share of ruin and lonely shoreline, and that even the gentlest of haughs and glens can turn hostile at a moment’s notice, or at the settling in of night.

The landscape and culture in which a writer is immersed inevitably find their way under the skin of the writing, forming some of the hard surface beneath. It would be difficult to write ghost stories in a country like Scotland without a hint at least of rock and water, old stone upon old stone and brambles peeking through glassless windows, the whisper of the old ways and fireside murmurings – and historical wickedness. And that is what you will find in the stories that follow. In Allan Cunningham’s ‘The Haunted Ships’ as in ‘The Sin Eater’ by Fiona MacLeod (pen name of William Sharp) there’s the cold spray and frightening isolation of the coast, though one is on the Solway firth and the other near and on Iona. The sea and its shoreline is a place between, meant for fated destinies and ritual, and those who ignore either or both are in for much trouble.

Other landscapes seem easier to traverse, but hide hidden pains, and bring them up when conditions are right. Margaret Oliphant’s lengthy and entrancing tale ‘The Open Door’ is set in Brentwood, a refined country estate the protagonist is renting with his family after a troubled stay in India. They seek the calm greenness of the Scottish lowlands after living for many years in a place they were ill suited to – that ruined their health but evidently filled their coffers, only to find the fabric of reality draws back over the ruins on their doorstep. British colonization, to which many Scots applied themselves heartily and which was still in active process when these stories were written, creates layers to both this story and ‘The Ghost of the Hindu Child’ by Elliott O’Donnell. In the latter, a vengeful ghost claims more of our sympathy as modern readers – though O’Donnell lightly gestures towards a singular act of cruelty, the broader, numberless atrocities of empire we can infer. Ghost stories, by their universal shared element, that of the return of the dead to trouble the living, are good at allowing room for this: saying that there is more standing in the shadows in front and behind us than we allow ourselves to believe on our splendid sunlit days. That what we imagine immutable, almost without thinking – our health, our families, our names – might just be crumbling beneath us.

Sometimes a ghost or supernatural creature functions as a force of rebalancing, the idea of the long arc of divine justice – even if it is a justice with collateral damage. Many of these stories tell of people who are secure, moneyed, being almost undone by a personal or familial legacy of evil ways, as in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ by George MacDonald, or simply, like in ‘The Open Door’, by a history the new family is not privy to, and only the servants and locals can ken. In others, desperation, as much as entitlement and greed, can open the door to the supernatural – like the long-suffering shepherding parents of Mary Burnet in James Hogg’s eponymous tale, or Neil Ross, driven to eating sins for his coin.

The outsider, the loathed scapegoat, the singular figure who can bear a burden or message in their very bodies is seen too in ‘Thrawn Janet’ – there’s much to be discussed regarding Robert Louis Stevenson’s racist choice to depict a black man as the figure that bedevils Soulis alongside witchy Janet. There is detail to notice and interpret, as you read on your way: scary tales of morality and immorality, tempered here by the complexities and nuances of tellings, and, too, of unexpected levity. A devil of a very different sort lands Buchan’s Duncan Stewart on ‘A Journey of Little Profit’, when he stumbles into a fine and welcoming house, out on those Borders moors, while driving his ill-gotten sheep too late from the nearest tavern. And the ghosts of Glamis Castle, in Elliott O’Donnell’s second story, are more a cavalcade of bogies than a tide of dread.

Amidst this chatter of themes and imagery, the talking around the stories, there is something I’ve neglected – the moments within many which are genuinely frightening, in sometimes a quiet and other times oppressively sudden way. Darkness moves, and forms within it shift and come slowly, slowly, nearer. A body buckles in a way a living body should not. A blank stare denotes a battle inside with terrible, unknowable forces. Will it come back to you again as it has to me, the peculiarly Scottish strangeness of a ghost of a juniper tree, or the placing of bread upon the chest of a corpse? The sense of loss and the sense of inescapable return? What lies ahead of you, or behind you, is this: what you allow yourself to attend to might come creeping inside, to make of you, if even for a moment, a haunted landscape.

Helen McClory

A Journey of Little Profit

John Buchan

The Devil he sang, the Devil he played

High and fast and free.

And this was ever the song he made

As it was told to me.

"Oh, I am the king of the air and the ground,

And lord of the seasons’ roll,

And I will give you a hundred pound,

If you will give me your soul."

The Ballad of Grey Weather

The cattle market of Inverforth is, as all men know north of the Tweed, the greatest market of the kind in the land. For days in the late Autumn there is the lowing of oxen and the bleating of sheep among its high wooden pens, and in the rickety sale-rings the loud clamour of auctioneers and the talk of farmers. In the open yard where are the drovers and the butchers, a race always ungodly and law-despising, there is such a Babel of cries and curses as might wake the Seven Sleepers. From twenty different adjacent eating-houses comes the clatter of knives, where the country folk eat their dinner of beef and potatoes, with beer for sauce, and the collies grovel on the ground for stray morsels. Hither come a hundred types of men, from the Highland cateran, with scarce a word of English, and the gentleman-farmer of Inverness and Ross, to lowland graziers and city tradesmen, not to speak of blackguards of many nationalities and more professions.

It was there I first met Duncan Stewart of Clachamharstan, in the Moor of Rannoch, and there I heard this story. He was an old man when I knew him, grizzled and wind-beaten; a prosperous man, too, with many herds like Jacob and much pasture. He had come down from the North with kyloes, and as he waited on the Englishmen with whom he had trysted, he sat with me through the long day and beguiled the time with many stories. He had been a drover in his youth, and had travelled on foot the length and breadth of Scotland; and his memory went back hale and vigorous to times which are now all but historical. This tale I heard among many others as we sat on a pen amid the smell of beasts and the jabber of Gaelic: –

"When I was just turned of twenty-five I was a wild young lad as ever was heard of. I had taken to the droving for the love of a wild life, and a wild life I led. My father’s heart would be broken long syne with my doings, and well for my mother that she was in her grave since I was six years old. I paid no heed to the ministrations of godly Mr. Macdougall of the Isles, who bade me turn from the error of my ways, but went on my own evil course, making siller, for I was a braw lad at the work and a trusted, and knowing the inside of every public from the pier of Cromarty to the streets of York. I was a wild drinker, caring in my cups for neither God nor man, a great hand with the cards, and fond of the lasses past all telling. It makes me shameful to this day to think on my evil life when I was twenty-five.

"Well, it chanced that in the back of the month of September I found myself in the city of Edinburgh with a flock of fifty sheep which I had bought as a venture from a drunken bonnet-laird and was thinking of selling somewhere wast the country. They were braw beasts, Leicester every one of them, well-fed and dirt-cheap at the price I gave. So it was with a light heart that I drove them out of the town by the Merchiston Road along by the face of the Pentlands. Two or three friends came with me, all like myself for folly, but maybe a little bit poorer. Indeed, I cared little for them, and they valued me only for the whisky which I gave them to drink my health in at the parting. They left me on the near side of Colinton, and I went on my way alone.

"Now, if you’ll be remembering the road, you will mind that at the place called Kirk Newton, just afore the road begins to twine over the Big Muir and almost at the head of the Water o’ Leith, there is a verra fine public. Indeed, it would be no lee to call it the pest public between Embro’ and Glesca. The good wife, Lucky Craik by name, was an old friend of mine, for many a good gill of her brandy have I bought; so what would I be doing but just turning aside for refreshment? She met me at the door verra pleased-like to see me, and soon I had my legs aneath her table and a basin of toddy on the board before me. And whom did I find in the same place but my old comrade Toshie Maclean from the backside of Glen-Lyon. Toshie and I were acquaintances so old that it did not behove us to be parting quick. Forbye the day was chill without; and within the fire was grand and the crack of the best.

"Then Toshie and I got on quarrelling about the price of Lachlan Farawa’s beasts that he sold at Falkirk; and, the drink having aye a bad effect on my temper, I was for giving him the lie and coming off in a great rage. It was about six o’clock in the evening and an hour to nightfall, so Mistress Craik comes in to try and keep me. ‘Losh, Duncan,’ says she, ‘ye’ll never try and win ower the muir the nicht. It’s mae than ten mile to Carnwath, and there’s nocht atween it and this but whaups and heathery braes.’ But when I am roused I will be more obstinate than ten mules, so I would be going, though I knew not under Heaven where I was going till. I was too full of good liquor and good meat to be much worth at thinking, so I got my sheep on the road an’ a big bottle in my pouch, and set off into the heather. I knew not what my purpose was, whether I thought to reach the shieling of Carnwath, or whether I expected some house of entertainment to spring up by the wayside. But my fool’s mind was set on my purpose of getting some miles further in my journey ere the coming of darkness.

"For some time I jogged happily on, with my sheep running well before me and my dogs trotting at my heels. We left the trees behind and struck out on the broad grassy path which bands the moor like the waist-strap of a sword. It was most dreary and lonesome with never a house in view, only bogs and grey hillsides, and ill-looking waters. It was stony, too, and this more than aught else caused my Dutch courage to fail me, for I soon fell wearied, since much whisky is bad travelling fare, and began to curse my folly. Had my pride no kept me back, I would have returned to Lucky Craik’s; but I was like the devil for stiffneckedness, and thought of nothing but to push on.

"I own that I was verra well tired and quite spiritless when I first saw the House. I had scarce been an hour on the way, and the light was not quite gone; but still it was geyan dark, and the place sprang somewhat suddenly on my sight. For, looking a little to the left, I saw over a little strip of grass a big square dwelling with many outhouses, half farm and half pleasure-house. This, I thought, is the verra place I have been seeking and made sure of finding, so whistling a gay tune, I drove my flock toward it.

"When I came to the gate of the court, I saw better of what sort was the building I had arrived at. There was a square yard with monstrous high walls, at the left of which was the main block of the house, and on the right what I took to be the byres and stables. The place looked ancient, and the stone in many places was crumbling away; but the style was of yesterday, and in no way differing from that of a hundred steadings in the land. There were some kind of arms above the gateway, and a bit of an iron stanchion; and when I had my sheep inside of it, I saw that the court was all grown up with green grass. And what seemed queer in that dusky half-light was the want of sound. There was no neichering of horses, nor routing of kye, nor clack of hens, but all as still as the top of Ben Cruachan. It was warm and pleasant, too, though the night was chill without.

"I had no sooner entered the place than a row of sheep-pens caught my eye, fixed against the wall in front. This I thought mighty convenient, so I made all haste to put my beasts into them; and finding that there was a good supply of hay within, I left them easy in my mind, and turned about to look for the door of the House.

"To my wonder, when I found it, it was open wide to the wall; so, being confident with much whisky, I never took thought to knock, but walked boldly in. There’s some careless folk here, thinks I to myself, and I much misdoubt if the man knows aught about farming. He’ll maybe just be a town’s body taking the air on the muirs.

"The place I entered upon was a hall, not like a muirland farmhouse, but more fine than I had ever seen. It was laid with a verra fine carpet, all red and blue and gay colours, and in the corner in a fireplace a great fire crackled. There were chairs, too, and a walth of old rusty arms on the walls, and all manner of whigmaleeries that folk think ornamental. But nobody was there, so I made for the staircase which was at the further side, and went up it stoutly. I made scarce any noise, so thickly was it carpeted, and I will own it kind of terrified me to be walking in such a place. But when a man has drunk well he is troubled not overmuckle with modesty or fear, so I e’en stepped out and soon came to a landing where was a door.

"Now, thinks I, at last I have won to the habitable parts of the house; so laying my finger on the sneck I lifted it and entered, and there before me was the finest room in all the world; indeed I abate not a jot of the phrase, for I cannot think of anything finer. It was hung with braw pictures and lined with big bookcases of oak well-filled with books in fine bindings. The furnishing seemed carved by a skilled hand, and the cushions and curtains were soft velvet. But the best thing was the table, which was covered with a clean white cloth and set with all kind of good meat and drink. The dishes were of silver, and as bright as Loch Awe water in an April sun. Eh, but it was a braw, braw sight for a drover! And there at the far end, with a great bottle of wine before him, sat the master.

"He rose as I entered, and I saw him to be dressed in the best of town fashion, a man of maybe fifty years, but hale and well-looking, with a peaked beard and trimmed moustache and thick eyebrows. His eyes were slanted a thought, which is a thing I hate in any man, but his whole appearance was pleasing.

"‘Mr. Stewart?’ says he courteously, looking at me. ‘Is it Mr. Duncan Stewart that I will be indebted to for the honour of this visit?’

"I stared at him blankly, for how did he ken my name?

"‘That is my name,’ I said, ‘but who the devil tell’t you about it?’

"‘Oh, my name is Stewart myself,’ says he, ‘and all Stewarts should be well acquaint.’

"‘True,’ said I, ‘though I don’t mind your face before. But now I am here, I think you have a most gallant place, Mr. Stewart.’

"‘Well enough. But how have you come to’t? We’ve few visitors.’

"So I told him where I had come from, and where I was going, and why I was forewandered at this time of night among the muirs. He listened keenly, and when I had finished, he says verra friendly-like, ‘Then you’ll bide all night and take supper with me. It would never be doing to let one of the clan go away without breaking bread. Sit ye down, Mr. Duncan.’

"I sat down gladly enough, though I own that at first I did not half like the whole business. There was something unchristian about the place, and for certain it was not seemly that the man’s name should be the same as my own, and that he should be so well posted in my doings. But he seemed so well-disposed that my misgivings soon vanished.

"So I seated myself at the table opposite my entertainer. There was a place laid ready for me, and beside the knife and fork a long horn-handled spoon. I had never seen a spoon so long and queer, and I asked the man what it meant. ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘the broth in this house is very often hot, so we need a long spoon to sup it. It is a common enough thing, is it not?’

"I could answer nothing to this, though it did not seem to me sense, and I had an inkling of something I had heard about long spoons which I thought was not good; but my wits were not clear, as I have told you already. A serving man brought me a great bowl of soup and set it before me. I had hardly plunged spoon intil it, when Mr. Stewart cries out from the other end: ‘Now, Mr. Duncan, I call you to witness that you sit down to supper of your own accord. I’ve an ill name in these parts for compelling folk to take meat with me when they dinna want it. But you’ll bear me witness that you’re willing.’

"‘Yes, by God, I am that,’ I said, for the savoury smell of the broth was rising to my nostrils. The other smiled at this as if well-pleased.

"I have tasted many soups, but I swear there never was one like that. It was as if all the good things in the world were mixed thegether – whisky and kale and shortbread and cockyleeky and honey and salmon. The taste of it was enough to make a body’s heart loup with fair gratitude. The smell of it was like the spicy winds of Arabia, that you read about in the Bible, and when you had taken a spoonful you felt as happy as if you had sellt a hundred yowes at twice their reasonable worth. Oh, it was grand soup!

"‘What Stewarts did you say you corned from?’ I asked my entertainer.

"‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I’m connected with them all, Athole Stewarts, Appin Stewarts, Rannoch Stewarts, and a’. I’ve a heap o’ land thereaways.’

"‘Whereabouts?’ says I, wondering. ‘Is’t at the Blair o’ Athole, or along by Tummel side, or wast the Loch o’ Rannoch, or on the Muir, or in Benderloch?’

"‘In all the places you name,’ says he.

"‘Got damn,’ says I, ‘then what for do you not bide there instead of in these stinking lawlands?’

At this he laughed softly to himself. ‘Why, for maybe the same reason as yoursel, Mr. Duncan. You know the proverb, A’ Stewarts are sib to the Deil."’

"I laughed loudly, ‘Oh, you’ve been a wild one, too, have you? Then you ‘re not worse than mysel. I ken the inside of every public in the Cowgate and Cannongate, and there’s no another drover on the road my match at fechting and drinking and dicing.’ And I started on a long shameless catalogue of my misdeeds. Mr. Stewart meantime listened with a satisfied smirk on his face.

"‘Yes, I’ve heard tell of you, Mr. Duncan,’ he says. ‘But