Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Can we book a haunted castle please!

Sometimes people ask to spend a night in a haunted castle - prompting a thought as to whether, in this litigious age, they have any recourse if they book a 'haunted castle' and neither see nor hear anything!

But last month a group from Pennsylvania innocently celebrating a fiftieth birthday in one of our Aberdeenshire castles experienced the unexpected...

"Our Ghost was first seen when my friend Ed was putting wood in the fireplace in the basement room ... [He] swears there was a man sitting in the chair, dressed in tweed-like clothing - patches on the elbows, arms on either armrest staring straight ahead. He vanished very quickly.

The second sighting was when my friend Nancy and I were in the room watching the Stanley Cup playoff hockey game .... I was sitting in the chair closest to the door and Nancy was on the couch. Nancy saw a person sitting on the other chair. She was scared, didn't want to scare me so she left to go to bed. The next day she related the story, and she and Ed started comparing the look of the ghost and described him wearing the same exact thing, sitting in the exact same pose, etc.

Nancy is an artist and is going to draw "Angus."We felt no animosity from him, talked to him every time we went into that room - but no one else saw him. We figured he liked hockey and just wanted to hang out for a while!

Nancy also said in her room (the 4-poster which would have been the master bedroom at one time) she heard as clear as a bell a child saying "ma ma," in a whiny distressed kind of way, and when she looked out the window she thought she saw someone in the field above the house, however figured it was a tree. The next day when she looked there were no trees in that particular place.

Others who stayed in the castle said they felt cold breezes and "felt" a presence, never angry or mean - just peaceful and curious."

Out of consideration for Angus, future tenants will be asked to leave a hockey game showing on the TV where possible when they retire to bed!

3 comments:

Jayne said...

Just found your blog and I enjoyed the ghost story :)

Anonymous said...

What a fascinating story, it seems he's not a mean spirted ghost, that's good. do you know who it could be, or why he's still there. had someone died there? I'd love to know if you do any research on that.

Alastair Cunningham said...

I have been in touch with the castle owner and sadly there are no previous sightings of this ghost. (In my experience very few 'real' ghost stories can be satisfactorily related to an identifiable person!)