Poltergeist Over Scotland

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Introduction

‘The annoyances appear rather like the tricks of a mischievous imp. I refer to what the Germans call the Poltergeist, or racketing spectre, for the phenomenon is known in all countries, and has been known in all ages.’

Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature, 1848.

This book introduced the word ‘poltergeist’ into the English language.

This is the first-ever history of Scottish poltergeists. It covers 134 cases, from the 1630s to the present day. Herein, furniture flies, objects move, electricity goes haywire, fires and floods flourish, terrifying noises bluster and bang, skin is scratched, blood and maggots ooze, and foul stenches pervade.

Enjoy.

WHAT ARE POLTERGEISTS?

The late John Peel (1939–2004) once described his favourite group, The Fall, as ‘always different, always the same’. And so it is with poltergeists, whose cantrips are as similar – and as bafflingly pointless – today as they were many centuries ago.

As with other paranormal episodes, poltergeist cases tend to have two parts: the ‘description of phenomena’ (i.e. the experiences, as described by the participants or commentators) and the ‘interpretation’, which is an entirely different kettle of aquatic vertebrates. For example, two people can experience being overwhelmed by a mysterious bright light, and one will interpret it as a UFO/alien experience, while the other will ascribe to it a religious interpretation (angel/saint/vision of God). Interpretation of poltergeist experiences depends in part on the social and religious context of the time, and the belief system of the individual.

In 1691 the Revd Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, in what was then Highland Perthshire, wrote The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns & Fairies, in which he had this to say of the fairies: ‘The invisible Wights which haunt Houses … throw great Stones, Pieces of Earth and Wood, at the Inhabitants, [but] they hurt them not at all.’ This notion, that poltergeists were fairies, brownies, or household spirits such as kobolds or follets, was widely circulated in Europe during the Early Modern Period (Claude Lecouteux’s The Secret History of Poltergeists and Haunted Houses gives numerous examples) – but I suspect it would find few adherents today. Kirk also wrote of the belief that ‘those creatures that move invisibly in a house, and cast huge great stones, but do no much hurt’ were ‘souls that have not attained their rest’. The ‘survival hypothesis’, the idea that poltergeists are the ghosts of the restless dead, remains popular, at least with journalists and Spiritualists (whose religion is founded on the reality of communications with the dead).

Intriguingly enough, however, we do not find this belief expressed in the earliest Scottish cases – but post-Reformation Protestant theology had removed the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory (a kind of unpleasant holding-area for souls, perhaps akin to the waiting room at Birmingham Coach Station), and so could conceive of no mechanism by which a soul could escape from Heaven or Hell for a day-visit to Earth. Therefore, any time a ghost appeared, it could only be one thing: a demon, often taking on the disguise of a deceased person so as to lead the living into sin. The notion that poltergeists are demons or unclean/evil spirits is as potent today as it was in the seventeenth century. A subset of the ‘polt as demon’ trope is the idea that poltergeists are invoked by witches; and as case 100 shows, this interpretation has also persisted into modern times.

By the nineteenth century we find a rationalistic insistence on the mundane reality of poltergeists: they were either the result of misperception or simply tricks employed by cunning fraudsters (and indeed, a small number of Scottish cases definitely fall into this category). The post-Freudian twentieth century brought us the concept of the poltergeist as externalized distress – the idea that some people, known as ‘focal persons’, can manifest their internal unhappiness by unconsciously projecting it into the world beyond their body. This notion – now named Recurrent Spontaneous Psycho-Kinesis or RSPK – remains the favourite hypothesis with parapsychologists. Statistical studies showed that most RSPK cases centred on a young person, often female, who was usually suffering from some form of stress (puberty, problems with family, school or relationships, and so on). The ‘troubled young girl’ has become something of a default position, but many cases (both in this book and elsewhere) show that the ‘focus’ can be a middle-aged man, a menopausal woman, or two siblings, or even several people consecutively or simultaneously. In other words, anyone can be a poltergeist focus – although why (and how) only a few of the millions of people under stress actually generate RSPK still remains a mystery – if, of course, RSPK is the actual agency. Like other attempts at explaining poltergeists, it is at best a hypothesis.

The post-war period also saw the rise of alternative explanations for poltergeists: earth tremors or changes in subterranean water pressure; ley-lines or ‘earth energy’; and electromagnetic fields or atmospheric conditions. In recent years the pages of august journals such as that published by the Society for Psychical Research have suggested that some poltergeist activity may be directed by ‘discarnate intelligences’ – that is, non-corporeal entities. Here we see the resurgence of the idea of ghosts, demons or spirits, only without the religious baggage. Who knows, perhaps in the next few years the pendulum may swing towards fairies and kobolds again.

Personally, my considered opinion on the nature of poltergeists is very simple: I have absolutely no idea what they are.

POLTERGEISTS AND HAUNTINGS

There is a great deal of overlap between what are thought of as traditional hauntings (which principally feature apparitions, voices, noises, temperature changes, etc.) and poltergeist cases. Many hauntings encompass minor poltergeist activity, and apparitions number among the reported phenomena in a significant minority of poltergeist outbreaks. The two categories are not distinct and may well be part of the same spectrum of phenomena. There is also the popular notion that hauntings are ‘place-based’ while poltergeists are ‘person-based’; but several cases in this book (for example, 15, 64 and 79) would appear to contradict that notion. In fact, the totality of the cases as a whole contradict any standard notion, any set belief – poltergeists challenge expectations; their reality often trumps theory.

WHERE DO POLTERGEISTS MANIFEST?

The overwhelming majority of the polts within this book (111, or 82.8 per cent) appear where people live. Of these, twenty-one of sixty-six cases before the Second World War centred on farms or crofts (31.8 per cent of the pre-war total, 15.7 per cent of the full list); twelve took place in council houses (18 per cent of the post-war cases, 9 per cent of the full total); while seven castles or mansions appear (5.2 per cent), closely followed by six manses and rectories (4.5 per cent). Meanwhile, pubs, clubs or hotels feature in nine (6.7 per cent) cases, with other workplaces taking up twelve (9 per cent) of the total. Only a tiny number of episodes occur in uninhabited locations.

PHENOMENA

Here are the elements that characterise the Scottish cases, by frequency.

  1.   Objects/furniture moved: 96 of 134 cases (71.6 per cent).

  2.   Noises (taps, knocks, bangs, cries etc.): 88 (65.7 per cent).

  3.   Apparitions (including shadows and ‘mists’): 36 (26.9 per cent).

  4.   Displacement (an item vanishes from one place to be found elsewhere): 33 (24.6 per cent).

  5.   Doors locked/unlocked/opened/closed: 31 (23.1 per cent).

  6.   Damage to objects/furniture/fixtures: 28 (20.9 per cent).

  7.   Lithobolia (throwing of stones etc.): 24 (17.9 per cent).

  8.   Electrical effects: 22 (16.4 per cent; as electrical products only became available from the 1890s, the more accurate percentage is 22 out of 83, or 26.5 per cent).

  9.   Assaults (punches, shoves, scratches, etc.): 19 (14.2 per cent).

10.   Voices: 19 (14.2 per cent).

11.   Fire or smoke: 16 (11.9 per cent).

12.   Witchcraft/magic: 14 (10.5 per cent).

13.   Sense of presence: 12 (9 per cent).

14.   Apports (objects that appear ‘out of nowhere’): 9 (6.7 per cent).

15.   Conversations: 9 (6.7 per cent).

16.   Food interfered with: 9 (6.7 per cent).

17.   Invisible hands etc.: 9 (6.7 per cent).

18.   Temperature effects: 9 (6.7 per cent).

19.   Water: 9 (6.7 per cent).

20.   Writing: 9 (6.7 per cent).

21.   Demons/Satan: 9 (6.7 per cent).

22.   Smells: 8 (6 per cent).

23.   Miniature beings/fairies: 7 (5.2 per cent).

24.   Hoax (at least in part): 6 (4.5 per cent).

25.   Names (poltergeist names itself or responds to suggested names): 6 (4.5 per cent).

26.   Attacks on religious visitors/objects: 6 (4.5 per cent).

27.   Levitation of persons: 6 (4.5 per cent).

28.   Luminous effects: 6 (4.5 per cent).

29.   Music/tunes: 5 (3.7 per cent).

30.   Animals interfered with: 4 (3 per cent).

31.   Clothes etc. cut/slashed: 4 (3 per cent).

32.   Telephone effects: 4 (3 per cent; 4.8 per cent of cases since 1901, when the first telephone exchange in Scotland was opened).

33.   Voices imitating the living: 4 (3 per cent).

34.   ’Possession’/trance: 4 (3 per cent).

35.   Noxious substances (blood, maggots): 3 (2.2 per cent).

36.   Ouija board: 3 (2.2 per cent).

37.   Thrown items warm to the touch: 2 (1.5 per cent).

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The cases are numbered chronologically, starting with No.1 in 1635, and ending with No.134 in 2012. Each chapter has its own map, and cases can also be found by place name in the index. To assist with locating a particular case geographically, current local authority names have been used, e.g. South or North Lanarkshire rather than just Lanarkshire. For the vast Highland Region, however, I have also added the district, such as Lochaber or Caithness. Most cases are structured around the same format: the period (how long the disturbances lasted, where known); a description of the phenomena; an evaluation of the sources; a discussion of the context for the case, which is often crucial to its understanding; and the interpretation of the participants at the time, sometimes with my own (doubtless biased) comments. Where minor or repetitive cases have strained the boundaries of available space, I have retained them within the case numbering system, but reduced their content to the bare bones.

Chapter One

The Seventeenth Century

Here’s a knocking indeed! … Knock! knock! knock! … Who’s there, i’ the name o’ Beelzebub? … Who’s there, i’ the Devil’s name? Knock! knock! knock!— Never at quiet?

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

The seventeenth century was a tumultuous period in Scotland, with wars and rebellions often fracturing along religious lines. In a generation-long conflict over Church government, some 30,000 hardline Protestant fundamentalists, known as Covenanters, lost their lives to Royalist forces. This complex dispute spilled over into the English Civil Wars, with Scottish armies supporting one side and then another – eventually leading to Protestant Scotland being under military occupation by Cromwell’s Puritans.

After decades of religious ping pong, the first Jacobite Rebellion of 1689–90 had the unintended side-effect of making Scotland officially Presbyterian – even today, while the Established Church in England and Wales is Anglican (Episcopal, that is, led by bishops and archbishops), the Church of Scotland, being Presbyterian, is a bishop-free zone. Meanwhile, the fortunes of the Catholic minority waxed and waned.

Executions for witchcraft reached their peak in the 1660s, with a steady decline thereafter (although punctuated by the occasional burst of ferocity). Part of this reduction was attributable to changes in the intellectual world. A new way of thinking – something called ‘natural philosophy’ or ‘science’ – was attracting the best minds. This too led to a backlash, with such freethinkers being labelled ‘Saduccees’ or ‘Atheists’ – and, as we shall see, books were published with the stated purpose of proving that spirits and witches were a) genuine and b) part of God’s design for the universe. Where there are devils, the argument ran, there must be a God.

1. EDINBURGH: 1635?

We owe the earliest record of a Scottish poltergeist case to John Maitland, 1st Duke of Lauderdale. The polt infested a house occupied by an unnamed elderly Presbyterian minister and his son, less than 4 miles from Edinburgh – which would place it very much within the suburbs of the present city.

Period

Several weeks (?).

Phenomena

‘Their house was extraordinarily troubled with noises,’ writes Maitland:

… which they and their family, and many neighbours (who for divers weeks used to go watch with them) did ordinarily hear. It troubled them most on the Saturday night, and the night before their weekly lecture day. Sometimes they would hear all the locks in the house, on doors and chests, to fly open; yea, their clothes, which were at night locked up into trunks and chests, they found in the morning all hanging about the walls. Once they found their best linen taken out, the table covered with it, napkins as if they had been used, yea, and liquor in their cups as if company had been there at meat. The rumbling was extraordinary; the good old man commonly called his family to prayer when it was most troublesome, and immediately it was converted into gentle knocking, like the modest knock of a finger; but as soon as prayer was done, they should hear excessive knocking, as if a beam had been heaved by strength of many men against the floor.

Maitland adds another intriguing detail:

Never was there voice or apparition; but one thing was remarkable (you must know that it is ordinary in Scotland to have a half cannon-bullet in the chimney-corner, on which they break their great coals), a merry maid in the house, being accustomed to the rumblings, and so her fear gone, told her fellow maid-servant that if the Devil troubled them that night, she would brain him, so she took the half cannon-bullet [cannon-ball] into bed; the noise did not fail to awake her, nor did she fail in her design, but took up the great bullet, and with a threatening, threw it, as she thought, on the floor, but the bullet was never more seen; the minister turned her away for meddling and talking to it.

If we look at a contemporary work, such as Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army during the Great Civil War, written by Richard Symonds in 1644, we see that a typical cannon-ball of the period tipped the scales at 9lb (4.1kg).

Sources

Maitland did not witness the events himself, but heard of them some years later from the minister’s son (himself a clergyman); the episodes were also described to him by several other witnesses, including the Duke’s own steward, whose father and servants lived close to the infested house, and saw the events with their own eyes. The Duke vouched for the character of all these witnesses.

Context

Maitland was a central figure in the complex weft of seventeenth-century Scottish politics, in which religious affiliations, self-interest and brute force created alliances built on quicksand.

Starting as a supporter of the ultra-Presbyterian Covenanters, he switched to the party of King Charles. During the Civil Wars he was captured by Parliamentarian forces at the Battle of Worcester (1651) and held prisoner in Windsor Castle for nine years. From his confinement the Scottish Royalist aristocrat wrote a number of letters to Richard Baxter (1615–1691), an influential English Puritan minister (Baxter’s replies have not survived). The letter describing the Edinburgh poltergeist was dated 12 March 1659, and includes a hint of an even earlier poltergeist episode: ‘I could tell you an ancienter story before my time, in the house of one Burnet, in the north of Scotland, where strange things were seen, which I can get sufficiently attested.’ Unfortunately no further details were forthcoming.

Baxter reproduced Maitland’s letter in The Certainty of the World of Spirits Fully Evinced by the Unquestionable Histories of Apparitions, Operations, Witchcrafts, Voices, etc., written for the conviction of Sadducees and Infidels. Published in 1691, the book was ideologically designed to combat the growing intellectual scepticism of the age.

Maitland stated that the events occurred ‘since I was a married man’. The Duke married Lady Anne Home in 1632, so we can guess that the polt may have been active sometime around 1632–35. Maitland signed off his letter asking that it not be printed, for patriotic reasons: ‘Scottish stories would make the disaffected jeer Scotland, which is the object of scorn enough already.’

Interpretation

Baxter’s ideological commitment is clear from the title of The Certainty of the World of Spirits. He did not comment on Maitland’s story of a house ‘disquieted with noises’, but the reader is left to assume that the agency involved was an evil spirit or demon.

2. BOTARY, ABERDEENSHIRE: 1644

Period

Twenty days.

Phenomena

Patrik Malcolme was a poor labourer with a reputation as a ‘charmer’, a term which meant a practitioner of folk magic. While lodging at the farm of Alexander Chrystie he asked Chrystie’s servant Margaret Barbour for sex. She refused, upon which Malcolme took the girl’s left shoe, told her she would not earn her wages that year and described what she had hidden in a locked cupboard. That night, stones and clods of peat rained down on the roof of the farm in Grange. The ‘clodding’ – a term specific to north-east Scotland – continued for twenty days and nights, and only ceased when Margaret Barbour was removed from the house.

Sources

On 28 February 1644 Patrik Malcolme was investigated by the kirk session at Botarie (Botary – now the hamlet of Cairnie, 4 miles north-west of Huntly). Kirk sessions were the Presbyterian frontline in maintaining social order, usually dealing with fornication, drinking, gambling, and minor crimes of theft and violence. Occasionally they found themselves up against magic, supernatural beliefs, and witchcraft. According to witnesses, Malcolme begged milk from the wife of John Maltman in Botarie; when he was rebuffed, he cursed the cow, and it died shortly afterwards. He took away the ‘goodness’ or substance of Alexander Gray’s cornfield and transferred it onto a neighbour’s crop, and then told Gray he would bring the goodness back in exchange for the gift of a shirt. Both of these were standard accusations of low-level witchcraft of the time, and established Malcolme’s reputation (the Strathbogie Presbytery had also investigated another charmer, Issobell Malcolme, who was almost certainly a relative of Patrik). As for the clodding, it was witnessed by Alexander Chrystie and his neighbour Walter Brabner. Margaret Barbour did not appear at the investigation. The Presbytery deferred the case for a month, and thereafter it vanishes from the records. The original text can be found in Extracts from the Presbytery Book of Strathbogie 1631–1654, published by John Stuart in 1843.

Context

Charming – folk magic below the serious level of witchcraft – preoccupied many a rural minister or church elder at the time. In 1637 the representatives of the Strathbogie Presbytery asked the Synod of Moray for advice on how to deal with the plague of charmers operating in their area. Again in 1672 Strathbogie charmers were described as using ‘spells and other heathenish superstitions, expressions and practices over sick persons for their recovery’.

Interpretation

This is a deeply frustrating case, in which the scant records only hint at what must have been going on. Did the Presbytery think that Malcolme initiated the clodding through sorcery? Or did Alexander Chrystie eject Margaret Barbour because he deemed she was either responsible for or the focus of the events? And why did Malcolme regard Margaret’s left shoe as a ritual object in his quest for sexual power over her?

3. MOFFAT, DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY: 1650

Period

Days? Years?