Haunted Scotland (10 page)

The chair was knocked down for remarkably little and Angus removed it to the shop he was then occupying on Great Western
Road. ‘It was a bit like a cocoon,’ he
said. ‘It had the usual straw back. I dated it as Victorian although maybe it was a bit later, around the turn of the century. On inspection, I have to say it was a bit worn and
scruffy-looking, but I reckoned it’d look good on display once I’d patched it up a bit.’

Sales of antiques took off during the late 1990s, and Angus soon found himself making a tidy profit as Glasgow homeowners became more period conscious. However, an Orkney chair, despite its
visual compatibility with the designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was not considered a particularly desirable item, at least not at the price Angus had placed on it. ‘I didn’t want it
to end up in some student flat,’ he explained. ‘It was too good for that.’

As the weeks passed, the chair remained in the corner of the shop and although the occasional customer commented upon it, nobody made Angus an offer. That was until one Thursday evening when
just as he was on the point of closing up, an old man wearing a cloth cap and a heavy tweed overcoat entered the emporium and strode directly over to the chair.

‘That’s it,’ he said in a lilting northern accent. ‘That’s my chair.’

Angus smiled to himself. ‘Your chair?’ he asked. ‘How come?’

‘I wove that straw my very self when I was a lad,’ the man informed him.

Angus studied the stranger more closely, attempting a guess at his age. His skin, he saw, resembled wrinkled parchment. A salt-and-pepper stubble framed his cheeks. He must be seventy? Eighty
perhaps? No, he could not possibly be old enough to have made the chair. On the other hand, if he was genuinely intent on buying it, who was he, Angus, to argue?

‘How much?’ asked the man.

‘£350,’ said Angus.

The old man chuckled. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said.

Angus could barely conceal his amazement. ‘Do you have transport?’ he asked. ‘If you live nearby I could have it delivered.’

‘Nae problem,’ replied the man. ‘I’ll leave it until the morrow.’

Angus wondered about that. He had lost sales before when folk had promised to return, but under the circumstances there seemed to be no alternative.

‘OK. I open at 11 a.m.,’ he said. ‘But I’ll need a deposit if you’re serious.’

‘You can have the lot,’ said the old man, extracting a wad of well-worn Scottish bank notes from his overcoat pocket. ‘You’ll find it all there,’ he added, handing
him the money with a wrinkled hand.

‘Good to do business with you,’ said Angus hesitantly, as the old man took his leave.

‘You’re welcome,’ came the response.

For no particular reason, Angus found himself unable to discard the image of the old man in the heavy tweed coat. Having closed the shutters, he made himself a cup of coffee and settled himself
down in the Orkney chair. It was the first time he had actually made use of it, and, as he lowered himself into its womb-like enclosure, everything around him began to shift and change.

Gone were the papered shop walls hung with prints and brica-brac. The front counter and random pieces of Chippendale, the Georgian sideboards, tables and brass fenders were no more. Instead,
Angus now found himself in a spartan room, its stone walls dimly lit by the flickering of an open peat fire. The floor upon which his feet rested was flagstone and cold, and crudely inserted into
the walls on either side of the fireplace were two bunk beds.

Angus blinked. He must be hallucinating, he concluded. He blamed it on the strength of the black South American coffee in
his mug. Then he noticed that the old man had
returned, but no longer wore the heavy coat. Instead, he was warming himself in front of the fire in a linen shirt, his baggy tweed trousers supported by string braces.

And the old man was not alone. Seated in a high-backed Orkney chair identical to the one Angus was occupying himself was a woman with a heavy shawl draped over her shoulders. Her coarse brown
hair was tied back in a bun, and she seemed pre-occupied with her knitting.

Gone was the outside noise of traffic heading into the centre of Glasgow and west towards Dumbarton. Instead, Angus heard only the strength of the wind, a vast, ceaseless roar that pounded the
senses as the peat in the fireplace flared and smoked.

The man seemed younger, he thought, although still rough and unkempt. The woman, whose face had a shiny pink surface, must presumably be of a similar vintage. There was a dusty, otherworldly
look about the two of them. It was all far too peculiar for Angus to get his head around.

Then, as quickly as the vision had emerged, everything returned to normal. In a state of disbelief, Angus hastily pulled himself out of the high-backed chair and strode into the back shop to
pour the remains of his coffee into the sink. Having locked the doors and switched on the alarm system, he headed home.

Never an early riser, it was around 11.15 the next morning when Angus opened up the shop, and it was only then that it crossed his mind that his visitor of the night before might have already
been and gone. This was exactly the thought he was turning over when he closed the shop door behind him and realised something was wrong.

Everything else was in its place, but he saw, to his horror, that the high-backed Orkney chair had gone. Appalled, he looked about, wildly checking the windows and locks for signs of a
break-in. No, everything with the exception of the chair was exactly as it had been left the previous day.

It defied explanation. It was absurd. What on earth was he to say to the old man when he returned to collect his chair? That it had vanished overnight? He would think him crazy, and there was
the small matter of the payment. Angus would have no alternative but to give it back.

Momentarily, he contemplated calling in the police, but there was no evidence of a break-in. The shop door had definitely been locked; the windows shuttered. Angus was utterly baffled. The chair
had definitely been in its place when he had last seen it.

All of that day and over the weeks and months that followed, Angus anxiously awaited the return of the old man. Every second day he rehearsed what he would say to him and speculated as to how he
might react. A year passed and the lease of the shop in Great Western Road came to an end. Angus moved premises. He never saw the old man or the high-backed Orkney chair ever again.

Time-slips manifest themselves in a great many ways. Sometimes you see something; sometimes you do not. The past and the present and the future overlap seamlessly, but every
now and then something goes wrong.

‘Nae man can tether time or tide’, is a favourite quote from Robert Burns’s
Tam o’ Shanter,
and it is therefore perhaps all the more appropriate that one of the
more contrary examples of chronology I have come across should have occurred within a few miles of the bard’s birthplace.

Molly Peaston is the locations editor for a well-known London-based homes and interiors magazine, and comes regularly to Scotland to seek out stylish country houses to write about and
photograph. Having made several visits to the west coast,
she made contact with the late James Hunter Blair, owner of Blairquhan, an imposing William Burn neo-Greek
masterpiece near Maybole. Ever the generous host, Hunter Blair enthusiastically invited her to lunch and she set off from Glasgow in her hire car.

Never particularly good at following directions, Molly decided she had travelled the requisite distance when she arrived at a lodge and some imposing gates which, according to her calculations,
must have been those of Blairquhan.

The driveway was typical: narrow, pitted with pot holes and flanked on either side by ditches and a tangle of bushes and trees. It seemed to go on forever until, turning a bend, she could see
ahead of her a fine Palladian house. ‘Wow,’ she thought to herself.

Excited at her find, she stopped the car immediately below the front steps, and, having climbed them, eagerly tugged the bell-pull on the right of the front door. In the distance, she could hear
a hollow clanging sound, but there was no response. She tried again, once more without success. Noticing that the door stood slightly ajar, she gave it a gentle push and stepped inside. ‘It
was amazingly palatial, with a wonderful high ceiling,’ she recalled afterwards. ‘On the walls on either side of the vestibule were stags’ antlers and sporting
trophies.’

Molly called out to announce her presence, and, after a short wait, a middle-aged woman appeared. ‘I’m here to take photographs,’ Molly informed her, at which the woman nodded
and showed her into a spacious drawing room furnished with chintz-covered sofas and lavishly hung ancestral portraits. When Molly turned to ask what she should do next, the woman was no longer
there.

‘Ah well, I thought to myself, I might as well get on with it,’ Molly told me later.

Exploring the rooms, Molly snapped away with her Instamatic camera to record everything she thought would interest her editor who, if she liked what she saw, would almost
certainly commission a professional set of pictures from one of the magazine’s freelance contributors.

‘I was starting to feel hungry so I went to see if I could find the woman I’d met in the hall,’ said Molly. ‘I called out, hoping she’d hear me, but there was just
nobody around. Finally, I thought I’d have a go at telephoning Jamie on my mobile. After all, he had invited me to lunch, and although I wasn’t expecting him to come up with a
full-blown luncheon, it seemed a bit odd he hadn’t put in an appearance to welcome me. A bowl of soup would have done just fine.’

When Jamie answered her call he sounded puzzled. ‘I was loyally expecting you at least an hour ago,’ he told her. ‘I thought you’d probably got lost.’

‘No, I’m here already,’ she replied. ‘I’ve been going around the house taking photographs. I hope that’s OK?’

There was a silence on the other end of the phone.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Jamie at last. ‘I’ve been here all morning. I would have seen you.’

A feeling of apprehension began to dawn on Molly.

‘Does your house have large pillars at the door, and a large marble hallway?’

‘Yes,’ replied Jamie.

‘Do you have a housekeeper who wears a calf-length patterned skirt? And is there a wide staircase with a full-length portrait of a woman on the landing?’

‘Not that I’m aware of,’ said Jamie.

‘Oh my God, I think I’m in the wrong house,’ said Molly.

‘Describe it to me,’ continued Jamie, falling silent as she did so.

As best she could, Molly filled in the details. When she had finished, she thought Jamie sounded strangely distant.

‘I think you should go back down the drive you arrived on and follow the road signs south towards Maybole,’ he told her calmly. ‘Keep your mobile phone on so I can talk you
in.’

Molly followed his instructions and much to her relief arrived at Blairquhan some twenty minutes later. Sitting down to enjoy a bowl of soup and a glass of wine, Jamie asked her to slowly go
over again where she had been and what she had seen.

‘It can’t be more than twenty miles from here,’ she told him and he nodded thoughtfully. When she had finished, he seemed to be confused.

‘I think the place you’ve been describing to me is probably Montgomerie House, which is next to Tarbolton,’ he told her.

‘Thank goodness for that,’ she said. ‘I thought I was going mad.’

‘There’s only one problem,’ continued Jamie. ‘Montgomerie House, which used to belong to the Arthur family, loyal friends of mine, was sold in the 1960s. Shortly after
that it was burned to the ground in a fire. There is nothing left of it. You can just make out where it was by the markings in the field, but everything else has gone.’

Molly looked askance. ‘But I have photographs of the rooms!’ she protested.

To be certain, the two of them later that day retraced Molly’s journey back to Tarbolton and, sure enough, as soon as they turned into the drive, she saw that the mansion had vanished.
Thankfully Jamie was highly amused at her predicament.

‘Make sure you send me the photographs when you get them developed,’ he reminded her as she set off in her car again towards Glasgow. ‘Now those will be interesting!’

Remember that this was in the early days of digital photography and before the science was improved, most glossy magazines still
preferred to use film. As soon as she was
back in her office, therefore, Molly handed over her spools to be processed, but to her bitter disappointment, and eternal bewilderment, when her pictures were returned they were found to be
over-exposed. Virtually nothing in the images was identifiable, only the faint outline of a large exterior building, a washed-out interior staircase and a series of seemingly empty spaces. All of
the pictures were two-tone, with a yellowish milky substance seeping over the surfaces. It was as if they had been dropped in acid.

‘Nothing like that has ever happened to me before,’ Molly informed Jamie over the telephone. ‘You must think I’m completely off my trolley. But I was there. I really was.
I know I was. I couldn’t have made it up.’

Jamie was sympathetic. ‘That sort of thing happens a lot in Ayrshire,’ he said kindly.

12

The village of Sauchie in Clackmannanshire consists of a quiet, close-knit community, and it was into this safe environment that the eleven-year-old Virginia Campbell arrived
with her mother in 1960. They had come to live with her elder brother and his family, whilst their father remained in Ireland to sell the family farm in Donegal.

It proved a major upheaval for a young girl. Moreover, Virginia desperately missed her only friend, Annie, and her dog, Toby. The situation was further exacerbated when her mother took
employment at a boarding house in Dollar. Virginia not only found herself obliged to share a bed with her younger niece Margaret, but having to attend a new school.