Haunted Scotland (12 page)

That evening the Reverend Hamilton of St Matthew’s Church paid them a visit. ‘I received a call from the police this afternoon asking if I would look in on you,’ he explained
when Mike opened the front door and invited him in. ‘I understand that Gideon Somerville has been causing you a few problems.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Mike. ‘Who is Gideon Somerville?’

The Reverend Hamilton shook his head. ‘On that basis, I conclude that nobody has told you about him?’

Mike turned to Poppy, and she shrugged her shoulders. Meanwhile, Jennifer and Mandy had entered the room. The minister, informally dressed without the collar of his calling, nodded to them as
they sat down on either side of the fireplace. ‘I wouldn’t want you to have nightmares about what I’m about to tell you,’ he continued.

‘It’s all right,’ said Poppy confidently. ‘We don’t hide anything from our children.’

‘Quite right. Quite right,’ said the Reverend Hamilton. ‘All the same, it’s not a pretty story.’

A while ago, he explained to them, back in the 1970s it was, the steading which they now occupied was used for storing agricultural equipment by Gideon Somerville. An unmarried tenant farmer in
his forties, he late in life became engaged to a local girl whom he had previously employed to cook and clean for him. According to local gossip, she had really set her cap at him and bossed him
about something terrible, always fussing over how he dressed and, in particular, encouraging him to stop smoking. On the eve of their wedding, however, she vanished without a trace.

‘Her family and Gideon searched high and low for her, but she was never found,’ said the minister. ‘Then the rumours started. Some claimed she’d gone off abroad; others
whispered he’d done her in. Gideon was notorious for having a bad temper. Most folk around here were amazed she should even have given him a second glance. But then love can be a funny old
business, whichever way you look at it.

‘Anyway, the police were contacted and Gideon was questioned, but seemed genuinely distraught at her absence. Nobody could
prove anything and eventually the
investigation was called off. After that, Gideon became a recluse and began drinking heavily.

‘He kept his distance from the village and the folk around here avoided him. I can remember coming here to see him when I first started my ministry at St Matthew’s. It was a complete
waste of time. His appearance alone was a shock. He resembled an old tramp, unshaven and unwashed. He reeked of pipe tobacco. I think he must have chewed it.

‘Although I hate to concede defeat, I knew at once there was nothing I could do for him. He wouldn’t allow me the light of day and made it perfectly clear I was unwelcome on his
land. So, much to my shame, I left him to get on with whatever it was he did. The next thing I heard was that he’d died of liver failure or some such disease. I was genuinely sorry to hear
that. Nobody deserves to die alone, and when they had tracked down his nearest relative, the lawyers asked me to preside over his burial service.’

The Reverend Hamilton shook his head sadly. ‘A sorry soul. And that would have been the end of it, except when it came to light that the rumours about the girl had been right all
along.’

Mike exchanged glances with Poppy and their daughters. ‘You mean that . . . ?’

The minister nodded. ‘He had indeed murdered his fiancée.’

‘But apart from the smell of tobacco, what does that have to do with us?’ asked Mike after a shocked silence.

‘Ah,’ said the minister. ‘I’ll explain.’

For over forty years, the scandalmongers had insisted Gideon Somerville had done away with his bride on the night before their wedding. But it was not until the farm and steadings were sold for
development that the terrible truth emerged. During demolition work, the diggers had unearthed the skeleton of a thirty-year-old woman wrapped in a blanket and buried under the floor of an
outhouse. Through forensic and tooth analysis, it was confirmed that these were the remains of the missing housekeeper.

‘And all those years he’d had her under his feet less than a stone’s throw from the farm,’ said the minister, shaking his head.

‘But from what I’ve been told, the old farm house was on the other side of the river in the new housing development,’ said Mike. ‘Why should Gideon turn up
here?’

The minister faced him. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but this is where he used to come to escape from her nagging. Locals say he came over here for a smoke of an evening, and after she
disappeared, he slept here. Guilty conscience, no doubt. He needed to distance himself from the scene of his crime.’

‘So what you’re telling us is that our home is haunted by a horrid old farmer who murdered his future wife and still likes to go out for a smoke at night?’ said Poppy,
shuddering.

‘Exactly.’

‘And you mean to say the previous owner knew about this and didn’t tell us?’

‘Under the circumstances, would you?’

The Lumleys, as a unit, were speechless. Then Mike spoke. ‘So is there anything we can do about it?’

‘That’s exactly why I’m here tonight,’ said the Reverend Hamilton.

The exorcism that followed was conducted along the prescribed pattern of prayers and a leading towards the light. ‘Especially difficult when the soul of the departed is being sent to
Hell,’ explained the Reverend Hamilton with a grimace. ‘Knowing what we know, there’s no guarantee it will work.’

However, by the following month all traces of the putrid tobacco smell had dispersed. The story of Gideon Somerville nevertheless continued to bother Mike and Poppy, especially as they knew
where and when it had taken place, and in living
memory. ‘It’ll be impossible if and when we decide to sell up and move on,’ complained Mike.

‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Poppy reassured him.

Of course, there was an up-side to this gruesome saga. Jennifer remained in her new bedroom and never again accused her sister Mandy of interfering with her make-up and clothes. Moreover, both
girls revelled in telling the story of Gideon Somerville to their school friends who, despite being dependent on public transport, were all too eager to travel out of town to stay in the guest room
at weekends.

Six months later Roy Spooner was promoted to captain of the school football team and he and Jennifer became what is nowadays generally known as a serious item.

‘Living in the country’s not so bad after all,’ she informed her mother as the family sat down to dinner one night. ‘It’s not nearly as boring as I thought it would
be.’

13

It was well over twenty years ago that an elderly lady of my acquaintance confessed to me that in her sleep she had seen fire falling from the sky over southern Scotland. Her
nightmares started in the summer of 1988, six months before Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the small town of Lockerbie.

Dreams are common to everyone, although only occasionally do we recall their content in detail. Watch a sleeping figure while he or she is dreaming and the eyelids and mouth twitch and flicker
and the eyebrows furrow. Something involuntary is taking place.

Jolyon Spence from Moulin in Perthshire was in her mid-twenties when she experienced a series of vivid dreams. ‘They always came around dawn in that half-sleep when the ghosts start to
appear,’ she said.

‘I was in a car with a man at the wheel and two children in the back seats. We were all being very happy and jolly, although it was pouring with rain outside. The
car was heading along some nondescript Highland road with trees on either side. I don’t remember the rain being particularly heavy but all of a sudden there was this great roaring noise and a
mountain of rocks and mud came crashing down in front of us.’

Jolyon told me the nightmare repeated itself until she met her husband Ted. When they married in 1991, they stopped. Michael and Nicholas were born, and as they were growing up, she and Ted
rented a house for the summer holidays at Killin in Perthshire.

‘Mike and Nick absolutely adored it,’ she recalled nostalgically. ‘They got to sail and water ski on Loch Earn and their dad took them fishing. It was lots of fun, but one
evening, it was my birthday and we’d been out to dinner at a local restaurant. We were travelling back through Lochearnhead when I suddenly had this awful sensation of impending doom. I
looked at the road ahead of us and it was just exactly as it had been in my dream. It was raining. Ted was cracking jokes and the boys were laughing, and before I knew what was happening, there was
a massive landslide. Fortunately, my husband slammed on the brakes and we swerved into a ditch.’ Thankfully, nobody was hurt and they were not alone in their plight. Around fifty other
motorists were trapped in their cars until a helicopter from RAF Kinloss arrived to fly them to safety. Heavy rain from the tropical storm Bonnie was blamed.

‘It was a horrific shock at the time, and a miracle that we weren’t all swept away,’ said Jolyon with a shudder. ‘But although I didn’t exactly realise it at the
time, it’s reassuring to know I’d been forewarned, even if it was thirteen years before anything happened.’

Aside from warning, dreams can have a practical application.

Having been born and brought up beside the hamlet of Pencaitland, Avril Kirk is no outsider to East Lothian folklore, and today lives in the village of Humbie, where she
has been researching her family tree.

One of her first discoveries was that her great-great-grandmother, Agnes Bone, had been born in Dunbar. Now, Avril already knew that Agnes’s daughter, her great-grandmother, had been born
illegitimately at Skateraw, a tiny coastal community, and because of this, she had begun her research in that area, but found nothing.

Disappointed, Avril had almost given up when one night she had a dream about a small harbour and heard a voice telling her to look to the left. ‘I naturally assumed it was Skateraw
Harbour,’ she said.

The very next day she and her husband Malcolm set off to visit their granddaughter in Dunbar and because of the dream decided to make a diversion to Skateraw on the return journey.

‘We were passing the old Parish Church when I suddenly felt an impulse to stop and have a look at the graveyard,’ she recalled. ‘For no particular reason, I found myself
standing in front of the grave of George Robertson. I’d not come across any Robertsons in our family, and was about to move on when I noticed his wife’s name was Agnes Bone!

‘She must have married shortly after giving birth to my great-grandmother. By some unexpected chance I’d found her grave while looking for her birthplace!’

What turned out to be a rather more immediate vision of the future was experienced by an Edinburgh taxi-driver on a nightshift in the winter of 2002. Working nights can be very
disorientating as it disrupts normal sleep patterns, but this cab driver, whom I shall call Bert, told me you get used to it. ‘You just have to make
yourself go to bed
as soon as you knock off,’ he said. ‘The money is good, and, if you’re feeling totally knackered, you can always pull over for a wee sleep.’

It was during one of these ‘wee sleeps’ that Bert had his first and probably his most startling premonition. ‘Normally Saturday nights are hectic between midnight and two a.m.,
when things ease off,’ he explained. ‘It was early December. I’d taken the night before off for the wife’s brother’s engagement party. I was feeling a bit rough, so
after I’d dropped a fare off at the Scotsman Hotel, I parked the cab in Blair Street, just off the High Street, for a wee bit of shut-eye.

‘It was really weird,’ he continued. ‘I don’t believe in all that psychic baloney, but I started getting all this stuff about a building on fire. I was walking along the
Cowgate towards the Grassmarket, and a man ran past shouting out something about towering infernos. When I turned around, there was a wall of flame coming. I started running. The heat was
suffocating and I woke up choking.’

When Bert woke up, he says everything in Blair Street was silent. At the foot of the hill he could see the Cowgate, but there was no one around. ‘I looked at my watch and it was five a.m.
I must have been asleep for at least a couple of hours.’

It was not until the following evening, however, that the Cowgate, under Edinburgh’s South Bridge, ignited into flame. A fire had broken out in La Belle Angèle nightclub, rapidly
spreading to the Gilded Balloon Fringe venue, part of the former 369 Art Gallery building. The flames quickly took hold of the adjoining terrace, lighting up the sky for miles around and smothering
Edinburgh’s Old Town in acrid smoke.

No fewer than nineteen fire crews, the majority from Lothian & Borders Fire Brigade, were called upon to get the blaze under
control, and both the Cowgate and South
Bridge remained closed for several days thereafter.

‘I was away on the south side dropping a fare off at Prestonfield when I heard the news on the car radio,’ said Bert. ‘It made me feel pretty peculiar, I can tell
you.’

Since then, Bert has had similar flashes of second sight, but is increasingly reluctant to talk about them. When I saw him five years ago, he told me how he had collected a bearded man with
reddish hair in the Grassmarket and driven him to the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood.

Bert had recognised him as Robin Cook, the Labour politician and former UK government minister. ‘He told me he’d been having his portrait painted by a local artist and just been to
see the finished work in her studio,’ said Bert. ‘He was a good bloke. I really took to him although I’ve never voted Labour in my life.’

Months later Bert had a dream in which he saw Cook standing with a woman on the summit of a high mountain. They were admiring the view when Cook collapsed. When Bert awoke, he dismissed the
image from his mind. However, that very evening the news broke that Robin Cook had indeed died from a heart attack while climbing Ben Stack in Sutherland.