Haunted Scotland (2 page)

Ewan Irvine has been aware of his psychic gifts since he was nineteen years old, and, having shaped his abilities as a medium with Portobello Spiritualist Church, set up Full Moon Investigations
to participate in the annual Mary King’s GhostFest. Mary King, as readers of
Supernatural Scotland
will know, was the inhabitant of a nearby medieval street which was closed off during
an outbreak of the bubonic plague during the seventeenth century. The majority of the inhabitants were, we are told, evacuated, but stories persist of those who were left behind, and it is their
spirits which are said to haunt the cobbled alleyway which lies forty feet below the quadrangle of today’s City Chambers.

There was a veiled moon above us when I joined a team from the Scottish Society of Paranormal Investigation and Analysis and Full Moon Investigations at the top of the High Street. We were a
group of around twenty, equipped with torches, cameras, tape
recorders, and first-aid kits. Dispersed over the five floors of the Camera Obscura tower, we were invited to make
notes of how we felt and to identify hot and cold spots. When I pressed the button of my infrared thermometer, it initially sprang to 666, then fluctuated between 10 and 19°C. Perhaps I was
hallucinating.

Matt from Newcastle was convinced that he saw orbs on the fourth floor, and insisted that there was a moving light in the operations room. Disappointingly, this turned out to be the reflection
from some sunglasses one of the spirit guides was using as a headband. But Matt, in his twenties, remained unconvinced.

Various items were set up to record displacement – iron filings, small building blocks, an object coated with flour. As we entered the deserted rooms of the Ragged School, Roberta Gordon,
a medium, informed us that she could see a lady whom she felt must have been a past pupil who had returned there to teach. The name Mary sprang to her mind. Ewan Irvine picked up the sound of
footsteps pacing the floor, readings from the Scriptures and children’s voices on the stair.

‘You know that sensation when you enter a room and it either feels right or wrong?’ he asked. ‘That’s what you have to ask yourself. The problem is that a large group
like this inevitably disrupts the atmosphere.’

It was now around 2 a.m. and the night air, despite our being indoors, had turned undeniably chilly. The exposed, uneven timbers beneath our feet were bare and covered with a thick dust. The
rooms smelt of neglect. The team had set up video equipment to run throughout the night. It looked as though it was going to be a long vigil, and I therefore decided that I had seen enough.
Excusing myself, I slipped out of a door and onto the empty, cobbled streets of the Royal Mile to head home.

Time moves on regardless of what we as individuals can do about it. I have no doubt that the spirits of the Ragged School
do exist and were, indeed, all about us watching
us that night. But I somehow felt guilty for intruding on their silence.

A report of the group’s findings appears on the Full Moon Investigations’ website (www.fullmooninvestigations.co.uk), but I am
not convinced that such forays, while both entertaining and enjoyable, can ever offer convincing proof of the paranormal. Given a fundamental belief in parallel worlds, it is the unexpected, never
the mundane, that fires the imagination.

In the summer of 2008, I was on a visit to the Cowal Peninsula with my literary agent John Beaton and his wife Jane, and we had been invited to lunch with Jim and Mary Lamb, who live at
Inverchaolain Manse. Among their other guests was their neighbour Bill Caffray, who has exercised his talents as a clairvoyant since childhood.

Having for many years owned a restaurant in Andalucia, Bill returned to Scotland from Spain in 1977 and purchased the Ardfillan Hotel in Dunoon. A resplendent figure in a white suit, he told me
how he had found himself rapidly filling a void, his powers of second sight being much in demand.

One summons, for example, had been from Dunans Castle in Glendaruel, the former headquarters of the Fletcher Clan. The Fletchers had relocated from north of Bridge of Orchy as early as 1745, but
in 1999, their dramatic Franco-baronial castle was sold to Robert and Ewa Lucas-Gardiner.

The Lucas-Gardiners had already purchased the Manor of Marr, a feudal barony which entitled them to call themselves Lord and Lady Marr. Dunans Castle they transformed into a luxury hotel and
once everything was up and running, Lady Marr had called upon Bill to conduct a seance for her.

‘I told her I could see her surrounded by people with shaven heads,’ he recalled in all sincerity. ‘I also warned her that I saw danger if she and her husband remained at the
castle.
Of course, that was the last thing either of them wanted to hear.’

A few months after the seance a fire destroyed the first and second floors, forcing the Marrs and twelve other occupants to escape to safety in the early hours of a Sunday morning. The damage
was considerable, but mercifully nobody was hurt.

‘I try to approach spiritual matters from a logical perspective,’ Bill reassured me. ‘But with the gift come responsibilities. Nobody can change fate. All of the decisions that
affect us have been made long before we got here. I simply tell people what I see. I leave them to come to their own conclusions.’

Mary Lamb, our hostess at Inverchaolain Manse, is Secretary of the Clan Lamont Society, and, after lunch, she took us to see Knockdow House, a mid-fifteenth-century mansion house which, until
the late 1950s, had been owned by the Lamont family. The last of the Lamont line at Knockdow was Augusta, who inherited the estate from her unmarried brother Norman. It appears she was most
definitely a woman of independent mind.

Having inherited money from her grandmother, she had enrolled herself at Edinburgh University, subsequently becoming an eminent zoologist. Her father, known to be a bit of a tyrant, was
horrified. A woman’s place was in the marital bed, he fumed. No doubt this was why Augusta remained a spinster for the rest of her life.

When Augusta died, she bequeathed Knockdow to the Clan Lamont Society, which for financial reasons was unfortunately unable to take on the responsibility. For a while the estate passed to
Augusta’s next of kin, but it was eventually sold in 1990 and has since remained unoccupied.

Before that, however, Bill remembered wonderful cricket matches on the lawn and formal dances taking place in the hall beneath its circular gallery. ‘For me Knockdow has always had a
really good feel about it,’ he said. ‘That’s why Augusta has never wanted to leave.’

Although he had never known her during her lifetime, Bill told me he had once stepped into the kitchen at Knockdow House and encountered an elderly woman with two younger companions, one slim,
the other rather more plump. ‘Of course, nobody else could see them, but they were as clear to me as you are now,’ he insisted. ‘I had no idea who they were at the time, but when
I described them afterwards to somebody who had once worked at the house, she immediately identified the older woman as Miss Lamont. The younger ones were kitchen staff. The description I gave of
them fitted perfectly.’

Needless to say, there was no sign of Augusta or her maids when our little party toured Knockdow House, but all of the time we were there, Bill seemed anxious to give me a
‘transfer’, to see if there were any spirits present. For a moment his face glazed over in preparation to enter a trance but, having had no previous connection with either the house or
Lamont family, I firmly declined his offer.

So far as I was concerned, if Augusta wished to introduce herself to me she would do so on her own terms and when it suited her.

‘She really loved Knockdow,’ said Mary Lamb. ‘All she really wanted towards the end of her life was to know it would be looked after.’

‘There’s nothing to be worried about here,’ added Bill. ‘But isn’t it good to know she’s still keeping an eye on things?’

2

It was during the Perthshire Open Studios Week of 2008 that I first encountered Gordon McNeill-Wilkie. In his everyday existence Gordon is a specialist in dry-stone walls and
garden features such as the monumental stone sofa-bench on show at Lethendy House where his partner, the painter Luisa Ramazzotti, was exhibiting her oil portraits.

When I mentioned I was in the process of writing this book, he casually informed me that he was both a faith healer and an exorcist. Slim, with intense blue eyes, he further indicated that he
was willing to talk to me openly on the subject. Having found others similarly blessed reluctant to do so, I naturally jumped at the opportunity.

‘Such gifts are easily misunderstood, but if you worry about what people think of you then they own you,’ he said wisely. ‘It’s certainly not been
easy for me, but once I learned to accept my situation, everything fell into place.’

Gordon was born in 1960 and grew up in Perthshire, where his father was the manager of the Green Hotel at Kinross. ‘When I was very young, I used to have nightmares full of sights and
sounds and smells,’ he explained. ‘I often experienced the sensation of leaving my body and flying, and I vividly remember trying desperately to maintain my concentration in case I
fell.’

As he grew older, he struggled to shut these thoughts out of his consciousness, but, playing in the woods on the banks of Loch Leven, he was continually aware of the energies surrounding the
plants, the trees and the people he encountered. In an attempt to suppress such feelings he turned to macho pursuits such as martial arts. He married and joined the army, enlisting in 15 Para
(Scottish Battalion) based at Yorkhill in Glasgow. But when his best friend was killed in front of him in an accident, it affected him deeply.

Shortly after this terrible experience, Gordon met a psychic who gave him a tarot reading in which the death card appeared again and again. She told him not to worry about this, but within
months his wife had also died.

Understandably traumatised, Gordon began reading every book he could find relating to the occult and spiritualism, but none provided him with the answers he needed.

That was over twenty-one years ago and when Gordon remarried, he and his second wife moved to live at Bankfoot, where his elderly neighbour, as it transpired, was a practising Buddhist. One day
this man, whom he liked enormously, came to see Gordon and confided in him that he had been diagnosed with a serious medical condition. Gordon was intensely shocked,
but
became even more perplexed when the man said to him, ‘I’m a healer, but I can’t heal myself. Will you help me?’

At first, Gordon was speechless, but the man went on to explain to him that he had recognised the healing ability in him. ‘It’s not something you do; it’s what you are,’
he explained. ‘It’s not a skill you acquire; you are born with it.’

After some initial hesitation, Gordon placed his hands over the old man’s lower back and felt a trembling sensation. After five minutes, he was told to stop.

‘That’s it gone now,’ said the man gratefully, and walked off saying, ‘Now you know. This is what you can do.’ He was later diagnosed as having fully recovered.

‘I felt a huge surge of emotion after that,’ said Gordon. ‘I’d recently read
Conversations with God
, three books by Neale Donald Walsch. In my head I kept hearing
the words, “If there were any gift that I could give you, it would be fearlessness.” I knew I had to take myself seriously.’

To start off with, of course, there were doubts. Was it just a case of feeding his own ego? Finally, Gordon decided that he had no choice. He had to do something about it, and told himself
everything was possible. He wanted the full party pack. As Jesus said, ‘These things I have done, so ye will do also.’

Ironically, all of this was going on just as Gordon’s life was once again starting to fall apart. Remarried, with three young children, his marriage failed.

‘Everything was going wrong for me. I even had my car stolen,’ he told me. ‘I moved to live at Inver, near Dunkeld, and having nowhere to go in the evenings but the pub, I soon
found myself healing some of the locals. I got a job as a personal trainer at the Dunkeld Hilton, and then a chiropractor friend suggested I open a clinic.’ Gordon had previously not
considered himself to be an exorcist, but soon found that people were coming to
him with psychological problems. This was compounded when a white witch, whose name he prefers
to withhold out of respect for her privacy, came to see him from Edinburgh and regressed him.

‘Afterwards, she became my mentor,’ he said. ‘She made me understand that I was not a source, but a conduit. In this game your biggest enemy is your ego.

‘The human soul is huge,’ he continued disarmingly. ‘It contains the body, not the other way around. Every lifetime is burned into your soul’s memory bank. You take this
information (which can be accessed) with you from lifetime to lifetime.’

Gordon does not believe in the Devil, as such, but he does acknowledge the existence of evil spirits and demons. One of his more memorable exploits was when he was asked to clear the interiors
and grounds of Ashintully Castle, near Blairgowrie.

‘I came across a group of spirit witches, or medicine women, as I prefer to call them, and moved them away from the old mausoleum,’ he recalls. ‘I thought nothing of it at the
time, but on the road home in the car I found myself looking over my shoulder all the time, as if there were passengers in the back seat.’

At home in their sitting room that night, he and Luisa were seated at opposite ends of a sofa, when the cushion between them compressed and the room turned bitterly cold.