Haunted Scotland (3 page)

‘My knees were freezing and I began to wonder what we had brought home with us,’ he recalled.

Then the shadow of a girl with very black hair materialised at Luisa’s feet, with yet another woman, presumably the girl’s mother, standing directly in front of them saying:

‘An’ fit are ye gonnae dae noo ye’ve cleared the hoose an’ cleared the chepel? Fit ye gonnae dae wi’ us?’

‘There was no sense of a threat,’ said Gordon. ‘I knew immediately that they were in that rut where there is no concept of time,
so I explained very
gently to them what I had done and told them that I could help them to go to a better place.’

‘Mebbe we’ll just stay here,’ the older woman responded.

‘Both were frightened by what they’d been told about Hell,’ he explained. ‘You would be too if you’d spent all of your mortal existence being persecuted. So I was
just wondering what I should do next, when a ray of brilliant white light showed through the window. Instantly, the daughter stood up and was carried away. Instantaneously, the mother leaned
forward to give me an icy hug and off she went too. It was really very extraordinary and the room then warmed up.’ A year later, Gordon was asked to return to the castle to clear the
dungeon.

‘During that first clearance I knew I was out of my depth,’ he mused when retelling me the story. ‘This time it was different.’

The dungeon lay under the castle and, being below water level, the vaults had been regularly flooded. Gordon had also been told that in medieval times prisoners were frequently put there to
drown.

‘This time I felt much more confident about what I was going to do,’ he said. ‘The dungeon entrance lay below a hatch on the ground floor, and, as I entered the hallway, all of
the dogs belonging to the castle started rushing around and barking in a frenzy. I began by opening the windows and, as I raised the hatch and peered into the space below, a piece of citrine
I’d placed in my shirt pocket fell into the void. It had an unexpectedly calming effect. The next thing I knew, I was lowering myself through the opening.

‘The first thing I noticed was the fetid air. Next, I felt my throat being squeezed, but this is quite a common occurrence in such circumstances. I knew that whoever it was that was doing
this, would stop as soon as I’d completed the clearance.’

Gordon revealed that a lot of what he does involves procedures, prayers and rituals which to those of a cynical disposition might
appear a trifle absurd. ‘This is
because you have to convince whatever it is that you are up against that you mean business. Coming from the past, they understand rituals.’

He had therefore taken with him a replica Japanese ceremonial sword made of steel and embossed with a gold dragon, and he boldly called out, ‘Begone foul evil spirits all, this is my word
so heed the call!’

Immediately the energy in the dungeon shifted. In the very same instant, Carol, the lady of the house, who was standing in the room above, witnessed nine black shapes fly out of the hatch and
evaporate through a window towards the light.

‘It gave her quite a shock!’ said Gordon. ‘But at least she knew I was doing my job!’

Gordon was adamant about differentiating between ghosts and what he called ‘stone tapes’. His theory was that in every old building where negative events take place, energies are
absorbed electromagnetically into the stone, and these energies can be replayed. ‘When, for example, somebody sees an apparition pass through a wall, it’s not a ghost at all, it’s
a stone recording,’ he insisted. Both good and evil spirits have the means to interact with human beings. A ghost, even when it has been shown the light, is able to come and go as it pleases,
whereas a stone tape is a hologram, nothing more. He went on to explain that if somebody dies in a state of imbalance, they will pass over, while some of their negative traits may possibly remain
behind. These can attach themselves to the living. ‘Sometimes when people experience mood swings, it can be because this negativity has latched onto them. That’s where an exorcist needs
to step in.’

Whenever Gordon gives a consultation, he previously aligns his operational space with crystals for protection. ‘It’s important that clients are welcomed into a comfortably furnished
room,’ he
says. ‘But hidden in the system there are things to protect them, me and the house.’

To help him, he makes use of obsidian, lapus lazuli, rose quartz, good for balancing the emotions, and citrine, the ‘stone of the divine’, which has four main functions – it
‘absorbs, transmutes, dissipates, and grounds negative energy’.

When Gordon volunteered to give me what he calls a ‘Wash Down’, he had me first remove my shoes and wristwatch. Watches, he explained, absorb the bad experiences of life. If you have
worn a watch for a period of years, it is a good thing to have it cleansed.

The Wash Down itself is a process by which he claims somebody is introduced to their full potential. It involved me clasping a piece of angelite in my right hand and a piece of lapis lazuli in
my left. Having relaxed in a vintage Parker Knoll chair covered with a white cloth, I was instructed to close my eyes. In the background, I listened to a soundtrack of Enya, while Gordon enunciated
various prayers.

The Wash Down took a fleeting four minutes. To be honest, I found it both relaxing and enervating in equal measure, creating an inner sense of calm which surprised me. In my analytical state of
mind, I had not expected that. Moreover, I was introduced to my spirit guide who, I was told, would become responsible for my future wellbeing.

‘You are now empowered to fulfil all of your innermost wishes,’ said Gordon.

As I drove home that night I somehow found this extremely reassuring.

3

My grandmother was the seventh child of a seventh child, which in the Celtic tradition made her fey or psychic, and there is a story in the family (as I am sure exists in every
Scots family) that one night she had a dream in which a childhood friend came to her bedside to say goodbye. On coming to consciousness, she immediately awoke her disgruntled husband to tell him
about this. The next day a telegram arrived to confirm that their friend had died in the night.

Second sight is infinitely more closely allied to the Celts than to any other race, although it also occurs in tribes of Red Indians, and in the folklore of Australian Aboriginals and the Maoris
of New Zealand. Why Scots and Irish should specifically be singled out for the gift might suggest some sort of unique genetic provenance buried deep within their Celtic birthright.

Premonitions are commonplace throughout Scotland’s long and lawless story. As early as the twelfth century, Thomas of Ercildoun predicted the union of Scotland with
England; in 1388, the second earl of Douglas dreamed of his own death before the Battle of Otterburn; in 1513, a ghostly spectre seen at the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh warned of the impending
catastrophe at Flodden.

In
Supernatural Scotland
, I wrote of my friend Swein MacDonald of Ardgay, in Sutherland. Swein died at the age of seventy-one in 2003. He too was possessed of the
Highland gift of second sight, warning of the 1993 Braer oilfield spill on Shetland only days before it occurred. With Swein, all of the clichés were in place. He was a seventh son born on
the seventh day of the seventh month. He predicted the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer, the birth of Prince William within a year of their wedding, and the subsequent break-up
of their marriage.

A portly, red-faced crofter with a shock of white beard, Swein enjoyed his whisky and there was a childlike naivety about him. I visited him whenever I found myself in the vicinity of his
smallholding overlooking the Dornoch Firth, and always came away with the conclusion that he was as baffled by his powers as were the rest of us. Swein’s predictions were simplistic, but
touched a chord. His readings, as he called them, were calculated to reassure rather than to disturb. In the bar of a local hotel he was denounced by a stranger who called him a crook and a
fantasist. Swein responded by warning him to be careful what he said because in a year’s time he would have no shoes. A month later, this same individual was driving towards Tain when his car
collided head-on with another vehicle. The unfortunate man spent the ensuing three years of his life in a wheelchair.

But there was no malice about Swein. Often he totally failed to comprehend the significance of what he predicted. On more than one occasion he told me that he found the
burden of his gift deeply troubling.

Another such individual with an extraordinary gift was Henry Torrance, whom I had been sent to for advice when researching a project on the Knights Templar. He was immensely
knowledgeable on matters both spiritual and occult, and we rapidly embarked upon a firm friendship, to the extent that I would occasionally invite him to accompany me when I went on excursions.

On one occasion, we had driven to have lunch with a mutual friend in Innerleithen and we were passing through the village of Clovenfords, west of Galashiels, when Henry requested I pull over to
the side of the road. There was an urgency in his voice and I was concerned. He was elderly. At first I thought he had been taken ill.

‘Can’t you see them?’ he asked in an agitated voice.

‘Who?’ I replied.

‘There, in that field. Those poor children.’

I looked across the fence towards a copse beside the Caddon Water. The sun shone hazily, but the enclosure of trees at the water’s edge appeared gloomy, in dark shadow. So far as I could
see, there was nobody there.

‘They look so sad,’ continued my old friend. ‘So frightened.’

‘But I can’t see anybody,’ I protested.

He looked disappointed. This was most unlike him. A man of substance in that he weighed around twenty stone, Henry was used to being in control.

‘You probably think I’m mad,’ he said reproachfully after a pause. ‘But I can assure you they are there. Clear as daylight. But it seems I’m the only one who can
see them.’

We had had a similar conversation once before when he had asked me if I believed in faith healing. A retired Edinburgh banker, survivor of a German prisoner-of-war camp
during the Second World War and awarded a Military Cross, Henry was not somebody one might expect to be preoccupied with the occult. But he was perfectly serious.

Ever since his childhood, he confessed to me, he had seen things that nobody else was aware of.

‘At first I thought it was perfectly normal,’ he said. ‘It never occurred to me that it was a gift or a curse, or whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t happen very
often, but sometimes I’m somewhere I haven’t been before and I know something is wrong. That’s when they appear, figures from the past, or at least, that’s what I assume
them to be, almost as if they’re wanting to tell me something. What should I do? I can’t ignore them. They don’t mean me any harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. They need help.
That’s why I became interested in faith healing in the hope of finding out what I can do for them.’

Poor Henry. His thirty-eight-year marriage had ended in separation and a painful divorce. Increasingly, those close to him regarded him with amused tolerance. He was harmless, they told me.

‘Don’t pay any attention to him if he turns all silly,’ his son insisted, when I mentioned I had seen his father on the steps of the Edinburgh College of Parapsychology.

But I did not consider him silly. I was intrigued, and often looked in on his Bruntsfield flat for a chat and a coffee. On this occasion, I had volunteered to drive him to Walkerburn for lunch
with some mutual friends.

‘Please don’t say anything about this when we get there,’ he pleaded. ‘They already think I’m a bit dotty. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to
stop. I just needed to have a proper look at those poor people.’

He was courteous and kind, and I was curious. ‘What did they look like?’ I asked.

He closed his eyes as we set off again. ‘There were at least a dozen women with several children, four or five maybe, all pretty emaciated. Their clothes were ragged and grubby. They
looked half-starved.’

Nothing more was said on the subject. We had an amusing lunch with our friends where, so far as I can recall, the conversation centred on labrador puppies. I drove Henry home afterwards and,
having delivered him to his door, promptly forgot all about the incident, that is until three months later, when I ran into him by chance.

I was walking along Melville Crescent when he hailed me and strode purposefully towards me with his hand outstretched. ‘I just wanted to let you know I finally got to the bottom of those
wretched people we saw when you drove me to lunch with George and Helen,’ he said.

‘You saw,’ I corrected him.

‘Yes. Well, at least you didn’t appear to think I was entirely potty. At least, I hope not.’

I nodded. ‘I always keep an open mind,’ I said.

‘And so you should. If only others followed your example,’ he said with a sigh of resignation. ‘Anyway, let me tell you what it was all about.’

On returning to Edinburgh, Henry had immediately telephoned his close confidant Marion McNaught to ask her advice. A well-respected historian, Marion was used to such enquiries and having
confirmed a map reference, began a search. Time-slips, for that is what this must have been, occur throughout and across the centuries, visible only to those susceptible to them, and on the spot
where they took place. Before long she had come up with an explanation.

Enclosed within an envelope of rolling hills, there was once, long, long ago, a small encampment at Caddonlee. It was a simple life in that era, safe from the intrusion of
the outside world, or so it was thought. All about was lush pasture land. The local community had their own livestock and were blessed with a plentiful supply of water from the River Tweed. They
kept themselves to themselves. With no roads or even footpaths, strangers rarely strayed into their territory.