Eleanor's Top Ten Hauntings of All Time | #6 Glamis: The Most Haunted Castle in the World
If there was ever a reason to abolish the aristocracy, this place is it
In honour of my Fringe Show Haunted House, I’m doing a top ten real life hauntings run down, and this time its one of Scotland’s most notorious castles. Glamis has EVERYTHING you could wish for in a haunting - a secret room, a pact with the devil, a hidden monster, a royal connection and a name everyone pronounces wrong. I don’t think I owned a single ghost book as a child that didn’t feature it. And yet I’ve never actually visited it, meaning that Glamis remains a phantom looming large in my imagination, still waiting to be explored…So without further ado…
First things first, Glamis is not pronounced ‘Glamis’, it’s pronounced Gla-mz or Glarh-mz depending on your accent, so if you’re planning a visit, get ahead of the tour guide and prove you read at least one thing before you went there. Let’s deal with the history before we get onto the ghosts.
An early (and gloomy) look at Glamis Castle
Glamis haunts Scottish history. Not only has it been the seat of aristocrats and royals for hundreds of years, it was also the fictional place of residence for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The real Macbeth had no connection, and to be honest, the locations in the play look like Shakey pulled them out of a scrabble bag at random. Most of them aren’t anywhere near each other. Still, I watched A Castle For Christmas on Netflix, and Brooke Shields takes a taxi from Edinburgh to Aberdeenshire, apparently, so he wouldn’t be the last writer to treat Scottish geography as a modern art project.
Glamis’ real royal connections are even more interesting than just The Scottish play. For starters, King Malcolm II was murdered there (on the site, at least) in 1032. The castle itself began construction in the 14th century, and the title of Lord of Glamis was created for Sir Patrick Lyon in 1445. The Lyons still live there - Queen Elizabeth’s mum, the late Queen Mother, was raised at Glamis after her father inherited it (I believe its the castle they visit in The Kings Speech), and is one of the many unbearable reasons King Charles likes to prance about in a kilt pretending to know anything about Scotland. Sorry - I find it hard to write about the royals. Ahem.
Glamis’ reputation as a place connected to misery and the supernatural began in 1537, when Janet Douglas, wife of Sir John Lyon, Lord Glamis was burnt at the stake at Edinburgh Castle, allegedly for attempting to poison the king (James V) and her own husband. Over the years, this poisoning attempt has morphed into an accusation of witchcraft - (there don’t seem to be any contemporary records mentioning the witchcraft), -probably because of the burning - and she’s now amongst the most famous ‘witches’ in British history.
Edinburgh Castle, where Janet was burned to death.
After Janet’s burning, James seized the castle for himself, and it wasn’t given back to the Lyon family until 1543. Mary, Queen of Scots visited in 1562 to reconnect with the family after that awkward business with her dad burning their maw. There then began a series of redesigns and renovations, and over the next few centuries, the family kept their status intact by marrying into wealthy merchant dynasties, and generally doing rich people stuff. Over the years there were several more skirmishes, including the Jacobite rebellions, which the 5th Earl took part in on the rebel side. He was killed at the Battle of Sheriffmuir in 1715. The Queen Mother (Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon) was raised there, and her daughter, princess Margaret was also born there in 1930. The current owner, the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, has his own ‘controversy’ section on Wikipedia, which includes speeding convictions, DUIs, Covid-19 violations and sexual assault. Classy.
The Fifth Earl of Strathmore, a Jacobite and a snappy dresser
As might be expected from centuries of aristocratic shenanigans, the house holds not only your typical ghosts, but a whole array of oddities and spooks. Earliest amongst these is probably Lady Janet herself, now back as a traditional White Lady. There’s also:
A Grey Lady (Who may also be Janet)
A black page boy (who froze to death, and now likes to trip unsuspecting visitors)
A woman without a tongue who wanders the grounds, either pointing to her mouth or screaming.
Earl ‘Beardie’ - the ghost of an Earl who challenged the Devil to a game of dice on a Sunday, and is now doomed to play forever in a room high up in the castle, his cursing and dice throwing echoing around the house.
According to several reports from visitors in the 19th century, Beardie sometimes appears to visitors in their dreams, huge and imposing, and with ‘the face of a dead man’.
The first of the ‘horrors’ of Glamis is the supposed slaughter of Clan Ogilvie in the 15th century. In 1486, the Ogilvie’s were hiding from Clan Lindsay during a particularly nasty skirmish, and Lord Glamis agreed to hide them in the castle. But unfortunately for the Ogilvie’s, Glamis hated them too, and instead of protecting them, locked them in a secret chamber to die. (People like to romanticise clan warfare, but in reality a lot of wars were petty and bitchy squabbling over land and titles). Their skeletons were only uncovered years later, much to the horror of the finder, and their moans still haunt the house. I’ve yet to find any actual dates or sources for this supposed uncovering (nothing on the Ogilvie Wiki page, which you’d think would have a field day with this stuff), which leads me to think this is definitely a myth.
One of the later Lord Ogilvies, depicted here not starving to death in a secret chamber
But perhaps the creepiest and most fascinating tale is that of the Monster of Glamis - he’s so famous, he’s even got his own Wikipedia page! The legend is rather blurry, but it goes as follows:
In 1821, a baby was born to the Glamis family, Thomas Lyon-Bowes. Sadly, the baby did not survive, passing away the same day. However, a legend has arisen that Thomas did not die, but rather was born so deformed that his family decided it would be better to hide him away from the world. For the rest of his life (some say he lived 100 years) he lived in a secret chamber, which was then bricked up after his death. There is a ‘Mad Earl’s Walk’ along the castle parapet, supposedly where the ‘monster’ was taken for secret nightly exercise. Guests to the castle could occasionally hear his wails and cries in the middle of the night.
A story recorded by famed ghost enthusiast Colin Wilson recounts a workman accidentally coming across the room in the late 19th century, and immediately being pressured to emigrate with his family to Australia or another colony, never to tell his secret. Others who discovered the ‘secret of Glamis’ were reported to be so horrified they refused to ever spend another night in the castle…the 13th Earl was said to be so traumatised by the knowledge of the ‘secret’ that he forever looked sad, and was quoted as saying to his wife "I have heard the secret, and if you wish to please me you will never mention the subject again."
Glamis, full of secret rooms and skeletons? Or drunk aristocrats trying to entertain each other?
And yet, according to Scottish author Lily Seafield, the monster is also rumoured to have been born hundreds of years before, and legend of a secret room was also popular long before Thomas’ birth (Walter Scott, he of very boring tartan trash novels, mentioned it in 1790). There is even supposed to be a 17th portrait of the 3rd Earl that depicts the monster ‘lurking’ in the background, although I couldn’t find a portrait that resembles this. So was the ‘monster’ a disabled Victorian child, or some sort of ageless, supernatural demon, locked away for centuries?
Curiously, one guest, Lord Ernest Hamilton, found a trapdoor to the monster’s secret room in the Blue Room, which is also the room where visitors had their dreams of Earl Beardie, supposedly a huge and monstrous man…did two legends become conflated?
And yet there is more to this myth than meets the eye. A story that has clearly intrigued people over centuries, this tale centres on the idea of a human who is considered not quite human enough, a ‘monster’ who must be hidden from the world. And sadly, the legend would also be an eerie foreshadowing of a tragic chapter in the Bowes-Lyon family.
Nerissa Bowes-Lyon (1919-1986) and Katherine Bowes-Lyon (1926-2014) were two first cousins of the late queen, daughters of her uncle, John Herbert Bowes-Lyon. The girls were classified as ‘imbeciles’ and lived in hospitals for most of their lives. In Burke’s Peerage (a sort of posh people directory), there were listed as having died in 1940s and 60s respectively. It was only in the 80s that a tabloid exposé revealed they were both still alive. The family defended this by claiming that Fenella Bowes Lyon had made a mistake in her Burke’s listing. This is possible, but rather hard to believe - Fenella was their mother. Would she really, regardless of her own eccentricity, twice make a mistake about whether her own daughters were alive?
They were not the only ones - several cousins on their mothers side were also in the same hospital, suggested it was the maternal line responsible. (Given that the family name is Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis, this makes a lot of sense. After four double barrels, you can only assume their was some serious genetic tomfoolery occurring)
The girls were given little money and were never visited (the family dispute this, but there are no hospital records saying otherwise), given Christmas or birthday cards, or acknowledged in any way publicly by the family. Despite outwardly supporting disability charities, the queen mother never seemed to display the smallest interest in her nieces. Only after her death was revealed to the public did Nerissa receive a headstone. Before then, the grave only had a plastic marker.
The Royals were not the only family to shun and stigmatise disabled people in the 20th century, but what makes this remarkable is the amount of time they spent scoffing that the idea there was a disabled ‘monster’ hidden in Glamis was ludicrous, all the while hiding their own relatives away for the very same reasons.
Perhaps the ghosts of Glamis can serve as reminder that its best not to keep skeletons in the family closet…literal or otherwise…
Next time: A Georgian spook becomes a London celeb…
Liked this? Support me on with the price of a coffee here