Haunted St Andrews E-Book

Geoff Holder

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 189

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

With the country's oldest university and the ruins of both a magnificent castle and one of the grandest cathedrals of medieval Europe, St Andrews is one of the most beautiful and historic places in Scotland. But it's also one of the most haunted. Here are investigations into St Andrews' most famous ghost (the White Lady) and its most famous paranormal location (the Haunted Tower, with its real-life Victorian mystery of mummified bodies); the numerous phantoms, historical and contemporary, that appear to cluster around the medieval quarter of The Pends and St Leonard's School; and spectres of castle and cloister, town and gown. There is also the Pitmilly House poltergeist, whose fire-raising activities resulted in a payout by an insurance company. Join paranormal expert Geoff Holder in an exploration of the darker side of St Andrews.

Leseprobe

To all the tribe of SADIML.

Acknowledgements

BLESSINGS to; the library angels of St Andrews Public Library, the Special Collections Unit of the Library of the University of St Andrews, Kirkcaldy Central Library, and the Local Studies Section of the A.K. Bell Library in Perth. For assistance, thanks to David Orr and Alan Tricker of the Byre Theatre, Amy Dale of the Museums Collections Unit, and Lorn Macintyre. Special thanks to Basia Rostworowska and Paul Kienewicz for adding a new twist to the story of the Pitmilly Poltergeist. Extra special thanks to Ségolène Dupuy and Jamie Cook.

This book is part of a series of works by Geoff Holder for The History Press, dedicated to the mysterious and paranormal. For more information, or to contribute your own experience, please visit www.geoffholder.com.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

    oneThe White Lady and the Haunted Tower

    twoA Haunted Cluster: the Ghosts of the Pends, St Leonard’s School and Queen Mary’s House

threeGhosts of Castle and Cloister

   fourGhosts of Town and Gown

    fivePitmilly House: Poltergeist Manor

     sixA Pair of Poltergeists

sevenDeath Warnings, Dead Air and Ghost Villages

Bibliography

Also by the Author

Copyright

Introduction

We come to…the decayed city of St. Andrews (which may also be styled a Gothic Pompeii from the number of its ruins).

Handbook for Travellers in Scotland, 1875

ANY book about haunted St Andrews owes a great debt to St Andrews Ghost Stories, a small volume first published in 1911 and still in print. The author, William T. Linskill, was a major force in St Andrews for decades, serving on the town council under the title of Dean of Guild, exporting the game of golf to his alma mater, Cambridge University, and encouraging the ‘howkings’ – diggings for the underground tunnels and chambers that he believed ran beneath the medieval ruins of the cathedral area.

Unfortunately, any serious book about haunted St Andrews also has to acknowledge that St Andrews Ghost Stories is a farrago of fiction, fancy and folklore, mixed up with the odd bit of fact. Despite his famously bluff manner, Linskill was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic who wanted above all else to see a ghost. He never got his wish, and his book betrays the powerful influences of the fictions of M.R. James and Charles Dickens, as well as a host of Gothic novels, plus several legends borrowed directly from elsewhere. All of which is a bit of a shame, because, when the urge took him, Linskill could worry away at historical mysteries like a terrier, and his input into the story of the Haunted Tower (see Chapter 1) has been invaluable.

St Andrews in 1693. The ruined cathedral and the monastic precinct are centre-right, with the tower of St Salvator’s situated in the centre. (From John Slezar’s Theatrum Scotiae)

Linskill died in 1929. The same year, H.V. Morton included an interview with the seventy-four-year-old in his travel book In Search of Scotland. Describing the ghost-hunter as looking like ‘a possibly violent retired major-general’, Morton found Linskill combative, sharp-minded and larger-than-life. Linskill related how, in his search for the supernatural, he had spent a night in the Haunted Tower with a bottle of whisky, and had attended numerous séances, all of which came to naught – in fact, at sittings with mediums he was ‘cast out’ from the circle of sitters because he was an ‘unbeliever’ and a ‘sceptic’. I consider it a great pity that the astringent attitude he displayed in real life did not come to the fore when compiling the contents of St Andrews Ghost Stories. That being said, if you hunger for tales of yesteryear in which impatient toffs say things like, ‘Zounds, Sir!’ and ‘Gadzooks, and oddbodkins, Sir!’ then it’s very much the book for you.

Looking west towards St Salvator’s along North Street, sometime before the First World War. (Author’s Collection)

St Andrews Ghost Stories has two kinds of ghost story. The first are ludicrously over-the-top Gothic fripperies, in which the upper-class narrators all have short, sensible names while the ‘rude mechanicals’ of the amusing working-classes labour through life bearing the weight of names such as: Jeremiah and Concrikketty Anklebone, Messrs Snaggers and Darkgood, Maria Trombone, Jemima Podge, Teresa Shadbolt and Pellingham Truffles. The second consist of Linskill’s interviews with anonymous informants whose experiences may actually have been rooted in the real world. These episodes, which form a minority report within the book as a whole, are the most interesting parts of St Andrews Ghost Stories, and are referred to in the chapters that follow.

As for Haunted St Andrews, Chapter 1 deals with St Andrews’ most famous ghost (the White Lady) and its most famous paranormal location (the Haunted Tower); it is my contention that I may have solved at least part of the mystery of the mummified body in the tower. Chapter 2 explores the numerous ghosts – historical and contemporary – that appear to cluster around the medieval quarter of the Pends and St Leonard’s. Chapters 3 and 4 catalogue ghosts reported from the cathedral, the university, the castle and the old town. Chapters 5 and 6 get involved with a trio of poltergeists – including one that resulted in an insurance pay-out – while Chapter 7 rounds off with some apparitions betokening death, an encounter with an evil vortex on a beach, and a truly extraordinary vision of a phantom village.

My personal bugbear is books on the supernatural that lack anything in the way of a critical apparatus, where the reader is unable to check references or see where the writer obtained the information. For this reason, all the stories in Haunted St Andrews are referred back to their original source, whether this be a newspaper, an ancient book, or an online chat-room. This, combined with the Bibliography at the end of the book, should enable you to determine whether I have been both fair and accurate, and whether you agree with my interpretations.

St Andrews shrouded in thick fog. (Photo by Geoff Holder)

St Andrews is a small burgh characterised by an immense catalogue of antiquity; the cathedral, castle and university buildings dominate the town architecturally, while the medieval street plan is still evident in the way North Street, Market Street and South Street, radiate east from the cathedral, with interconnecting north-south lanes and wynds running between them. St Andrews is also sited on the very tip of the Fife coast, which means not only plentiful gobbets of wind and rain, but also the haar – the thick sea-fog that rolls in from the North Sea. When the haar seeps into the cobbled lanes, ancient buildings, the gaunt ruins and the old-world town, they all take on a distinct character redolent of centuries gone by. In the fog, the streetlights glow like gas lamps. Sounds are muffled. Sharp edges become hazy. Arched ruins loom out of the edge of vision. You almost expect a horse-drawn Victorian carriage to clatter out of the gloom.

St Andrews from the top of St Rule’s Tower. In the background, the haar is rolling in. (Photo by Geoff Holder)

Now, in many ways, I distrust a place that has ‘atmosphere’, because it gets in the way of investigation. The imagination takes over and we see and feel – or think we see and feel – evidence of the supernatural, when this may just be our emotional tendency to prefer the crepuscular to the unspectacular. But once wrapped in its mantle of luminous fog, the ancient fabric of St Andrews becomes a half-world, of things half-seen and half-feared, an environment of anxiety and anticipation; a place where ghosts might indeed walk.

Zounds, Sir!

Geoff Holder, 2012

1

The White Lady and the Haunted Tower

Go forth and win the haunted tower!

Andrew Lang, ‘The Haunted Tower’, 1889-90

THE ‘White Lady’ is without doubt the most written-about ghost of St Andrews, and her link with the so-called ‘Haunted Tower’ makes her story all the more fascinating, for here lies a murky story not just of the spirit of an attractive young woman, but of mummified bodies and corpse-stealing. The entire subject is garnered with a heavy sprinkling of myth-making, factual confusion, claims and counterclaims, all leavened by a dose of fictional invention and obfuscation. It’s time to sort the wheat from the White Lady chaff.

There are two separate factors to the tale – the apparition of the White Lady herself, and what exactly was discovered in the vaults of what became known as the Haunted Tower. We do not know how far back sightings of the former go, nor do we have any clear idea when the structure in the precinct wall of the cathedral became known as the Haunted Tower. By the time people started writing about the subject in the 1860s, both elements were well-established features in the ghost lore of St Andrews.

William Linskill provides us with both the most fantastical exploits of the White Lady, and, in contrast, a more sober documentary record. The former come, as expected, from St Andrews Ghost Stories, while the latter can be found in The Strange Story of St Andrews Haunted Tower, a now-obscure pamphlet reprinting an article he wrote originally for the St Andrews Citizen in 1925.

The Setting

The Haunted Tower is the rectangular two-storey structure in the imposing precinct wall, immediately north of the shattered west gable of the cathedral. The cathedral and priory were enclosed by a wall from at least the 1300s, although the current wall dates from the early fifteenth century, having been built during the priorate of John Hepburn (?-1522). Rising up to twenty feet high, enclosing an area of some thirty acres, and running almost a mile in length, the great wall, still substantially complete, is one of the marvels of medieval Scotland. It was fortified by sixteen wall-towers, of which thirteen remain. The Haunted Tower is unusual in being rectangular rather than round, and consists of two rooms: a vault below the present ground level, and a kind of L-shaped watchroom on the first floor, reached by a short external stair. This upper chamber has a maximum length of ten feet, eight inches. There are gun loops and, on the outside face, two niches that probably held statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Alongside these niches is an armorial panel carved with the arms of Prior Hepburn, and a pot of lilies representing the Virgin. There was once a parapet walkway running along the top of the wall and passing through the upper part of the tower, although this has long collapsed.

The Haunted Tower and the cathedral graveyard. (Photo by Geoff Holder)

The Haunted Tower today. The steps lead up to the chamber where the bodies were found in 1868. (Photo by Geoff Holder)

At some unknown date, but obviously after the Reformation of 1560, when the cathedral was effectively abandoned, the two rooms of the tower were taken over by someone with money and influence, and converted into a kind of family mausoleum. When the ruins were returned to state care in 1826, both chambers had been sealed up since time immemorial, keeping their secret cargo of corpses to themselves. Over the next few decades, the cathedral ruins were stripped of the accumulated debris and soil of centuries, and slowly took on the visitor-friendly form we see today. Captain Daniel Wilson, who was born in 1844, told Linskill that, as a boy, he and his several brothers had the job of assisting their father with his work on the shipping beacon that once stood on one of the neighbouring towers. After lighting or extinguishing the beacon, the young lads, bold as day, would climb the ivy that then festooned the precinct wall – stealing birds’ nests and eggs. During these expeditions they would bravely peer through the chinks in the masonry of the tower, gazing in awe and terror at what appeared to be the preserved corpse of a lovely young woman, lying in a coffin from which the lid had fallen off. If this reminiscence is accurate – Wilson was remembering back from his old age in the 1920s – then we can assume that the secret of the tower was starting to become known by the 1850s, and it may be from this time that we can date stories of the townsfolk (especially the fisher families)starting to avoid the tower after dark, always rushing past it fearfully as they walked around the outside of the wall on Kirkhill. The sealed rectangular structure was now, very definitely, the Haunted Tower.

The barred gate of the upper chamber – the site of the mysterious mummies. (Photo by Geoff Holder)

The Discovery of the Mummies

How the corpses in the tower came to be formally discovered is a matter of some dispute – and a great deal of overlapping claims. However, if we can trust the accumulated recollections of those involved, gathered by Linskill for the Haunted Tower pamphlet – plus a few others taken from contemporary newspapers – then the tower was entered at least four times in the nineteenth century. The first time appears to have been in early 1868. I date it thus because the only named witness was the Revd Skinner, who, in 1867, became the first priest of the new St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, which still imposes itself grandly on Queen’s Gardens – and the discovery must have taken place some time before the second opening of the vault, which is clearly dated to September 1868. Many years later, the Episcopal clergyman related the events around the first discovery in a letter to Thomas Truman Oliphant – one of the most prominent of St Andrews’ citizens at the time. Oliphant showed the letter to Linskill, who reproduced it within a letter of his own written to the Aberdeen Weekly Journal (and other papers) on 9 February 1894. This is what Skinner wrote:

I remember looking at some stonemasons repairing the Abbey wall, near the lighthouse tower… A chisel belonging to one of the workmen fell through an interstice and disappeared. I urged the men to take out some of the stones of the wall, when, lo! We found a vault in the interior, and, striking a light, we discovered a coffin with a roof-shaped lid, which had partly fallen off, and inside was the form of a female dressed in satin, which when touched became dust, and on her skeleton hands and forearms she wore long white kid gauntlet gloves, with numerous buttons. The wall was built up again.

This is what we might call the ur-document of the White Lady case: the first eye-witness account of the female corpse, complete with the description of her coffin, rich clothes, and long gloves, all of which played an important role in the subsequent mythologizing of the case. Jesse Hall, the manager of the town gas works and the local inspector for the Woods and Forest Department (the official body charged with clearing up the cathedral ruins), thought that the mason present was named John Ainslie.

Word got around, and soon Mr Hall found himself approached by pair of antiquaries keen to investigate further: Mr Smith, a watchmaker, and Mr Walker, the University Librarian. Despite his distaste for disturbing the dead, the inspector eventually agreed to a brief and discreet investigation. So, before six in the morning of 7 September 1868, the three men (accompanied by a mason and his teenaged apprentice) opened up part of the doorway into the upper chamber of the tower. These are Smith’s notes from the event, as reproduced by Linskill in the Haunted Tower pamphlet:

We found it a square chamber with a recess westward in the body of the wall, in which was a number of coffins containing bodies, the coffins being piled one over the other. The bodies – about ten in number – which we examined were in a wonderful state of preservation. They had become dried and sufficiently stiff to be lifted up and set on end.

This suggests that Smith and Walker et al propped the preserved bodies up against the walls themselves (later writers have claimed that the cadavers were already upright when the explorers arrived, but this is clearly not the case).

The Haunted Tower in relation to the east gable of the ruined cathedral. (Photo by Geoff Holder)

The watchmaker’s description continued:

One of them, a female, had on her hands white leather gloves, very entire, a piece of which Carmichael took away as a relic.

Smith remembered the name of the mason as being Mr T. Carmichael, whereas Jesse Hall was convinced it was the same John Ainslie who had been present at the original discovery. Hall’s memory may be more accurate, as some years later the mason’s apprentice, John Grieve, made the following statement:

I assisted John Ainslie to open the tower. I then saw the body of a woman, with a silk napkin tied round her head. She was lying on the floor of the chamber, and the coffin was sticking about three feet above, and the bottom had fallen out. She was in a state of perfect preservation, and had long black hair; otherwise she was quite devoid of clothing. I saw no gloves.

Mr Walker, for his part, appears to have left no record of his recall of the events, but Jesse Hall did remember what occurred that early morning:

We all scrambled in, and by the light of a candle, which we carried, we saw two chests lying side by side. I cannot say how many chests there were. We did not want to disturb them any more than we could help. There would be half-a-dozen as far as I can remember. I saw the body of a girl. The body was stiff and mummified-like. What appeared to be a glove was on one of the hands.

John Grieve may not have seen the gloves that the Revd Skinner, Mr Hall and Mr Smith all mentioned, but it is clear someone did help himself to a souvenir, as, decades later, the surviving fragment of one of the gloves was shown to Linskill, who tells us no more about what subsequently happened to it. Linskill was unclear whether the glove was taken during the first or the second opening of the chamber, and this does point to the souvenir-hunter being John Ainslie. Note that the witnesses disagreed about the number of bodies and coffins present. This may of course be a result of the hurried, cramped viewing conditions where the only light was provided by a candle, but discrepancies such as this can easily arise when the memory is recounted many years later, and so we should be wary of taking all of these reminiscences at face value.

However, it is clear from the accounts we have from three witnesses to the opening on 7 September 1868, that the upper chamber of the Haunted Tower contained at least six – if not ten – bodies. The corpses were well preserved, and one female specimen still had its long hair, as well as some form of textile remains in the form of gloves. There were a number of coffins present, and at least some appeared to have partly disintegrated. Mr Smith further asserted that some of the coffins were made of oak, and a number had a top ridge that indicated a great age.

One of the truly strange things about the 1868 event is that while Messrs Hall, Grieve and Smith are quite clear that only they, plus masons Walker and Ainslie, were present, many years later Matthew Forster Heddle, a Professor of Chemistry at the University, gave his own eye-witness account. He told Linskill and others that he looked through the hole into the upper chamber, and saw the piled-up coffins and one of the bodies, the head of which appeared to have broken off. He also said that he had studied a large number of skulls recovered from the lower chamber of the Haunted Tower. This is the first time that we have a mention of anything beyond the bodies found in the upper chamber. Of these skulls, the teeth were in excellent condition, and about a dozen had their lower jaws tied up with silk bandana handkerchiefs. All of which is intriguing, and we want to know more, but these skulls appear to have vanished – although perhaps they are lying, ignored and mislabelled, in a dusty draw somewhere. Heddle died in 1897. Many years later, his words were reported in the Haunted Tower pamphlet. He, like Walker, was a member of the St Andrews Literary and Philosophical Society, so perhaps he had heard about the expedition via the grapevine and just decided to pop in.

We are not told how long the party remained in the chamber, but if they wanted to avoid public interest, it could not have been long, so presumably by seven a.m. or so, the masons were once more sealing up the gap in the wall (the hole had been made deliberately small, just wide enough for a man to squeeze through). All present agreed not to divulge what they had seen. ‘We kept the matter a profound secret,’ said Mr Hall, ‘and I did not know that anyone knew of it except ourselves.’

The Midnight Re-opening of the Tower

That was the state of affairs in 1868. But at least one of the men present that morning clearly was not altogether discreet, for after a while rumours began to circulate. Linskill, writing in the Aberdeen Weekly Journal on 9 February 1894, described how he first heard a garbled account as a boy – a tutor told him that, ‘there were a lot of girls found in the turret, in riding dresses and gloves, with no appearance of decay about them’. In later years, an older man told him that the incorruptible body of a beautiful female saint lay in the tower, while a Presbyterian minister and a gamekeeper each separately informed Linskill that they had seen the ‘mummies’. It appeared that neither the Haunted Tower nor its secret contents were secure. Then in 1888, Linskill got hold of John Grieve – now a master mason – learned his story, and vowed to launch his own investigation. Finally, after pulling enough strings, the Dean of Guild gained the necessary permissions, and engaged Mr Grieve to once again dismantle part of the entrance into the upper tower. The Dean briefly alluded to ‘other friends’ being present, but he did not name them in print. It was 21 August 1888, almost twenty years to the day since the 1868 expedition. Linskill, with his customary flair for the dramatic, decided to stage the entry at midnight.