Poltergeist Over Scotland E-Book

Geoff Holder

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

Seitenzahl: 323

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In 1945 the celebrated psi-researcher Harry Price published Poltergeist over England, popularising the word poltergeist (German for 'noisy ghost') and making famous the kind of physical haunting characterised by thrown objects, mysterious noises, and damage by fire or water. Now, for the first time, an astonishing array of historical Scottish poltergeist cases are gathered together, from the Middle Ages to the modern period - unearthing many episodes that have remained neglected for centuries. Some were no doubt hoaxes, but in others, multiple witnesses testified to disturbing events enacted over months. Whatever the true cause of the events, the historical evidence from Scotland suggests that poltergeist phenomena is undoubtedly real.

Leseprobe

As the word poltergeist is German

(poltern, noisy, geist, ghost), it seems appropriate

to tip the titfer to the legends of kosmische musik:

Amon Düül II, Can, Cluster, Embryo, Faust,

Neu!, Popol Vuh, Klaus Schulze and Tangerine

Dream. Thanks for the wig-outs, chaps.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One: The Seventeenth Century

Chapter Two: The Eighteenth Century

Chapter Three: The Nineteenth Century

Chapter Four: The Twentieth Century, Part I: 1900–1949

Chapter Five: The Twentieth Century, Part II: 1950–1975

Chapter Six: The Twentieth Century, Part III: 1976–1999

Chapter Seven: The Twenty-First Century (to 2012)

Bibliography

Plate Section

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to: the AK Bell Library, Perth; the Burns Monument Centre, Kilmarnock; Edinburgh Libraries, the National Records of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland and the Advocates Library, Edinburgh; Aberdeen Library Local Studies; the Mitchell Library, Glasgow; Shetland Archives; and Shetland Library. I would also like to express my appreciation to the various organisations that responded to my Freedom of Information requests.

I wish to extend my gratitude to: Alan Murdie of The Ghost Club; Julian Drewett of The Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies; the Revd Angus Haddow; Tim Prevett; Dr John Holliday; Lachie Campbell; Tricia Robertson of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research; Melvyn Willin of the SPR; Professor Peter Jánosi of the University of Vienna; the late Norman Adams; Jamie Cook; Dane Love; Ron Halliday; Dr Peter McCue; Archibald Lawrie; Jenni Wilson for designing the maps; and, bien sûr, Ségolène ‘Cactus’ Dupuy. All sins of commission and omission are of course the author’s.

Geoff Holder manifests mysteriously at www.geoffholder.com.

Introduction

‘The annoyances appear rather like the tricks of a mischievous imp. I refer to what the Germans call the Poltergeist, or racketing spectre, for the phenomenon is known in all countries, and has been known in all ages.’

Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature, 1848.This book introduced the word ‘poltergeist’ into the English language.

This is the first-ever history of Scottish poltergeists. It covers 134 cases, from the 1630s to the present day. Herein, furniture flies, objects move, electricity goes haywire, fires and floods flourish, terrifying noises bluster and bang, skin is scratched, blood and maggots ooze, and foul stenches pervade.

Enjoy.

WHAT ARE POLTERGEISTS?

The late John Peel (1939–2004) once described his favourite group, The Fall, as ‘always different, always the same’. And so it is with poltergeists, whose cantrips are as similar – and as bafflingly pointless – today as they were many centuries ago.

As with other paranormal episodes, poltergeist cases tend to have two parts: the ‘description of phenomena’ (i.e. the experiences, as described by the participants or commentators) and the ‘interpretation’, which is an entirely different kettle of aquatic vertebrates. For example, two people can experience being overwhelmed by a mysterious bright light, and one will interpret it as a UFO/alien experience, while the other will ascribe to it a religious interpretation (angel/saint/vision of God). Interpretation of poltergeist experiences depends in part on the social and religious context of the time, and the belief system of the individual.

In 1691 the Revd Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, in what was then Highland Perthshire, wrote The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns & Fairies, in which he had this to say of the fairies: ‘The invisible Wights which haunt Houses … throw great Stones, Pieces of Earth and Wood, at the Inhabitants, [but] they hurt them not at all.’ This notion, that poltergeists were fairies, brownies, or household spirits such as kobolds or follets, was widely circulated in Europe during the Early Modern Period (Claude Lecouteux’s The Secret History of Poltergeists and Haunted Houses gives numerous examples) – but I suspect it would find few adherents today. Kirk also wrote of the belief that ‘those creatures that move invisibly in a house, and cast huge great stones, but do no much hurt’ were ‘souls that have not attained their rest’. The ‘survival hypothesis’, the idea that poltergeists are the ghosts of the restless dead, remains popular, at least with journalists and Spiritualists (whose religion is founded on the reality of communications with the dead).

Intriguingly enough, however, we do not find this belief expressed in the earliest Scottish cases – but post-Reformation Protestant theology had removed the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory (a kind of unpleasant holding-area for souls, perhaps akin to the waiting room at Birmingham Coach Station), and so could conceive of no mechanism by which a soul could escape from Heaven or Hell for a day-visit to Earth. Therefore, any time a ghost appeared, it could only be one thing: a demon, often taking on the disguise of a deceased person so as to lead the living into sin. The notion that poltergeists are demons or unclean/evil spirits is as potent today as it was in the seventeenth century. A subset of the ‘polt as demon’ trope is the idea that poltergeists are invoked by witches; and as case 100 shows, this interpretation has also persisted into modern times.

By the nineteenth century we find a rationalistic insistence on the mundane reality of poltergeists: they were either the result of misperception or simply tricks employed by cunning fraudsters (and indeed, a small number of Scottish cases definitely fall into this category). The post-Freudian twentieth century brought us the concept of the poltergeist as externalized distress – the idea that some people, known as ‘focal persons’, can manifest their internal unhappiness by unconsciously projecting it into the world beyond their body. This notion – now named Recurrent Spontaneous Psycho-Kinesis or RSPK – remains the favourite hypothesis with parapsychologists. Statistical studies showed that most RSPK cases centred on a young person, often female, who was usually suffering from some form of stress (puberty, problems with family, school or relationships, and so on). The ‘troubled young girl’ has become something of a default position, but many cases (both in this book and elsewhere) show that the ‘focus’ can be a middle-aged man, a menopausal woman, or two siblings, or even several people consecutively or simultaneously. In other words, anyone can be a poltergeist focus – although why (and how) only a few of the millions of people under stress actually generate RSPK still remains a mystery – if, of course, RSPK is the actual agency. Like other attempts at explaining poltergeists, it is at best a hypothesis.

The post-war period also saw the rise of alternative explanations for poltergeists: earth tremors or changes in subterranean water pressure; ley-lines or ‘earth energy’; and electromagnetic fields or atmospheric conditions. In recent years the pages of august journals such as that published by the Society for Psychical Research have suggested that some poltergeist activity may be directed by ‘discarnate intelligences’ – that is, non-corporeal entities. Here we see the resurgence of the idea of ghosts, demons or spirits, only without the religious baggage. Who knows, perhaps in the next few years the pendulum may swing towards fairies and kobolds again.

Personally, my considered opinion on the nature of poltergeists is very simple: I have absolutely no idea what they are.

POLTERGEISTS AND HAUNTINGS

There is a great deal of overlap between what are thought of as traditional hauntings (which principally feature apparitions, voices, noises, temperature changes, etc.) and poltergeist cases. Many hauntings encompass minor poltergeist activity, and apparitions number among the reported phenomena in a significant minority of poltergeist outbreaks. The two categories are not distinct and may well be part of the same spectrum of phenomena. There is also the popular notion that hauntings are ‘place-based’ while poltergeists are ‘person-based’; but several cases in this book (for example, 15, 64 and 79) would appear to contradict that notion. In fact, the totality of the cases as a whole contradict any standard notion, any set belief – poltergeists challenge expectations; their reality often trumps theory.

WHERE DO POLTERGEISTS MANIFEST?

The overwhelming majority of the polts within this book (111, or 82.8 per cent) appear where people live. Of these, twenty-one of sixty-six cases before the Second World War centred on farms or crofts (31.8 per cent of the pre-war total, 15.7 per cent of the full list); twelve took place in council houses (18 per cent of the post-war cases, 9 per cent of the full total); while seven castles or mansions appear (5.2 per cent), closely followed by six manses and rectories (4.5 per cent). Meanwhile, pubs, clubs or hotels feature in nine (6.7 per cent) cases, with other workplaces taking up twelve (9 per cent) of the total. Only a tiny number of episodes occur in uninhabited locations.

PHENOMENA

Here are the elements that characterise the Scottish cases, by frequency.

  1.   Objects/furniture moved: 96 of 134 cases (71.6 per cent).

  2.   Noises (taps, knocks, bangs, cries etc.): 88 (65.7 per cent).

  3.   Apparitions (including shadows and ‘mists’): 36 (26.9 per cent).

  4.   Displacement (an item vanishes from one place to be found elsewhere): 33 (24.6 per cent).

  5.   Doors locked/unlocked/opened/closed: 31 (23.1 per cent).

  6.   Damage to objects/furniture/fixtures: 28 (20.9 per cent).

  7.   Lithobolia (throwing of stones etc.): 24 (17.9 per cent).

  8.   Electrical effects: 22 (16.4 per cent; as electrical products only became available from the 1890s, the more accurate percentage is 22 out of 83, or 26.5 per cent).

  9.   Assaults (punches, shoves, scratches, etc.): 19 (14.2 per cent).

10.   Voices: 19 (14.2 per cent).

11.   Fire or smoke: 16 (11.9 per cent).

12.   Witchcraft/magic: 14 (10.5 per cent).

13.   Sense of presence: 12 (9 per cent).

14.   Apports (objects that appear ‘out of nowhere’): 9 (6.7 per cent).

15.   Conversations: 9 (6.7 per cent).

16.   Food interfered with: 9 (6.7 per cent).

17.   Invisible hands etc.: 9 (6.7 per cent).

18.   Temperature effects: 9 (6.7 per cent).

19.   Water: 9 (6.7 per cent).

20.   Writing: 9 (6.7 per cent).

21.   Demons/Satan: 9 (6.7 per cent).

22.   Smells: 8 (6 per cent).

23.   Miniature beings/fairies: 7 (5.2 per cent).

24.   Hoax (at least in part): 6 (4.5 per cent).

25.   Names (poltergeist names itself or responds to suggested names): 6 (4.5 per cent).

26.   Attacks on religious visitors/objects: 6 (4.5 per cent).

27.   Levitation of persons: 6 (4.5 per cent).

28.   Luminous effects: 6 (4.5 per cent).

29.   Music/tunes: 5 (3.7 per cent).

30.   Animals interfered with: 4 (3 per cent).

31.   Clothes etc. cut/slashed: 4 (3 per cent).

32.   Telephone effects: 4 (3 per cent; 4.8 per cent of cases since 1901, when the first telephone exchange in Scotland was opened).

33.   Voices imitating the living: 4 (3 per cent).

34.   ’Possession’/trance: 4 (3 per cent).

35.   Noxious substances (blood, maggots): 3 (2.2 per cent).

36.   Ouija board: 3 (2.2 per cent).

37.   Thrown items warm to the touch: 2 (1.5 per cent).

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The cases are numbered chronologically, starting with No.1 in 1635, and ending with No.134 in 2012. Each chapter has its own map, and cases can also be found by place name in the index. To assist with locating a particular case geographically, current local authority names have been used, e.g. South or North Lanarkshire rather than just Lanarkshire. For the vast Highland Region, however, I have also added the district, such as Lochaber or Caithness. Most cases are structured around the same format: the period (how long the disturbances lasted, where known); a description of the phenomena; an evaluation of the sources; a discussion of the context for the case, which is often crucial to its understanding; and the interpretation of the participants at the time, sometimes with my own (doubtless biased) comments. Where minor or repetitive cases have strained the boundaries of available space, I have retained them within the case numbering system, but reduced their content to the bare bones.

Chapter One

The Seventeenth Century

Here’s a knocking indeed! … Knock! knock! knock! … Who’s there, i’ the name o’ Beelzebub? … Who’s there, i’ the Devil’s name? Knock! knock! knock!— Never at quiet?

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

The seventeenth century was a tumultuous period in Scotland, with wars and rebellions often fracturing along religious lines. In a generation-long conflict over Church government, some 30,000 hardline Protestant fundamentalists, known as Covenanters, lost their lives to Royalist forces. This complex dispute spilled over into the English Civil Wars, with Scottish armies supporting one side and then another – eventually leading to Protestant Scotland being under military occupation by Cromwell’s Puritans.

After decades of religious ping pong, the first Jacobite Rebellion of 1689–90 had the unintended side-effect of making Scotland officially Presbyterian – even today, while the Established Church in England and Wales is Anglican (Episcopal, that is, led by bishops and archbishops), the Church of Scotland, being Presbyterian, is a bishop-free zone. Meanwhile, the fortunes of the Catholic minority waxed and waned.

Executions for witchcraft reached their peak in the 1660s, with a steady decline thereafter (although punctuated by the occasional burst of ferocity). Part of this reduction was attributable to changes in the intellectual world. A new way of thinking – something called ‘natural philosophy’ or ‘science’ – was attracting the best minds. This too led to a backlash, with such freethinkers being labelled ‘Saduccees’ or ‘Atheists’ – and, as we shall see, books were published with the stated purpose of proving that spirits and witches were a) genuine and b) part of God’s design for the universe. Where there are devils, the argument ran, there must be a God.

1. EDINBURGH: 1635?

We owe the earliest record of a Scottish poltergeist case to John Maitland, 1st Duke of Lauderdale. The polt infested a house occupied by an unnamed elderly Presbyterian minister and his son, less than 4 miles from Edinburgh – which would place it very much within the suburbs of the present city.

Period

Several weeks (?).

Phenomena

‘Their house was extraordinarily troubled with noises,’ writes Maitland:

… which they and their family, and many neighbours (who for divers weeks used to go watch with them) did ordinarily hear. It troubled them most on the Saturday night, and the night before their weekly lecture day. Sometimes they would hear all the locks in the house, on doors and chests, to fly open; yea, their clothes, which were at night locked up into trunks and chests, they found in the morning all hanging about the walls. Once they found their best linen taken out, the table covered with it, napkins as if they had been used, yea, and liquor in their cups as if company had been there at meat. The rumbling was extraordinary; the good old man commonly called his family to prayer when it was most troublesome, and immediately it was converted into gentle knocking, like the modest knock of a finger; but as soon as prayer was done, they should hear excessive knocking, as if a beam had been heaved by strength of many men against the floor.

Maitland adds another intriguing detail:

Never was there voice or apparition; but one thing was remarkable (you must know that it is ordinary in Scotland to have a half cannon-bullet in the chimney-corner, on which they break their great coals), a merry maid in the house, being accustomed to the rumblings, and so her fear gone, told her fellow maid-servant that if the Devil troubled them that night, she would brain him, so she took the half cannon-bullet [cannon-ball] into bed; the noise did not fail to awake her, nor did she fail in her design, but took up the great bullet, and with a threatening, threw it, as she thought, on the floor, but the bullet was never more seen; the minister turned her away for meddling and talking to it.

If we look at a contemporary work, such as Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army during the Great Civil War, written by Richard Symonds in 1644, we see that a typical cannon-ball of the period tipped the scales at 9lb (4.1kg).

Sources

Maitland did not witness the events himself, but heard of them some years later from the minister’s son (himself a clergyman); the episodes were also described to him by several other witnesses, including the Duke’s own steward, whose father and servants lived close to the infested house, and saw the events with their own eyes. The Duke vouched for the character of all these witnesses.

Context

Maitland was a central figure in the complex weft of seventeenth-century Scottish politics, in which religious affiliations, self-interest and brute force created alliances built on quicksand.

Starting as a supporter of the ultra-Presbyterian Covenanters, he switched to the party of King Charles. During the Civil Wars he was captured by Parliamentarian forces at the Battle of Worcester (1651) and held prisoner in Windsor Castle for nine years. From his confinement the Scottish Royalist aristocrat wrote a number of letters to Richard Baxter (1615–1691), an influential English Puritan minister (Baxter’s replies have not survived). The letter describing the Edinburgh poltergeist was dated 12 March 1659, and includes a hint of an even earlier poltergeist episode: ‘I could tell you an ancienter story before my time, in the house of one Burnet, in the north of Scotland, where strange things were seen, which I can get sufficiently attested.’ Unfortunately no further details were forthcoming.

Baxter reproduced Maitland’s letter in The Certainty of the World of Spirits Fully Evinced by the Unquestionable Histories of Apparitions, Operations, Witchcrafts, Voices, etc., written for the conviction of Sadducees and Infidels. Published in 1691, the book was ideologically designed to combat the growing intellectual scepticism of the age.

Maitland stated that the events occurred ‘since I was a married man’. The Duke married Lady Anne Home in 1632, so we can guess that the polt may have been active sometime around 1632–35. Maitland signed off his letter asking that it not be printed, for patriotic reasons: ‘Scottish stories would make the disaffected jeer Scotland, which is the object of scorn enough already.’

Interpretation

Baxter’s ideological commitment is clear from the title of The Certainty of the World of Spirits. He did not comment on Maitland’s story of a house ‘disquieted with noises’, but the reader is left to assume that the agency involved was an evil spirit or demon.

2. BOTARY, ABERDEENSHIRE: 1644

Period

Twenty days.

Phenomena

Patrik Malcolme was a poor labourer with a reputation as a ‘charmer’, a term which meant a practitioner of folk magic. While lodging at the farm of Alexander Chrystie he asked Chrystie’s servant Margaret Barbour for sex. She refused, upon which Malcolme took the girl’s left shoe, told her she would not earn her wages that year and described what she had hidden in a locked cupboard. That night, stones and clods of peat rained down on the roof of the farm in Grange. The ‘clodding’ – a term specific to north-east Scotland – continued for twenty days and nights, and only ceased when Margaret Barbour was removed from the house.

Sources

On 28 February 1644 Patrik Malcolme was investigated by the kirk session at Botarie (Botary – now the hamlet of Cairnie, 4 miles north-west of Huntly). Kirk sessions were the Presbyterian frontline in maintaining social order, usually dealing with fornication, drinking, gambling, and minor crimes of theft and violence. Occasionally they found themselves up against magic, supernatural beliefs, and witchcraft. According to witnesses, Malcolme begged milk from the wife of John Maltman in Botarie; when he was rebuffed, he cursed the cow, and it died shortly afterwards. He took away the ‘goodness’ or substance of Alexander Gray’s cornfield and transferred it onto a neighbour’s crop, and then told Gray he would bring the goodness back in exchange for the gift of a shirt. Both of these were standard accusations of low-level witchcraft of the time, and established Malcolme’s reputation (the Strathbogie Presbytery had also investigated another charmer, Issobell Malcolme, who was almost certainly a relative of Patrik). As for the clodding, it was witnessed by Alexander Chrystie and his neighbour Walter Brabner. Margaret Barbour did not appear at the investigation. The Presbytery deferred the case for a month, and thereafter it vanishes from the records. The original text can be found in Extracts from the Presbytery Book of Strathbogie 1631–1654, published by John Stuart in 1843.

Context

Charming – folk magic below the serious level of witchcraft – preoccupied many a rural minister or church elder at the time. In 1637 the representatives of the Strathbogie Presbytery asked the Synod of Moray for advice on how to deal with the plague of charmers operating in their area. Again in 1672 Strathbogie charmers were described as using ‘spells and other heathenish superstitions, expressions and practices over sick persons for their recovery’.

Interpretation

This is a deeply frustrating case, in which the scant records only hint at what must have been going on. Did the Presbytery think that Malcolme initiated the clodding through sorcery? Or did Alexander Chrystie eject Margaret Barbour because he deemed she was either responsible for or the focus of the events? And why did Malcolme regard Margaret’s left shoe as a ritual object in his quest for sexual power over her?

3. MOFFAT, DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY: 1650

Period

Days? Years? Decades?

Phenomena

Poldean Holm, 4 miles from Moffat, was plagued by ‘noises and apparitions, drums and trumpets’. In August 1650 Charles II and his English troops lodged at the house, and some of the soldiers were ‘soundly beaten by that irresistible inhabitant’. By 1659 it was manifesting as a disembodied naked arm, and discussing politics with the officers. The house had supposedly been haunted for fifty or sixty years.

Sources

The source is Lauderdale’s letter to Richard Baxter, 12 March 1659, although here the details are scanty. The Duke said he heard the tale from the house’s owner, a Mr [Ambrose] Johnstone, when the latter was in England in 1651, while the information about the arm and speechifying was supplied to him by a Puritan minister, James Sharp. Agnes Marchbank, in Upper Annandale: Its History and Traditions (1901), quoting the scholarly Revd William Bennet of Moffat (d.1899), supports the tradition of the ghost arguing with Royalist officers and taking a political stance opposite to that of the laird.

Context

The Civil Wars generated supernatural tales a-plenty, often with an eye to propaganda.

Interpretation

A minor poltergeist outbreak, or a more conventional haunting? In 1909, in a history of the Johnstone clan, C.L. Johnstone sceptically suggested the spirit was a device invented to prevent hungry soldiers from eating the inhabitants of Poldean out of house and home.

4. GLENLUCE, DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY: 1654–56

If Moffat was an information famine, this is a glut; the ‘Devil of Glenluce’ is one of the best-attested Scottish polts, with a wealth of details.

Period

November 1654 to September 1656 (twenty-two months, with gaps).

Phenomena

The locus of the astonishing set of phenomena was the home of Gilbert Campbell, a weaver who lived in the rural Galloway village of Glenluce, some 9 miles east of Stranraer. Weavers worked long hours on large home looms. In the household were Gilbert’s wife, Grizel, several children of various ages, and a servant named Margaret. The episodes had three principal phases, with several months of peace between each.

Phase One: November 1654–April 1655

As with many poltergeist outbreaks, it started with sounds – in this case, shrill whistling both outside and inside the house, ‘such as children use to make with their small slender grass whistles.’ Sometime in early November 1654, Gilbert’s daughter Janet was at the well, with the whistling all around, when both she and another woman heard a voice that resembled Janet’s say threateningly, ‘I’ll cast thee, Janet, into the well.’

Around mid-November the polt graduated to throwing great quantities of stones through the doors and windows and down the chimney, although, despite the force with which they were thrown, they did not injure anyone. At this point the parish minister, the Revd John Scott, along with neighbours and friends, became aware of the disturbances, which now included the slashing and cutting of the family’s hats, clothes, and shoes, even while they were wearing them, and the severing of the threads on Gilbert’s weaving loom. At night, blankets were pulled off beds. The contents of chests and trunks were strewn around the house. Work items and tools were displaced into tiny holes and clefts. Gilbert was forced to move his remaining equipment to a neighbour’s house, and temporarily lost his livelihood.

Some neighbours suggested the troubles were centred on one member of Gilbert’s family, and so he sent all his children away to various houses for five days – and the disturbances ceased. They returned one by one – and when one son, Thomas, arrived, the phenomena kicked off again, this time with fires breaking out on two separate days. The weaver, now convinced Thomas was the focus, lodged the boy with the Revd Scott. But even with the lad out of the picture, the phenomena just kept getting worse, with peats hitting the house, turf being pulled off the roof and walls, clothes being slashed or stolen, and attacks with pins that left bloody prick-marks on skin. When Thomas returned he heard a forbidding voice ordering him not to enter the dwelling – and when he did so, he suffered so badly that the Revd Scott was forced to re-accommodate him.

One day, three months into the outbreak, the entire family heard a voice speak to them, and spent many hours in casual conversation with it. The next day, Tuesday, 13 February 1655, the Revd Scott, fearing fraternisation with Satan, turned up with a task force: his wife, accompanied by a gentlewoman of the name of Mrs Douglas, and a troupe of gentlemen of good standing – James Bailie of Carphin, Alexander Bailie of Dunragged, and Mr Robert Hay. As they entered the voice addressed them in Latin and then in Lowland Scots. It was the start of a truly extraordinary day, in which the group became convinced they were speaking with the Son of Satan.

Throughout the day, the voice was silent whenever the group prayed, but at other times it was garrulous. It revealed the names of ‘the witches of Glenluce’. When Gilbert Campbell said that one of the women named had died, the voice replied: ‘It is true she is dead long ago, but her spirit is living with us in the world.’ The voice threatened to set the roof on fire if Thomas Campbell did not leave. It asked for a shovel to make its own grave. It claimed to have a written commission from Christ to vex the family. It argued Scripture with the minister, trading back and forth endless quotations from the Gospels. It stated it lived in the ‘bottomless pit of hell’, and that Satan was its father. It accused Robert Hay of being a witch and mocked Alexander Bailie for his broad-rimmed hat. It called for the candles to be extinguished, so it could appear in the darkness as a fireball. It cried for oatcakes out of hunger, asked Janet Campbell to hand over her belt so it could bind its bones together, and threatened to dash out the brains of a younger daughter (to show how familiar the family were with the voice, the young girl just shrugged this off and went back to her chores).

When, late into the night, the party prepared to leave, it threatened to burn the house down or strike the children. The voice appeared to come from the ground beneath a bed, or from the children lying on the beds, or from outside. When it roared for the candles to be put out, the noise was so great the visitors thought the voice was shouting into their ears.

Perhaps most peculiar of all, at some point during the day the voice created an apparition of Satan’s own forearm:

Presently there appeared a naked hand, and an arm from the elbow down, beating upon the floor till the house did shake again, and also he uttered a most fearful and loud cry, saying, ‘Come up, my father; come up. I will send my father among you; see, there he is behind your backs.’ Then the minister said, ‘I saw indeed a hand and an arm, when the stroke was given and heard.’ The Devil said to him, ‘Saw you that? It was not my hand, it was my father’s; my hand is more black in the loof [palm].’

Despite a later visit by five ministers – in which their continuous prayers remained uninterrupted by Lucifer Jnr – the Campbell household continued to suffer the visitations until April 1655. At which point, after six months of torment, the disturbances just stopped.

Phase Two: July 1655-April 1656

Four months of peace was shattered in July 1655, with a renewed series of assaults, including the destruction or spoiling of food, so that the family were close to starving. In October Gilbert Campbell approached the Synod, the regional body of Presbyteries, for help. Acting with glacial speed, the Synod committee met at Glenluce in February 1656, implored God in his mercy to assist the afflicted family, and declared a day of fasting and humiliation throughout south-west Scotland. Such fast days were common at the time, part of Presbyterian attempts to attract the attention of the Almighty. The Synod’s slow reaction may have been caused by the death of the Revd Scott in December 1655, aged forty-six. Back in February 1655, the voice had predicted (correctly, as it turned out) that it would have a longer life than the minister. Phenomena slowly declined, and by April 1656 had vanished altogether.

Phase Three: August 1656-September 1656

A second four-month gap came to an end in August 1656, with cooked food being displaced from the table into holes, under beds, within the bedclothes, and out of the house. Making breakfast one morning, Grizel had the plate snatched from her. She called out, ‘Let me have my plate again,’ and the item flew at her, but without causing any harm. Throughout August, noises and disturbances raged through the house every night. In September events built up to a climax of sorts: the noises got worse, stones cascaded on the house, the family were assaulted in their beds by wooden staves, and the voice roared out that it was going to burn the house down. On 21 or 22 September, one of the beds caught fire, the blaze being quickly extinguished. And then, that was that. After almost two years, the terrifying phenomena simply ceased, and the principal narrative breaks off:

Thus I have written a short and true account of all the material passages which occurred. To write every particular, especially of lesser moment, would fill a large volume. The goodman lived several years after this in the same house; and it seems, by some conjuration or other, the Devil suffered himself to be put away, and gave the weaver a peaceable habitation. This weaver has been a very old man, that endured so long these marvellous disturbances.

In January 1661 Robert Baillie, Principal of the University of Glasgow, wrote one of his habitual long letters to his friend William Sprang, mentioning the Glenluce case, which he said was notorious throughout Galloway (although he called Mr Campbell John, not Gilbert). Baillie noted that nothing had been heard of the disturbing spirit for at least a twelve-month.

Sources

The primary source is George Sinclair, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, who says he received some details from one of the clergymen present at the five-minister prayer session, but that the bulk of the narrative was supplied by one of Gilbert Campbell’s sons, who was a philosophy student at Glasgow (‘philosophy’ at this point meant natural philosophy, i.e. science). Sinclair himself taught at Glasgow between 1655 and 1667. This son is not named in the piece, but he does feature in the text. On 13 February 1655, the famous day when the Revd Scott and others argued with the Devil’s offspring, the voice stated: ‘If the goodman’s son’s prayers at the College of Glasgow did not prevail with God, my father and I had wrought a mischief here ere now.’ In other words, Gilbert’s college boy, through his prayers, had kept Satan & Son at bay.

The story first appeared in print in 1672, rather bizarrely inserted into Sinclair’s engineering treatise The Hydrostaticks, or, the Weight, Force, and Pressure of Fluid Bodies … together with a Short History of Coal. He reprinted it – as ‘The Devil of Glenluce, enlarged with several remarkable additions from an eye and ear witness, a person of undoubted authority’ – in his compendium of the supernatural, Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (1685). This was another book designed to shore up the popular belief in the supernatural, as can be seen from its subtitle: A choice Collection of Modern Relations, proving evidently against the Saducees and Atheists of this present Age, that there are Devils, Spirits, Witches, and Apparitions, from Authentic Records, Attestations of Famous Witnesses and undoubted Verity. The Glenluce narrative also appeared in the second edition (1689) of Joseph Glanvil’s hugely influential book Saducismus triumphatus: or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions, which gave the initial boost of publicity to famous English poltergeist cases such as the Drummer of Tedworth. The editor of the second edition, Henry More, wrote of the Glenluce case: ‘I have heard the Truth of the Story averr’d with all assurance myself by some of that Country.’ Robert Baillie’s comment in 1661 shows that the episode was well known long before Sinclair published his account.

Context

Sinclair opens with a reference to Alexander Agnew, ‘a bold and sturdy beggar, who afterwards was hanged at Dumfries for blasphemy … [he] had threatened hurt to the family, because he had not gotten such an alms as he required.’ In the next sentence, the whistling begins, as the herald of the full poltergeist outbreak. The unstated implication is that Agnew, by some form of sorcery or cursing, had conjured up the evil spirit in revenge for being rebuffed. Volume five of David Masson’s monumental Life of John Milton (1877) tells us more about Alexander Agnew. He was commonly known as ‘Jock of Broad Scotland’, and was an itinerant beggar infamous for his religious views. The English Civil Wars had unleashed a hurricane of sects, cults and revolutionary beliefs across the land, with the result that many people at the lower end of the social scale were openly espousing their opposition to orthodox religious tenets. As both England and Scotland were both effectively theocracies, the authorities did not look kindly on these challenges to established Christian norms. Big-mouthed Agnew was arrested for blasphemy. He was charged with refusing to attend church, denying the reality of the Trinity, Heaven, Hell and the efficacy of prayer, claiming he owed nothing to God and that God provided nothing for him, mocking all religious beliefs, and indeed regarding the entire Christian worldview as a charade. ‘He declared that he knew not whether God or the Devil had the greater power; but he thought the Devil had the greatest; and “When I die,” said he, “let God and the Devil strive for my soul, and let him that is strongest take it”.’ On Wednesday, 21 May 1656, for expressing these views, Jock of Broad Scotland was hanged from a gibbet.

In his letter of 1661, Robert Baillie states that the Campbells obtained some temporary relief in the period after Agnew was executed. In reality, the phenomena had stopped in April 1656, at least a month before the hanging, and then started up again in August of that year.

Interpretation

The association between Agnew’s threat and the onset of the poltergeist may seem like coincidence to the modern reader, but to Sinclair or his informant it was clearly meaningful. Given the beggar’s forthright views, was he thought to be an agent of the Foul Fiend? Throughout the infestation, the ministers and other gentlefolk were convinced the poltergeist was demonic, even Satanic in nature. Some of the Campbell family, in contrast, seemed to treat the voice as if it were an annoying lodger that wanted to constantly draw attention to itself.

Sinclair’s account tells us very little about the family situation, the age and number of children, or any tensions within the household. Deliberate fraud may have been employed by one or more of the children, but given that the Campbells ended up almost starving, this idea can’t be taken too far, and the sheer range and scale of phenomena would require a family-wide conspiracy to carry out. Thomas Campbell may have been the human focus of the poltergeist, but phenomena continued in his absence; possibly his sister Janet was the agent – we cannot tell. Fraud? RSPK? The actions of a discarnate intelligence? Sadly, it is now impossible to come to any form of conclusion about the Glenluce Devil.

5. STIRLING: 1659

If this is a poltergeist case, it is one that centres exclusively on spontaneous fires. As such it bears comparison with the 1982 case of Carole Compton (No.100).

Period

January 1659 (two or three weeks?).

Phenomena

Fires broke out wherever Margaret Gourlay went. Around the second week of January her bed caught fire on two consecutive days. After a third blaze in her house, three separate fires broke out in the home of her neighbour Andrew Wright. Two days later the bed of the male servants in the byre went alight. Another two days brought what appears to be the climax, with five fires starting up simultaneously in different parts of the barnyard, while Margaret, who was winding wool at the time, ignored a fire flickering under her very feet.

Sources

Margaret Gourlay was examined by local magistrates on 25 February 1659, and, along with five other women and one man, tried for witchcraft by the Circuit Court in Stirling on 22 and 23 March. The accusations against the six overlapped, and were mostly concerned with ritual healing, and magical harm to humans and animals – Margaret alone was associated with fiery outbreaks. The proceedings are recorded in the Circuit Court Books listed as JC10/1 and the Process Notes JC26/26, both held in the National Records of Scotland. There is a good summary of the events in Professor Maxwell-Stuart’s The Great Scottish Witch-Hunt (2007).

In addition to the fires, Margaret was implicated in various uncanny events, such as the appearance of a sinister black man and a mysterious flight of crows. A day or two before the fires started, a bizarre clap of thunder was heard at her window, there were bangs at her door, and stones were thrown at her wall (these episodes of course hint at poltergeist activity, although they could just as easily have a mundane human explanation). Margaret’s principal accuser was Janet Millar, apparently a neighbour, associate or even a servant, and one of Margaret’s co-accused. In the end two of the accused were found guilty and executed, while four, including Margaret and Janet, were acquitted and set free.

Context

If Margaret really was a pyrokinetic poltergeist agent, her powers could, within the context of the times, have only been regarded as sorcery. Spontaneous outbreaks of fire are extremely rare within the corpus of Scottish witchcraft cases.

Interpretation