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| The Horror of Glamis Castle |
| Diabolical Games The second story is about patrick and his friend the Earl of Crawford. They were playing cards together one Saturday night when a servant reminded them that the Sabbath (Sunday) was approaching. Patrick replied that he would play, Sabbath or no Sabbath and that the Devil himself might join them for a hand if he so wished. At midnight, accompanied by a roll of thunder, the Devil appeared and told the card-playing Earls that they had forfeited their souls and were therefore doomed to play cards in that room until Judgement Day. The pact presumedly came into operation only after Patrick's death, and there is some evidence that he revelled in the tale. But did he tell it merely as a joke or as some sort of elaborate cover up, in order to scare intruders forever from the castle? If the latter was his intention, it was certainly strikingly successful. In 1957, a servant at the castle, Florence Foster, complained in a newspaper article that she had heard the Earls at their play in the dead of night, 'rattling dice', stamping and swearing. "Often I lay in bed and shook with fright", she said, and resigned rather than risk hearing the phantom gamblers again. The story persists even today of a secret room known only to the Earls themselves, and no one knows for certain which of the hundred-odd rooms at Glamis was used by Patrick for his diabolical game of cards. Another story tells (with curious precision) of a grey-bearded man, shackled and left to starve in the 1486. A later one, probably also dating from before Patrick's time, is gruesome in the extreme. A party of Ogilvies from a neighbouring district came to Glamis and begged protection from their enemies, the Lindsays, who were pursuing them. The Earl of Strathmore led them into a chamber, deep in the castle, and left them there to starve. Unlike the unfortunate grey-bearded man, however, they had each other to eat and began to turn cannibal. Some of them, according to legend, even gnawing the flesh from their own arms. On or the other of these tales may account for a skeletally thin apparition, known as Jack the Runner; and the ghost of a black pageboy, also seen in the castle. These seem to date from the 17th or 18th century, when young slaves were imported from the West Indies. A "white" lady is also said to haunt the castle clock tower, while the grey-bearded man of 1486 appeared, at least once, to two guests simultaneously. One of whom was the wife of the Archbishop of York at the turn of the 20th century. She told how, during her stay at the castle, one of the guests came down to breakfast and mentioned casually that she had been awakened by the banging and hammering of carpenters at 4am. A brief silence followed her remarks, and then Lord Strathmore spoke, assuring her that there were no workmen in the castle. According to another story, as a young girl, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (daughter of the 14th Earl, Claude George Bowes-Lyon), once had to move out of the Blue Room, because her sleep was being disturbed by rappings, thumps, and footsteps. Fascinating as all these run-of-the-mill ghosts and their distinguished observers are, however, it is the 'horror' that remains the great mystery of Glamis. All the principal rumours - cannibal Ogilvies notwithstanding - involve a deformed child, born to the family and kept in a secret chamber, who lived, according to 19th century versions of the story, to a very old age. In view of the portrait openly displayed at glamis, and always supposing that it is the mysterious child who is actually portrayed, subsequent secrecy seems rather pointless. If Patrick himself was prepared to have his 'secret' portrayed in oils, why should successors have disouraged open discussion of the matter? Unmentionable Horror Despite the secrecy, at the turn of the 19th century, stories were still flying thick and fast. Claude Bowes-Lyon, the 13th Earl who died in 1904 in his 80th year, seems to have been positively obsessed by the horror, and it is around him that most of the 19th century stories revolved. It was he, for instance, who told an inquisitive friend; "If you could guess the nature of the secret, you yould go down on your knees and thank God it were not yours." Claude, too, it was who paid the passage of a workman and his family to Australia, after the workman had inadvertently stumbled upon a 'secret room' at Glamis and been overcome with horror. Claude questioned him, swore the man to secrecy, and bundled him off to the colonies shortly afterwards. To a great extent, the obsession seems to have visited itself upon his son, Claude George, the 14th Earl, who died in 1944. In the 1920's, a party of people staying at the Glamis decided to track down a 'secret chamber' by hanging a piece of linen out of every window they could find. When they finished, they saw there were several windows that they had not been able to locate from the inside. When the Earl learned what they had done, he flew into an uncharacteristic fury. Unlike his forbears, however, Claude George broke the embargo on the secret by telling it to his estate factor, Gavin Ralston, who subsequently refused to stay overnight at the Castle again. When the 14th Earl's daughter-in-law, the next Lady Strathmore, asked Ralston the secret. Ralston is said to have replied, "It is lucky that you do not know and can never know it, for if you did, you would not be a happy woman." That statement, surely, is the clue to the horror of Glamis. Old Patrick's deformed offspring did not alarm the father because nothing like it had been seen in the family before. Possibly the 'wicked' Earl rather delighted in him. But if the same deformity appeared even once in a later generation, the head of an ancient, noble and hereditary house would certainly have been reluctant to breadcast the fact. Perhaps, Claude, 13th Earl of Strathmore, knew of such a second, deformed child in the Bowes-Lyon line, and passed the secret, and the fear of its recurrence, on to his successors. |
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