Glamis Castle

In 1537, a woman named Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, was burned as a witch on Castle Hill in Edinburgh.

This requires some context.

Janet Douglas was the widow of the 6th Lord Glamis. She was also the sister of Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, who was the political enemy of King James V of Scotland. James V was not a subtle man. When he wanted to punish his enemies he looked for their relatives.

Lady Glamis was accused of witchcraft and of conspiring to poison the king. The evidence was obtained through torture of her servants. Her son was also imprisoned. Her second husband was put in the castle dungeons. She was burned alive.

She was later declared innocent. Posthumously. The evidence was fabricated. The king had wanted her dead and found a mechanism for it.

People burned as witches who were later formally declared innocent tend to have complicated relationships with the places that burned them.

The Grey Lady of Glamis Castle is understood to be Janet Douglas. She haunts the chapel. She is seen sitting in a pew, or kneeling, or standing near the altar. She has been described by guests as calm, even serene. Not angry. Just present.

This is either a ghost that has found peace or a ghost that is waiting for something. With ghosts that were murdered, it can be difficult to tell the difference.

Every Lord Strathmore, on his twenty-first birthday, was told a secret.

This is the tradition. The estate manager and the current Lord would meet, and the Lord would be told what was in the secret room. What the family was keeping. What required keeping.

After being told, the Lords of Strathmore reportedly became changed men. One Lord, in the 19th century, said to a close friend: if you could guess the nature of the secret, you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours. Another is said to have remarked that the secret made life not worth living.

The theory is this: that sometime in the early 19th century, a child was born to the Strathmore family who was severely deformed. Not merely ill. Something more unusual than illness. The child was not expected to live. The child lived anyway. Rather than sending the child to an institution, as was common practice, the family kept him. In a room. A room that was sealed.

The child, or the man he became, or whatever he was, was long-lived. Longer than anyone expected. Long enough that the secret required maintenance, required each new Lord to be briefed, required an estate manager who knew what was being kept and where.

The last Lord Strathmore who was told the secret died in 1972. Whether anyone living knows it is unclear.

The room has never been publicly identified. The castle's floor plans are notably inconsistent.

The servants decided to find the secret room.

This is, in retrospect, a predictable decision. You work in a castle. There are strange sounds. There are locked doors you are not permitted to open. There are rooms you are not permitted to enter. The estate manager occasionally disappears for hours with no explanation. Curiosity is reasonable.

The servants' plan was elegant. Every room in the castle that had a window: they would hang a towel or a cloth from the window. When they were done, they would go outside and count the windows. Any window without a cloth was a room they could not access from inside.

They did this. They went outside.

One window had no cloth.

They went back inside. They counted rooms. They walked every corridor. They looked at every window. They found every room that had a window they had draped. They could not find the room that belonged to the uncovered window.

The room was there. It was visible from outside. It had a window. From inside, it had no door, no access, no explanation. It existed and did not exist at the same time.

The servants reported this to the estate manager. The estate manager told them, in terms that were apparently very clear, that they were to stop looking for the room and never speak of the matter again.

They were, it seems, not the first people to have tried this.

The window with no cloth is still there.

The Grey Lady is the most famous ghost, but she is not alone.

There is a tongueless woman who has been seen running across the park grounds. She runs silently, which given the situation is not surprising. She points to her mouth as she runs. She has been seen by multiple witnesses over multiple centuries. Nobody knows who she was. The theory is that she was a woman whose tongue was removed to prevent her from telling someone something. This was, in earlier centuries, a thing that happened to people.

There is a small Black boy who sits by the door of the room that was the Queen Mother's sitting room. He sits quietly. He does not speak. He does not frighten people who see him, which some find stranger than if he did. He has been seen throughout the castle's history. Nobody knows his name.

There is a figure on the castle roof, spotted periodically over the centuries, that appears and disappears too quickly to identify.

There is a ghost called Jack the Runner who appears during times when something bad is about to happen to the family. He has appeared before several family deaths.

All of these ghosts coexist in the castle with the family, with the staff, and now with the tourists who pay to take guided tours. The tours mention the ghosts. The ghosts do not mention the tourists.

The Queen Mother lived here until she was grown. She was by all accounts a cheerful woman who preferred the outdoors and loved her family.

Perhaps you do not notice what you grow up with.

Glamis Castle is open to the public most of the year. You can tour the state rooms. You can see the chapel where the Grey Lady sits. You can look at portraits of the Lords Strathmore, including the several who were told the secret and came back from the telling changed.

The family still lives in part of the castle, which is a thing the British aristocracy does that would require an entirely separate story to explain.

The secret room is not on the tour.

There is no agreed explanation for the Monster of Glamis. Some historians believe the story is entirely fabricated, a piece of Victorian gothic folklore attached to a real castle for atmosphere. Some believe there was a real child but the story has been exaggerated. Some note that the castle's floor plans genuinely do not add up, that there is space inside the walls that is not accounted for by any accessible room, and leave the question open.

The small boy by the sitting room door has not been explained. The tongueless woman has not been identified. The Grey Lady continues to sit in her chapel.

The castle has been standing for seven hundred years. It has absorbed a great deal.

One visitor, asked what it felt like to tour Glamis, said it felt less like visiting a building and more like visiting an argument between the past and the present that had been going on for so long that neither side remembered how it started.

Which is, if you think about it, a reasonable description of Scotland in general.