As you drive along the road that skirts the shore of Loch Oich you pass a bizarre column, surmounted by seven severed stone heads, that has a particularly gory history. But history remains mute about his activities until in 1305, betrayed by one of his own countrymen, he was captured and taken to London. Edward wasted little time in inflicting English administration upon the vanquished Scots and placed her affairs into the hands of two trusty lieutenants, William de Warenne and treasurer Hugh Cressingham. A dark fairy queen called The Glaistig appears in "Waycross", one of the short stories in Caitlin R. Kiernan's Alabaster short story collection.

The Provost Lordship in Glasgow, which is the oldest house in Glasgow, we thought would have been absolutely jumping but it was flat all night, nothing happened.Taking his words literally, the locals stormed the castle, wrapped de Soulis in lead, and plunged him head first into a boiling cauldron. Douglas was much respected in Scotland on account of his victories against the English. However, when King David 11 made Sir Alexander Ramsay sheriff of Teviotdale, the ruthless and envious Douglas lured the unfortunate Ramsay to Hermitage and imprisoned him in a "frightful pit or Dungeon, apparently airless and devoid of sanitation." Here he was starved to death, and his ghostly groans have echoed down the centuries ever since. The Great Hall, which is the only room never to have been remodelled, still retains many of its original fixtures, and is imbued with a uniquely historic atmosphere chilling yet tranquil. It is a candlelit place of dancing shadows, where reports of indistinct shapes seen flitting around its darker recesses, or the oft heard sound of disembodied voices engaged in indecipherable conversation, are sufficient to send uncanny shivers down the spine.

The steely grey mountains that fret the skyline and dapple Glencoe in a cloak of sinister gloom, cast such strange shadows that you find yourself constantly on edge, ever vigilant against whatever unspeakable horrors may be skulking in the darker recesses of the eerie terrain. Blythswood Square in Glasgow was the place to live in the 1800s, but when Captain Smythe moved into his new des res he took a dislike to the bathroom, finding it dark and sinister. One night, just as he was about to enter the tub he saw the apparition of a beautiful woman strangle someone in the bath. Weeks later his son saw the bloated body of an old man in the water. The Smythes swiftly moved out, only to discover the former residents were a wealthy old man, who had been found dead in the bath, and his beautiful young Spanish wife, who inherited his fortune and was never seen again. Garbed in green, her face concealed by a hood, she wanders Balgonie castle and has been seen many times in recent years. Vestiges of Scotland's stormy past are to be found all over the country and nowhere is it more apparent than in the haunted, ruined castles of Scotland.Mysterious rooms and dark recesses are set into the tower’s east wall and here a veritable cornucopia of phantoms and presences are known to lurk. Some say that it is an unknown species of fish; others that it is a survivor from pre-historic times, possibly a plesiosaurus.

Edward’s army then swept northwards, inflicting a crushing defeat on Balliol’s army at the battle of Dunbar and capturing the ancient coronation stone, the Stone of Destiny, which was taken from Scone to Westminster Abbey. But most infamous of all the Castle’s bygone residents was Sir William de Soulis, who owned it during the reign of Robert the Bruce (1274-1329). Since his cargoes consisted largely of tea and alcohol, for some reason a clause was inserted into the lease that forbade the house to sell either alcohol or tea.Although the house itself is private, the grounds that surround it are open to the public and from there you can gaze upon its sturdy walls and ponder the ghosts of the green, grey, and white ladies that are said to wander the house‘s interior.