Holder Haunted Aberdeen and District

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6238-7
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 96 Seiten

From reports of haunted castles, hotels, public houses, chapels and churchyards, to heart-stopping accounts of apparitions, poltergeists and related supernatural phenomena, this collection of stories contains both well-known and hitherto unpublished tales from around the city of Aberdeen. This spine-tingling selection includes Fyvie Castle, home to the Green Lady; Aberdeen Central Library, where the ghost of a former librarian still helps customers; the Four Mile Inn, whose staff have heard ghostly footsteps; and His Majesty's Theatre, said to be haunted by a ghost named Jake, a theatre hand who was killed in a stage accident. Richly illustrated with over seventy-five photographs and ephemera, Haunted Aberdeen is sure to appeal to all those interested in finding out more about Aberdeen's haunted heritage.

GEOFF HOLDER is a full-time writer covering such diverse subjects as walking, natural history, archaeology, music and art. He is the author of a number of titles, including The Guide to Mysterious Glasgow, Scottish Bodysnatchers and 101 Things to do with a Stone Circle.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Holder, Geoff

Leseproben

one

THE HISTORIC CENTRE

From medieval times up until the late 1700s, Aberdeen was essentially a small patch of irregular streets and crowded buildings bounded by Castlehill to the east, the valley of the Denburn to the west (where the railway and dual carriageway now runs), the River Dee to the south (now diverted and re-engineered as the docks area) and a reedy loch to the north. The Castlegate was the very centre of the burgh, the main road north to the Bridge of Don leaving by Broad Street and Gallowgate, and the only route south a twisting inconvenient switchback following Shiprow, The Green, and then the Hardgate to the Bridge of Dee. The topography was dominated by St Katharine’s Hill, which was levelled when Union Street was built, straight as a die for a mile, in 1801. The straight lines of Marischal Street, Union Street and King Street have been superimposed on top of the original street plan, but the medieval pattern can still be made out in the older streets, particularly where the ground slopes down from the higher ground beneath Union Street and towards the shoreline. This means that central Aberdeen is a split-level urbanscape, with an ‘underground city’ of underpasses, culverts, cellars and tunnels passing beneath the ‘flyover’ of Union Street.

Punishment and the paranormal at the Tolbooth

At the centre of the old town was the Tolbooth, the centre of civic administration, tax-gathering and justice. Much of the original building has been replaced, but Aberdeen is fortunate indeed to retain the former Wardhouse or prison, built between 1616 and 1629. Now called the Tolbooth Museum, it is situated off Castlegate between the Sheriff Court and Lodge Walk. It consists of a number of eighteenth-century cells containing displays relating the civic history of Aberdeen, with particular emphasis on crime and punishment.

As well as countless ordinary felons, the prison was used to house people accused of witchcraft, rebel Jacobites, and Quakers who were persecuted for their religious beliefs. Many condemned criminals, including numerous murderers, spent their last nights on Earth here, sometimes unable to sleep for the sound of the gallows being built outside in readiness for the hanging.

Right Aberdeen in 1661. The River Dee almost laps onto The Green, and St Katherine’s Hill dominates the tiny town. (Author’s Collection)

Left Aberdeen in 1822. Union Street and other straight routes have been imposed over the medieval street pattern. (Author’s Collection)

Below The small town of Aberdeen in the seventeenth century. The spire in the centre is St Nicholas Kirk, with the Tolbooth to its right. (Author’s Collection)

The Tolbooth as it was in the early nineteenth century. (Author’s Collection)

Clockwise from above

Lodge Walk, the alleyway beside the Tolbooth. (Author’s Collection)

The Tolbooth in 1661, at the heart of the city, surrounded by the space of Castlegate. (Author’s Collection)

Above The current sign outside the Tolbooth. (Photo by Geoff Holder)

With this history of violence, suffering and death, it is not surprising that the Tolbooth has come to be regarded as haunted. Indeed, with its narrow spiral staircases, original doors, chains and locks, and low-vaulted windowless rooms, the interior resembles a set for a Gothic horror film, and conforms to what many people would regard as a classic ‘haunted house’. On my visit, with only Chris Croly the curator, and my wife, for company, I found it grimly atmospheric, but despite spending ten to fifteen minutes alone in the darkened Jacobite Room, with its models of prisoners shackled to a metal bar in the stone floor, I did not pick up any sense of anything spooky.

In contrast, on a hot day in May 2007 author Graeme Milne was in the Crime and Punishment Room, on a tour with a group of eight people, when he felt icy cold down his left side; along with four others in his group he heard a sound like shuffling feet or a chain being moved close by. In his book The Haunted North, Milne also includes an episode related to him by a Mrs Wood. In 2005 she had seen the apparition of a man wearing a brown striped suit and a 1920s’ trilby hat. His overall height was very small, as if he was cut off at the knees due to the floor level having been raised since his lifetime. The sighting was on the first floor of the Tolbooth. Unusually, the apparition noticed Mrs Wood, nodding its head at her, at which point she became very scared and left the museum.

Two of the massive doors that are still in place within the maze of prison cells and passages in the Tolbooth Museum. (Ségolène Dupuy)

Ghost-hunting in the twenty-first century

In recent years there has been an upsurge in small groups of like-minded individuals setting out to investigate locations that have the reputation of being haunted. Some of these groups have greater quality control than others when it comes to the rigour of collecting, reporting and interpreting data. The procedures of these groups vary, but typically there will be a mix of long-established tactics (use of mediums, lone and group vigils, and ‘calling out’ – asking any spirits present to make themselves known) and new technology (digital video cameras and audio recorders, digital thermometers to measure temperatures at a distance, and EMF meters to record any changes in the ambient electromagnetic frequencies; electrical devices, mains circuits and humans all have EMF fields, and it is assumed that ghosts can either affect EMF fields, or generate their own). Another typical procedure is the use of ‘trigger objects’, small items set up with a chalk outline around them; a video camera is often trained on the objects in an attempt to record any movement caused by invisible forces.

In general this tactical mix is thought to make the best of both subjective (internal, human-centred) experience and objective (external, technology-centred) recording. In practice, no matter how sophisticated the technology and competent the operators, most events recorded during a modern ghost-hunt tend to be subjective, subtle, even barely-noticeable, and inevitably require interpretation as to whether there is anything paranormal prowling about. Factors affecting this interpretation include: the belief systems of the participants; environmental sources (air-conditioning, central heating, draughts, infrasound, waterpipes, and noises from the external city); and the kind of group psychology that can develop on a ghost-hunt, where participants are typically in a heightened state of nervous arousal, and feelings of excitement, anxiety, paranoia, anticipation and ‘paranormality’ can easily be communicated and shared through the power of suggestion. Other factors may also be at work – as one Glasgow man in his twenties told this author, hanging out in darkened rooms at night in frightening circumstances is ‘a great way to meet girls’. Victorian and Edwardian investigators used cutting-edge technology such as photography and film in their investigations, while the séance rooms of the period were often a hotbed of suppressed sexuality. In some respects then, modern ghost-hunts may have the gadget trappings of the twenty-first century, but are still repeating the paradigms of their nineteenth-century predecessors.

There is perhaps a high expectation that, with all the advantages of cool technical toys, contemporary ghost-hunts will deliver instant, dramatic results, the ideal experience for those seeking thrills, or irrefutable evidence for believers in survival after death. In practice, most properly-conducted paranormal investigations produce findings that are at best ambiguous, with suggestions that such-and-such a phenomenon might be of supernatural origin. Typical of this more cautious approach is the work of East of Scotland Paranormal (ESP). Since 2007 ESP has conducted several investigations in Aberdeen, some of which are discussed elsewhere in this book, while several are presented in this chapter.

ESP has conducted three investigations in the Tolbooth, on 11 December 2007, and 12 March and 20 August 2008. Recorded phenomena included fluctuations in temperature and humidity; a ‘thick and muggy’ atmosphere; odd noises such as something that sounded like the jangling of keys, footsteps, a loud ‘breath’ and a high-pitched whistle; a sense of presence or of being watched; possible human voices, including singing; feelings of despair or oppression; and moving shadows such as a ‘tall dark figure’ and a man with a ‘faded’ appearance. The phenomena were not consistent across the several visits and did not appear to be concentrated on any particular cell – in fact, rooms that had been ‘active’ in one investigation produced nothing on subsequent visits.

The first investigation included several mediums, who reported a wide variety of impressions of people and events. Some of these were quite intriguing, such as one medium feeling the labour pains of a fifteen-or sixteen-year-old girl who died in childbirth in the prison, and the presence of young children (kidnapped children were indeed held in the building for a time – see The Green on page 30 for the full story). However, the investigation also demonstrated the potential weakness of relying on the...