Spooky Scotland

Is Scotland haunted? There is no shortage of books listing the ghosts, witches, fairies and bogles which are said to haunt our lands, from John Gregorson Campbell's comprehensive The Gaelic Otherword to Martin Coventry's pocket-sized A Wee Guide to Scottish Ghosts and Bogles.

For a guide to Scotland's ghosts, try Norman Adam's Haunted Scotland (an old title, but do ghosts ever die?). All good castles should have their own ghost, and there are a couple of guides to the spookiest castles and country homes of Scotland: Martin Coventry returns with Haunted Castles & Houses of Scotland and his associated Wee Guide.... Geoff Holder is exploring Scotland's supernatural with his new series of books, starting with The Guide to Mysterious Perthshire and The Guide to Mysterious Iona and Staffa.

Naturally, Scotland's biggest cities have their own share of ghost stories. Haunted Glasgow by Ron Halliday gets us started, but it's Edinburgh which really gives us the willies: Jan-Andrew Henderson's The Ghost that Haunted Itself: The Story of the McKenzie Poltergeist tells of the haunting of Greyfriar's Kirkyard, while Michael TRB Turnbull's The Edinburgh Graveyard Guide promises a spooky saunter through Edinburgh's cemeteries. Indeed, according to Jan-Andrew Henderson, Edinburgh is the City of the Dead, as he explains in his article Edinburgh's Dark Literary Past. You don't even have to be on dry land to be haunted, as Angus Konstam's Ghost Ships explores.

For some, tales of ghosts and goblins suggest the existence of another world beyond our own. Indeed, what we now call superstition was once considered fact. John Gregorson Campbell recorded the folklore traditions of the Highland and Island Gaelic in the 1850s, and presented these in two books, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Witchcraft and the Second Site in the Highlands and Islands. Together, these volumes have been collected in The Gaelic Otherworld - we feature an extract of hobgoblins and goblins, or bòcain in Gaelic.

In the late 1890s, Father Allan McDonald collected stories of ghosts and seers as part of a Society of Psychical Research project. The story of his work, and that of researcher Ada Goodrich Freer, is told in Strange Things by John Lorne Campbell and Trevor H. Hall.

Another researcher was Hugh Miller, the Cromarty-born stonemason, geologist and social crusader. He collected the tales of his native Ross-shire in Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, Or, The Traditional History of Cromarty.

Maurice Fleming's collection Not of this World features haunted woods, lochs and homes.

James VI and I was so concerned about witchcraft that he wrote Dæmonology in 1597. While there is some debate about the true extent of the witch hunts in Scotland, there's no doubt that many women and not a few men were drowned, burnt or otherwise tortured. The three key witchcraft titles are Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context and An Abundance of Witches.

Hugh V McLachlan, editor of The Kirk, Satan and Salem has a wider introduction to witchcraft in Scotland in his feature for BooksfromScotland.com, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: An Introduction to the Topic and the Literature.

For local witchcraft tales, see The Weem Witch, in Fife, and Scottish Witches and Wizards.

Of course, we can't mention witches without referring to Tam O'Shanter, Robert Burns's great cautionary poem (and Matthew Fitt's updated corollary, the comic Kate O Shanter's Tale ).

The supernatural plays a large part in Scottish fiction - if not always directly, then as an undercurrent, running through some of the best-known classics. James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is the most obvious example. The sinister events, the narratorial voice and the settings are contrived to cut the ground beneath the reader and disturb their equilibrium. A very worthy successor to the genre is James Robertson's The Testament of Gideon Mack, a novel featuring a very modern devil, in polo shirt and trainers no less, which succeeds in creating the right amount of uncertainty for the reader.

The Devil also makes an appearance in John Burnside's latest novel. Set in Fife, The Devil’s Footprints begins with the arresting image of ‘neat, inky marks laid down by some cloven-footed thing, some creature that not only had walked on two legs through the streets and wynds from one end of the town to another, but had also ascended their walls and crossed their high, crowstepped roofs in the pursuit of an undeviating straight path through their sleeping domain.’ Highly recommended.

The father of them all could be said to be George MacDonald (1824-1905). His many works, particularly his fairy tales (The Complete Fairy Tales, Penguin Classics), inspired fantasy writers all over Europe and America and is cited as the greatest influence upon J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

Another nineteenth-century Scottish writer, Margaret Oliphant, was also one of the pioneers of supernatural short stories. Tapping in a huge public appetite for ghastly goings-on, she was a very popular writer whose fiction has now fallen out of favour. Try A Beleagured City and Other Tales of the Seen and Unseen, for a good introduction to this writer.

One vastly under-rated writer in this genre is John Herdman whose novels, Imelda and Ghostwriting (published by Polygon and now out of print) are worth tracking down. The subtleties of the supernatural elements in Herdman’s fiction and the elusive, satirical writing style are deserving of critical acclaim. He has recently brought out a collection of short stories, My Wife’s Lovers.

Also under-rated is Sian Hayton whose trio of historical novels received rave reviews on publication in the last 80s and 90s but which are now sadly out of print. Cells of Knowledge, Hidden Daughters and The Last Flight tells of the adventures of half-mortal women/sorceresses who spell danger to the monks and warriors they encounter. See also the fiction of Margaret Elphinstone (A Sparrow’s Flight) , Ellen Galford (The Fires of Bride), Iona McGregor (Alice in Shadowtime).

Some of the fiction of Neil Gunn and Naomi Mitchison is suffused with the Other World. Both were writing from rural, often Celtic, perspectives where myth, superstition and folklore met the real world most fruitfully.

The three ‘Sacred Monsters’ though are where you will find the absolute classics in this genre: in the writings of Walter Scott, in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, scared almost to death by the scary tales from his nurse during his Edinburgh childhood, and Arthur Conan Doyle, believer in the whole Victorian panoply of mediums, ectoplasm, and voices from beyond the grave. For a strong taste of Gothic horror, see RL Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles or his anthology of horror stories.

Colin Manlove’s An Anthology of Scottish Fantasy Literature (now out of print) is a good introduction to the weird and wonderful in fiction.

It would be foolish to talk about Scottish witchcraft and children's books without mentioning JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, from the first - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - to the last - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But there is plenty of other Scottish tales to entertain children, such as Debi Gliori's Pure Dead series (start with Pure Dead Magic).

Edinburgh publishers Floris have a number of supernatural books for children, such as The Witches' Mark by Donald Lightwood, Chill by Alex Nye and Gill Arbutnott's Winterbringers. Likewise, Barrington Stoke, also in Edinburgh, have books such as The House With No Name and Dead Man's Close, specially written for children with reading difficulties.

For younger children, try Spooks Away, set in a haunted Scottish castle, or Loch Ness Ghosts.