Scotland's Worst Poltergeist

How long could you stand living in a house haunted by a vengeful poltergeist? That's the situation a Scottish family found themselves in in the late 17th century. As members of the local community gathered to try investigate, a terrifying mystery unfolded... What was the cause behind the haunting? And why was it so determined to torment its inhabitants? Our guest today is Dr. Martha McGill, historian of supernatural beliefs in early modern Britain. Martha is the author of ‘Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland’. Edited by Aliza Dams. Produced by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. After Dark is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello After Darkers. Now brace yourselves for a public service announcement.

• 0:04Anthony Delaney?

  History Hit, the production company behind After Dark, also makes documentaries. And I'm talking beautifully shot, fantastically told, immersive histories on screen. There's hundreds and hundreds available to watch right now, online at historyhit.com, with a new release each week.

• 0:20Speaker 00

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• 2:13Speaker 00

  How long could you stand living in a house haunted by a vengeful poltergeist? We're in 1695 and on a quiet farmhouse in Scotland, a local family is being relentlessly tormented. Stones are thrown, fires break out, objects move without explanation. Something unseen is terrorizing the people of Ringcroft of Stocking, and no one seems able to stop it. The local community believes they are under attack by the devil himself. As neighbours and ministers descend on the house, a terrifying mystery unfolds.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  What is haunting Ringcroft? And why does it seem determined to torment its inhabitants? From the spooky 1690s in Scotland, welcome to After Dark.

• 3:41Anthony Delaney?

  Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  And I'm Maddie.

• 3:44Anthony Delaney?

  And we are well and truly now in spooky season. It is, of course, our favourite time of year. And to that end, we are discussing one of the earliest and most documented cases of poltergeist activity in Britain. We are taking a trip up to Scotland to explore the Ringcroft Poltergeist Case of 1695.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm so excited for this. Helping us today, walking us through this history, is Dr. Martha McGill. She's on the pod. Martha is a historian of supernatural beliefs in early modern Britain. She's the author of Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland. If you haven't read this book, go out and get it. It's one of my absolute faves. I love it. I used it loads when I was writing Hoax. It's so interesting. Martha, welcome to After Dark.

• 4:27Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  We have been pushing to have you on for a really long time now. Every time we have a meeting about what episodes we're doing, I'm like, Martha McGill, Martha McGill. We need Martha McGill. So you're finally here. We've got you here. You've come in on the train, you're in the studio, it's all happening.

• 4:41Anthony Delaney?

  I don't think we've ever documented a person's journey to the studio before.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Well, we've just been discussing off-mic going in driverless taxis.

• 4:49Anthony Delaney?

  We have.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  To which Anthony asked, is that AI?

• 4:52Anthony Delaney?

  I don't know how that works.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Good lord.

• 4:54Anthony Delaney?

  I turn up, like, that's it.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  But from modern phenomena.

• 4:59Anthony Delaney?

  Go on.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  To the 17th century.

• 5:02Anthony Delaney?

  All uncanny, though.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  All uncanny, all deeply worrying. We are for this episode in 1695. For listeners of the pod interested in Scottish history and 17th century history, this is just three years after the Glencoe massacre. We did a two-parter on that. We did a detailed background of Scotland at this time. So if you don't remember that, if you missed it, if you have joined us since that episode came out, go back in our back catalogue and search for that. We're in Cuckoobury in southwest Scotland. Martha, talk us through what the political, cultural landscape feeling is at this time, in this particular moment, in Scotland. What kind of world are we encountering?

• 5:45Speaker 05

  So 1695, you've got a few different challenges facing Scottish society. It's soon after the re-establishment of Presbyterianism. Presbyterianism was sort of kicked out after the 1660 Restoration. It came back with the Revolution of 1688 to 9. So the Scottish Kirk is keen to sort of mark its authority now that the Presbyterians are back in power. So first of all, you have a drive to mobilise, to make sure the people of Scotland are behaving themselves, to make sure everybody's in check and behaving according to the new religious regime. And then at the same time, you've got social and economic hardship.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  1695 is the beginning of what would become known as Seven Ill Years, periods of very bad weather and recurrent harvest failures, leading to quite devastating famines across the country. So at the time when this poltergeist story takes place, we're just getting the very beginnings of that. We've had a few periods of bad weather. We're getting towards a period of drought. So people are starting to be nervous, essentially. There are various reasons to think that God might be angry with the nation.

• 7:00Anthony Delaney?

  God is looming over all of this. Before I ask you the next question, Martha, I just want to point out that Maddie let that pronunciation of the place that this story is based in, just as if it was no big deal at all, and she pronounced it correctly. She said it was Kirk.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  You're making me sweat now, isn't it?

• 7:17Anthony Delaney?

  Cuckoobury. No, no, no, no. This is you. You did it perfectly well. But I just want to point out that phonetically, that word is spelt Kirk-Cud-Brightshire, but it is pronounced... Just do it for me again.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Cuckoobury.

• 7:30Anthony Delaney?

  That, I'll never understand it. And that's absolutely fine, but I don't need to.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Says the Irish person.

• 7:35Anthony Delaney?

  Sure, sure. Listen, that's a good...

• 7:36Speaker 00

  You cannot even comment right now.

• 7:38Anthony Delaney?

  Thank you to all the Shabons and Neevs in the world.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 7:41Anthony Delaney?

  But what, so we have that geographical place, Martha, but we also have at the core of this story, the idea of a poltergeist. Now, we will have a 21st century idea of what a poltergeist is. What is a late 17th century poltergeist when it's at home?

• 7:57Speaker 05

  So the term translates as noisy ghost, and they are known simply for creating a lot of trouble within households by throwing things around and clattering and clanging and so forth. In terms of what they actually were, there's some room for interpretation. After the Scottish Reformation in 1560, your Protestant theologians are pretty suspicious of ghost stories generally. Ghosts are associated with Catholic superstition. There's this idea that ghosts came from purgatory, this middle ground between heaven and hell. Protestant theology strips out purgatory. And the new theory is that there's nowhere for ghosts to come back from. Nobody would ever be allowed to leave hell. Nobody would ever want to leave heaven. So, you know, ghosts aren't possible.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  So after the Reformation, Protestant theologians tend to argue that you're strange apparitions and manifestations of the devil. Either the devil coming along himself, or some demons getting summoned up by witches to cause havoc. So most usually poltergeists are interpreted in that framework, although there are some variations.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  That's really interesting to me that it's specifically related to the devil in this period because thinking about ghosts in the 18th century, you have ghosts that appear usually as, I suppose, shorthand for like domestic unrest or accusations of murder or, you know, times when people are unsettled or pissed off in some way or have a score to settle. And these spectres will kind of manifest, whether they are, you know, the product of imagination or frankly, just all-out lies, or whether people truly believe them. But they're always to do with upset. And I suppose, Martha, you've painted the scene in Scotland as being this kind of turbulent moment. And actually, you know, there is a lot of upset. But I think the element of religious sort of oversight here is really crucial, isn't it?

• 9:46Speaker 00

  For people living in this moment, in this particular part of the world, belief in God and subscription to Presbyterianism in particular is strong and important and would have been a sort of elemental force in everyone's life.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And this is actually one of the reasons that we see stories like this increasingly published in the latter half of the 17th century. So for the first generation after the Reformation, your reformers are very scared of the Catholic threat. By the later 17th century, that hasn't entirely gone away. There's still fear of it around the Jacobite rebellions and so forth. But there's a new looming spectre on the horizon, which is the menace of atheism. You've got the philosophy of René Descartes becoming popular in Scottish universities. Descartes essentially split the universe into mind and matter and left no third category for spirit.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  And he also argued that the universe operated broadly mechanistically. God was a watchmaker. He said it all on course and then it ran itself. He didn't leave space for these direct interventions of supernatural power. And this was quite alarming for more traditional ministers and natural philosophers. They began to worry that everybody was going to turn into atheists and deny the reality of a world of spirits altogether. So although ghosts have been questionable theological territory for a period after the Reformation, we actually see them rehabilitated to a degree in the later 17th century. Orthodox ministers, you know, strict Presbyterians, natural philosophers as well, begin collating, sometimes printing and publishing ghost stories in order to refute atheists.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  And yes, that very much ties into this religious context you're talking about. It's all about telling people what they want to be believing, making sure that they are aware there is an afterlife there. And you see ghosts coming back to make broad Christian moral messages or just to say, yeah, you know, that's, that's definitely a hell. I've been there. It's awful. Make sure you don't end up there.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, don't do the, the crimes that I did. Live a good life.

• 11:44Anthony Delaney?

  So it is 1695 and you've been talking about, and we've been talking about ghosts more generally. Let's come to this specific tale now and just talk us through some of the narrative twists and turns of this particular tale.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  So the version of this tale that we have is published by a minister called Alexander Telfer, and it's very much within this context we talked about refuting atheism. So Telfer says he's viting for the conviction and confutation of that prevailing spirit of atheism and infidelity in our time.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Catchy.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  Exactly. So he's concerned with making sure this is a really well substantiated story. He gathers lots of local people, all swearing that the events he describes took place. And then he talks about it in some detail, lots of little points of observation and evidence to convince your skeptical audiences. And he tells essentially of how this family led by Andrew Mackey, a stonemason, becomes tormented by this poltergeist. And it does lots of very cruel things to them. It throws stones at them. It sets their house on fire.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  It really escalates, doesn't it? It's, it's a really shocking series of events. Talk to me about the cows, Martha.

• 12:58Speaker 05

  The cows, yes.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  These poor cows.

• 13:01Speaker 05

  I mean, generally the devil would be barred from causing any very serious injury to people. God would allow him to vex and torment people, not usually to actually murder them. Animals, he often had a bit more leeway and we do see that the animals in this story often come out particularly badly.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Animals were definitely harmed in the making of this tale.

• 13:20Speaker 05

  Sadly, yes. Although even then, actually, we do see some degree of divine protection afforded to the cows and the sheep at the centre of the story. So we see initially Andrew Mackey's cows are untethered or sometimes they're tethered to odd things. One cow is strung up to the ceiling by a rope so that its feet only just brush the floor. But actually, Telfer records that it didn't come to any harm. So there's this idea that the devil is allowed to be a massive nuisance.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  But his, his power has limitation in this world.

• 13:53Speaker 05

  Exactly, yes. He sets barns on fire and things, but actually I don't think any animals are killed over the course of the story, just tormented in various ways.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  So you have this stonemason, you have his animals being attacked, treated in unusual ways, you know, this, this sort of uncanniness, I suppose, within this Scottish landscape that is facing famine, that will face drought, that is, in the case of Glencoe, you know, has seen huge violence. You come out of your stonemason's cottage and your cow is hanging from a rafter, another one's tethered to something odd over there. But then these strange happenings do come inside the house and they, the attention is turned to the human beings inside that domestic space. Talk to me about the kinds of things that happen there because again, it's this escalation and it's something I suppose, we can go on to talk about this, but the way in which

• 14:42Speaker 00

  this story sets a blueprint for poltergeist stories to come and thinking about some of the kind of tropes that we will see again and again, there's a lot of items disappearing, items moving. Talk to me about that.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  I think throwing stones is the poltergeist's main activity. It does this a lot, particularly if the family's at prayer, tries to interrupt that devotion to God. But it also goes around hitting people, slaps the children on the hip, things like that. It throws lit burning peats into the house to try to set it on fire. Occasionally will just sort of loom up at a window and frighten people.

• 15:18Anthony Delaney?

  Ah, so we are seeing it take visible, seeable forms then. It's not just noises and, and stones.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  On occasion, yes. Most of the time it is the noises and stones, but Telfer sees it as an arm from the elbow down to the hand, a white arm. And other people see other manifestations. One neighbour reports seeing a blond haired man peering through the window. The children and some other neighbours see a boy of about 14 wearing a bonnet. And towards the end of the story, it actually appears as a mysterious black cloud as well, sort of engulfing the atmosphere nearby.

• 15:59Anthony Delaney?

  So you're getting all the trope, well, many of the tropes that we've become familiar with in ghost stories later, coming in here, that black cloud, the, the child ghost, the disembodied limbs, like all of these things are making a presence here.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  I mean, the devil has no innate form. He's a spirit. He can take on any kind of body he likes. So sometimes he likes to borrow a corpse and appear as a sort of balding dead person. On other occasions, he likes to craft himself a body out of the element of air. And then he can take any form he likes by sort of piecing together bits of air, like Play-Doh, to come up with something exciting.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  And isn't that so interesting? Because if you take these sightings at face value and, and accept that the people reporting them believe that they really have seen them, let's just do that for a moment. It gives you such an insight into the different psychology of everyone involved here and what their imagination potentially is giving them, the kinds of things that would appear frightening to them. And there's such a range of things that, you know, sort of disembodied arm and someone looking in at the window. It's, it's gives such a sense of the sort of mental landscape of 17th century, I think.

• 17:04Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah. And, and it also starts to, and you can rein me in a little bit here, Martha, if this is going too far, but I, I'm interested to know how this takes shape. It also then begs the question of control and who is going to take control of this

• 17:21Speaker 05

  Chaos.

• 17:21Anthony Delaney?

  Chaos in terms of the, the context of 1695. So how do we get somebody that's harnessing this? Does the church get involved? Are there lawmakers that get involved here? Or is this just seen as, uh, you know, rural farming thing that is happening over there? What's the next step in this story?

• 17:37Speaker 05

  Well, Alexander Telfer, the local minister, does come along to investigate and several other ministers end up coming in as well, sort of drawn in from neighbouring parishes.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  I love that this happens so much in early on ghost stories where one churchman will be like, okay, I'm called in and they'll be like, come and have a look at this to their colleagues. And this sort of more, more and more clergy arrive to, to investigate, but also just have a good go, I think sometimes.

• 18:00Speaker 05

  Yes, well, quite a few of them gave their name to the account that Telfer finally produced, confirming that they had seen all of these things. But yes, I mean, traditionally, if you are being hounded by the devil, the minister is the person you go to. The minister is the person with the power to help you, to guide you in praying for relief, potentially even to conduct an exorcism if it comes to that. Although whether they were willing to do that would probably depend on their own specific theological leaning, and it's not something that ends up happening in this story. But we do see the minister ends up taking a leading role in terms of investigating, chronicling what's going on and attempting to make sense of who this poltergeist is and what it wants.

• 18:52Anthony Delaney?

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• 21:25Speaker 00

  How unusual is the methodology that Telfer uses? Because from the documents that we have, he really does set up a proper investigation. He is recording, he's taking witness testimony, he's listing things that happen. Does he have a blueprint to go on? Have there been cases like this before? Or is this his own way of dealing with this? Is he sort of pioneering here?

• 21:47Speaker 05

  There was a precedent for this. So the obvious precursor would be Joseph Glanville in England. He publishes this work, Satychismus triumphatus. Well, it's published in 1681, after his death. But that describes his quite meticulous investigations into a similar poltergeist case called the Drummer of Tedworth. And Glanville, much like Telfer, goes around trying to gather what evidence he can, documenting his investigations pretty thoroughly and finding people who are willing to attest to the reality of what's going on. And it accorded with what was going on in intellectual society more broadly at the time. There was a growing fashion for conducting these kind of methodical investigations in order to learn about how the natural world operated.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  It was a time when empiricism increasingly was a very popular mode of learning about the operations of the universe. So this sort of process of observation and documentation was in line with what your leading intellectuals from the Royal Society, for instance, are doing at the time, just turned to a slightly more unusual subject.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Hmm. And would this have felt unusual for the kind of methodology, as you say, that has been practised by the intellectual elites in urban centres? For this to show up in this rural setting, in the context of the home of a stonemason? Would that have felt strange? You know, would the Mackies, the family at the centre of this, be sort of watching this unfold, this investigation? Would they be thinking, what the hell is going on? What do you mean you need witness testimony? Or is this just an accepted part of late 17th century life? That, you know, they're sort of willing to go along with and be involved in?

• 23:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think this was reasonably normal, the idea that if something very weird was going on, you'd try to have multiple people attest to it and have your prominent, respected members of the community come along to give their thoughts on it. I mean, it's a society that's very, very dependent upon these communal relations. You know, that's how anything gets sort of proven or gets demonstrated by the testimony of respected local people. So I don't think that element in itself is so strange. For them, I guess it would just be a question of, are these people actually going to take this seriously? We've got all of this weird stuff going on. Is the minister going to buy into it and actually help us?

• 24:08Speaker 05

  Or is he going to say, you know, this is all a hallucination, maybe a bit melancholy? You know, you should see a doctor or something of that sort.

• 24:16Anthony Delaney?

  And it's interesting that that could also be an outcome, right? Because when that isn't the outcome, when the findings show something else, it almost lends credence, particularly from our perspective, to this documentation of events and of findings that they're coming across. And you've already talked, Martha, about the idea of they're seeing things at windows, arms, et cetera, heads of different beings. You've talked about the stone throwing. What does this investigation uncover then? What are they assuming is at the base of this disturbance?

• 24:49Speaker 05

  They don't know. And there are a few different possibilities that emerge over the course of the investigation. One of the things I find interesting about this story is that it's probably a story about the devil, but it tries to be various other things along the way. At one point, it looks like it might be a story about witchcraft. So at one point, there's this line of investigation. A family who had previously lived in the house had encountered repeated misfortunes and had begun to feel they were under some sort of curse. The son of the family went off and spoke to an old witch and later, years down the line, relayed the message that a tooth was buried under the hearth.

• 25:28Speaker 05

  And this needed to be uncovered and destroyed, after which the curse on the household would lift. And this comes back to stories about witches' activities. Witches would often use parts of dead bodies to work spells against people. And it's said that the next inhabitants of this house, having heard this story, actually found and destroyed a tooth-like thing in this location. So this thread is planted, but then doesn't really go anywhere. The tooth has been destroyed, and yet the disturbances continue. Another possibility that gets introduced is that it is a ghost story. So at one point, Andrew Mackie's wife finds this little buried cache of bones.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  I find this very sinister and strange. This is a weird turn in the story.

• 26:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, so seven little bones, some flesh and some fresh seeming blood. And she's understandably alarmed by this. She passes on to the local authorities. And then they do this interesting thing. They invite all of the people who have lived in the house for the last couple of decades to come and touch the bones. And this comes back to a belief in something called cruentation, which is the idea that a dead body would bleed in the presence of its murderer. It was believed to be a sort of sign from God, essentially. If the murderer came close, divine intervention would make it bleed to reveal, you know, the secrets of the crime. So they have the various previous inhabitants of the house come along to touch these bones

• 27:00Speaker 05

  in case it turns out that one of them was guilty of a murder and that it's now a ghost plaguing the household. But nothing happens.

• 27:06Anthony Delaney?

  Okay, Grace, another dead end.

• 27:07Speaker 05

  And follows. Exactly, yes. So we come back to the primary theory being that it's an infestation by the devil. And the other kind of strange explanatory tool that's offered is this letter that gets discovered. A letter written in blood, calling upon the people of Scotland to repent.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  I mean, this is really intense, right? So I have it here in front of me, the little quote from this. And this letter supposedly says, woe be to Scotland. Repent and take warning, for the doors of heaven are already barred against thee. I am sent for a warning to thee to flee to God. Yet troubled shall this man be for twenty days and three. Repent, repent, repent, Scotland.

• 27:52Anthony Delaney?

  Poor Scottish people. They're some of the nicest people in the world. The doors of heaven are not barred to them.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Well, they were in 1695.

• 28:00Anthony Delaney?

  But that's intense.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Um, right, this is interesting for a number of reasons. One, I suppose, because it's not just focused on the household in which the Mackies are living. This is a big message to the nation of Scotland, the people of Scotland. But also, it's a piece of physical evidence. I suppose we've had the bones, we've had the disruption to the cows, we've had things thrown. Are we able to say that the letter is a real physical piece of evidence in Telfer's investigation? I mean, obviously, we have some of the text here. Is this Telfer just saying, oh, yeah, there's a letter written in blood? And here it is, and all its literary flourish? Or is it presented as a material object, I suppose, is what I'm asking?

• 28:42Speaker 05

  Well, it's not appended to the pamphlet.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  Interestingly.

• 28:46Speaker 05

  I think it's extremely difficult from the modern standpoint to say what was and what wasn't real in terms of what's going on here. A lot of the events that are described are probably not possible within the framework of modern day physics. So we have some reason to doubt that this is a perfectly accurate account. When it comes down to these details, like, was there actually a letter written in blood? It's possible, you know? That's not contrary to the laws of physics, actually.

• 29:13Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 05

  At the same time, it doesn't need to be true to get reported in a pamphlet like this. It's not wild to think that Telfer has been misled or Telfer is, to whatever degree, deliberately elaborating a story that he thinks is useful and important for the people of Scotland. And it might well be that he thinks knowing that there's a sign thing in blood telling them to repent is significant enough as a tool for changing people's behaviour that it doesn't matter too much whether it's really there. It is back kitchen or whatever.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  So we have Telfer publishing his findings and, you know, the extent to which he believes these events are really happening, whether he sees them as useful in terms of his religious preaching and the control that he wants to exert over other people's behaviour and belief in this period. But what about the Mackies at the heart of this story? Because so often, I think, with ghost stories, and, you know, I've seen this a century later with the cockling ghost, that the people at the centre of this story very quickly disappear in favour of these sort of bigger debates that come in and these big intellectual figures who want to come and kind of claim it for themselves for various reasons. But talk to me about the Mackies. What happens? Are they going to stay in this house and just accept that there are bits of bone and flesh under the floor? And their cows keep getting hanged from the barn?

• 30:35Speaker 00

  What do they do?

• 30:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it was potentially an uncomfortable situation for them, of course, in that their affairs are getting broadcast in this pamphlet all across the land. And there was some question around, to what extent is it their fault? Because very commonly, people would be blamed if the devil was vexing them. You know, you must have invited it in some way, you must have done something wrong. And Telford actually is quite careful to refute this at the beginning of the pamphlet. He says there were rumours that Andrew Mackey had promised a child to the devil, but he didn't see any evidence of it. So far as he could tell, they were a perfectly nice family who all prayed.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, and who were giving him access to their home so he could write this, of course.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. So Telford tries to sort of not blight the reputation of the family too far in the publication. In terms of what actually happens to them, I mean, it is reported that the poltergeist eventually quietens down. It claims that it's been allotted a certain period in which to torment them.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 31:33Speaker 05

  The idea would be God has allowed it to come for this certain time, and then it will stop.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Do we know what time of year this happened?

• 31:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it begins in February and then everything finishes on the first of May.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  So that's so fascinating, because often, certainly in the 18th century, we get haunting stories that happen around sort of Christmas time into January, often, or sometimes in the run up to Christmas, actually. I think nowadays, we think of the season we're in now, autumn, as the particular spooky season, but that's not necessarily the case for people in the early modern period. Is there a reason? Do you see the timing of this in terms of the calendar year important in this story? Or does it not hold any relevance?

• 32:10Speaker 05

  Not particularly.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah.

• 32:12Anthony Delaney?

  But then also, when was it printed, I guess? You know what I mean?

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Well, yes, yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 05

  It's printed the next December, so.

• 32:18Anthony Delaney?

  So it is in Christmas, kind of. So it's the darker months again, and it's that, right? Okay, okay, okay.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, in terms of people consuming it, as I think, interesting. So the Mackys, they do leave the property, don't they, eventually?

• 32:30Speaker 05

  They go away temporarily while the hauntings are ongoing. They stay away for a night or something, and some neighbours take up residence in the house. But they do come back. We don't know what happens at the end of the story. We're told that the hauntings kind of settle down. They stop being troubled by the poltergeist. So we can assume that they did stay on in the house thereafter. It was probably abandoned at some subsequent point, but we don't know when exactly.

• 32:52Anthony Delaney?

  Tell me this, we were in Scotland. To what extent is this a Scottish event, if that makes sense? How easily does this belief system translate into England at the end of the 17th century? Is this geographically specific?

• 33:11Speaker 05

  Not massively. As I mentioned, Joseph Glanville had done pretty similar investigations into poltergeist activity in preceding decades. And it's actually a pattern that you see more markedly in England. Natural philosophers going around trying to reclaim ghost stories as proof of a world of spirits. Nothing within this story is necessarily specific to Scotland. These themes that you need to repent, and you need to behave yourself, and make sure the devil doesn't come after you are things ministers are saying all over the place to their various different parishioners of different confessional stripes. That said, Scotland in the 1690s, there is some recurrence of interest in these themes.

• 33:54Speaker 05

  We see a very prominent witchcraft and possession case in the subsequent years around a young girl called Christian Shaw. A bit of prosecution for witchcraft in the Highlands around this time as well. So it is a period of relative political, economic instability, which often can encourage the publication of stories of this sort, and in general, calls for people to repent, and warnings that everything's going to go terribly wrong if they don't. Essentially, a sense that the devil is plaguing the land.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  As a historian who spends a lot of time thinking about ghosts in the past, Martha, what do you see as the use of these kinds of histories? Why should we look at them? And, you know, this is a safe space, we absolutely think that they should be looked at. But I think maybe, you know, there might be a temptation to come at these and say, well, of course, these events didn't really happen, and this is a case of human beings, as you say, kind of bringing in these different motivations, these different viewpoints. Everyone's trying to convince other people of the right way of behaving, the right way of believing, all of this. You know, maybe settling local scores in some of the cases that you've mentioned.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Why are ghost stories such a useful lens through which to look at, in particular, the early modern period? What does it give us that other routes into history don't?

• 36:34Speaker 05

  Ghost stories do tell us plenty about changing cultural concerns, in part because they are not fixed over time. They do go through these different patterns. So we do see the ghost turned into a devil in the wake of the Reformation. Then we see the ghost making this comeback, but it's not necessarily in a form that we would recognise today. At least, it tends not to be your sort of purposeless spectre gliding along castle battlements. In the later 17th century, ghosts are typically purposeful, they've got some set business that they want to communicate to people on earth, so they come back to do that, and then they hasten back to the afterlife.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  Later on, into the late 18th century especially, the Romantic movement encourages a new kind of ghost, a ghost that does just loom on lonely moors and things like that for unspecified periods without having any kind of business to communicate.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  They've become part of the landscape, part of ruined castles and things.

• 37:35Speaker 05

  And tourist attractions as well. And that's linked to the rise of Gothic literature, too. So you see ghosts sort of changing form at different historical periods according to contemporary concerns. And we see in this story as well, we mentioned, it's kind of a story about the devil and his activities. It could be a story about a ghost, there's a potential for a murder there. It could also be a story about witches and what they get up to. And the supernatural often comes with that sort of uncertainty attached, whereby events can take on lots of different meanings, depending on who's talking about them, who's thinking about them. And you can just imagine for a story like this, there were probably lots of different interpretations swirling around the local area that are getting picked up in some of

• 38:20Speaker 05

  these threads that Telford then writes about. So it can be a window into all kinds of different strands of belief, some of which come to the forefront more prominently within print, some of which are probably circulating primarily at an oral level.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  I suppose as well, ghost stories, they expose the darkest parts of human nature, whether that is, I'm thinking of something like the Red Barn murder, which takes place in the 1830s, and it's, you know, a real life murder of a young woman, and her ghost supposedly comes back to identify the grave of where she is buried and to reveal what's happened. And so I suppose the ways that people deal with these real human crimes, the darkness of that, in terms of telling ghost stories, is useful. But as a historian, it kind of brings you face to face with these very human elements. And I just wonder, has there ever been a time when you've come up against archival material in your research, where you've been sort of genuinely frightened?

• 39:17Speaker 00

  And I don't mean that you've read something and gone, God, was this ghost real? But has there ever been a moment where, you know, you've had goosebumps and thought, gosh, that's a strange thing to have happened, or, gosh, that's very telling of a sort of a chilling belief or chilling human behaviour?

• 39:33Speaker 05

  I suppose the things concerning children often tend to be especially emotive. So I mentioned, this is a period when Presbyterian ministers are collating stories of ghosts. One such was Robert Woodrow, who prepares what he terms a collection of remarkable providences. And that includes quite a few ghost stories, including one that always gets to me a bit. A story of a man who goes to stay in this supposedly haunted room and sees the ghosts of two young children. And they don't do anything, they don't speak, they're just sort of there and he sees them. And it's established later that they were two young boys who were sold into slavery. And stories like this, I suppose you get that little prickled goosebumps

• 40:15Speaker 05

  because it's a kind of sadness that penetrates over time.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  It is kind of haunting, I suppose.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yeah. And you see it as well, interestingly, when the Highland clearances really kick off in the subsequent century. There's a rise in Highland ghost stories concurrent with the clearances. And it's not immediately evident that those are stories coming from Highlanders themselves. It's part and parcel of this broader romanticisation of the region that you get at the time, where the Highlands are turned into this wild, beautiful, primitive place, full of the ghosts of old warriors stalking around. But there's a very cruel irony to that, the idea that the Highlanders are getting kicked out of the land. And then at the same time, folk like Walter Scott are coming along and making up these ghost stories.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Repopulating the landscape with the dead.

• 41:05Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah, with these ghostly old warriors and things. So yes, I suppose it's these moments that reflect on what feels like a genuine human cruelty. They're still very, very moving after centuries.

• 41:16Anthony Delaney?

  While we have you here, I can't, we can't finish up and let you go without. If, if people have listened to After Dark for a while, they'll know that I am like a broken record sometimes with the idea of disbelief. And the idea that while we can never fully integrate our own belief systems, whatever variation they might come in, back to an early modern one, and it, it, it, we will always be able to remove as to what that experience was like. There is often popularly an accepted idea that belief is just embedded in this society, that everybody believed in ghosts, that this is just part and parcel of the landscape that people are occupying. I wonder, do you come across disbelief in relation to these things during the early modern period?

• 41:59Anthony Delaney?

  Where there are people going, can we call a halt to this now and just move along? You know what I mean? Like, is there also that element that is maybe not so narratively compelling for us during a, you know, the Halloween season, when we want to hear about all of these amazing things, which we love hearing about? But, but is that there too?

• 42:16Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yes. Supernatural belief, there's a spectrum in terms of what's acceptable, leading to what's unacceptable. So a belief like fairies is very popular among normal folk, but your ministers would tend to frown on it. Ghosts, complicated middle ground, there's plenty of stories of them around. Some ministers do endorse those stories, like Telfair. But there's plenty who would be very, very sceptical of ghost stories, would still see it as a Catholic sort of superstition. The devil, God, angels, things that are very explicitly vouched for in the Bible, essentially, tend to be on more solid ground.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  There's much, much less open scepticism about supernatural forces of that kind. But you still get it. Just the year after this story is published in 1696, Thomas Aitkenhead is executed in Scotland for blasphemy for denying the reality of most of what's in the Bible, essentially, and for perceived atheism. So absolutely, you know, the society is not monolithic in terms of what it believes in. People had all kinds of different gradations of belief about the supernatural realm. And yeah, you're going to get a very different set of opinions, depending on who you talk to about what is and is not possible.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Martha, this has been absolutely fascinating. If people want to find more of your work, where can they do that?

• 43:43Speaker 05

  Um, my website is martha mcgill.co.uk and that lists the main publications and various other bits and pieces of resources. I did publish a card game about the Scottish witch hunts.

• 43:53Anthony Delaney?

  Stop, hold on, what?

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 43:55Anthony Delaney?

  We need to take a minute, what is this, please?

• 43:58Speaker 05

  So this is intended as a historically sensitive and empathetic and educational resource to explore Scottish witch hunting. It can be used either in classrooms or at home, playable in 45 minutes or so, and based on the Scottish witch hunts.

• 44:14Anthony Delaney?

  Okay, we need to play this on this podcast.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  We'll be purchasing this immediately.

• 44:16Speaker 05

  And it's called Witch Hunt 1649.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Oh, right, perfect, yeah.

• 44:20Anthony Delaney?

  Guys, note that one down, we're going to play this card game on this.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Producers, get your credit card out, we're buying it. That's amazing, thank you so much, Martha. If you've enjoyed this episode and you want to hear more about Scottish history, about early modern history, about ghosts, you can email us at [email protected]. We are in the midst, the zenith of spooky season right now. So if you are enjoying After Dark, tell your friends, tell your family, tell anyone who will listen, tell a stranger in the street. Um, in a safe and reasonable, friendly manner. And spread the word, we love to grow, we love to invite and welcome more and more of you in all the time. Leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts and we will see you next time, bye.

• 45:12Speaker 05

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