What could be more exciting than a haunted house to most people? I would venture to say that it would be a haunted castle. There are many stories of haunted castles all over the world. The U.S. misses out because, by the time this country got started, no one was building castles anymore or we would have been studded with them. I would have to guess that anywhere a wooden fort was built, there would have been a castle instead. I know that I would have found this interesting. We came close to castle construction with some of the structures we built that housed munitions or big guns but we never actually built one as far as I know, but I could be wrong about this.

Near Castle Type Structure At Fort Hancock, N. J.
Photo Source: Me

The above photo is actually that of an artillery battery. It was mounted above the structure and inside the structure were munitions that were loaded into guns that were raised and lowered by steam power. No haunting has been reported to my knowledge inside or outside of this structure. So the best thing for us to do at this point, is to move to the castles in Scotland. I have been to many castles in Scotland and they are quite impressive.

Castle Ruins
Photo Source: Clipart.com

There is a castle in Scotland that still looks great today. It is at the edge of the sea and is about 600 years old. The name of the castle is Ackergill Tower castle. It has been turned into a sort of bed and breakfast and contains about 25 bedrooms. The castle has a long history of conflict, that is the type of place that it seems, is a leading candidate for haunting. The owners were the Keiths. They were bitter enemies of the Gunns and Sinclairs. The Sinclairs had captured the castle in 1547 and then recaptured it in 1556 after William Keith gained control. Several times the monarchy stepped in and the Keiths got the castle back. The Keiths had kidnapped Helen Gunn who threw herself off the battlements of the tower rather than submit. It is said that her ghost roams this tower at night. The tower has been completely altered

Craigievar Castle is another castle where violence has taken place. The castle itself is about seven stories high. This is quite high for structures of the time. The Mortimer family were the first owners but soon after the Forbes family took over and completed the castle in 1626. It is said that Sir John Forbes forced a member of the Gordon family out of a high window at sword point and he went crashing to his death. Mr. Gordon never left, he now walks the battlements of Craigievar, but he is not alone, there is a fiddler there also, but he only appears to members of the Forbes family. The construction of the castle is that of an L tower with lots of little turrets. The nice part of this castle is that it looks almost the same as the day it was built. There is even a secret staircase inside adding to the mystery. A point of interest is that the castle has only one entrance and the staircase leading to it is too narrow for a coffin so when anyone died that had to be put out a window.

Dunrobin Castle is in Sutherland, an area that was named using the Norse for south lands. The Sutherland family lived in this castle for centuries. This family was infamous. The reason for their infamy was the fact that they cleared the lands by forcibly evicting people because they wanted it uninhabited so that they could raise sheep which was more profitable. The ghost that inhabits the castle is not one of the evicted peasants, but that of the daughter of the 14th Earl of Sutherland. He had his daughter imprisoned in the castle because he didn't like who she wanted to marry. She decided to escape by climbing down a rope but fell to her death instead. The castle has 189 rooms and some of it dates back to the 1300s. In the 1960 and 1970 the castle was used as a boy's boarding school and reports of ghosts in the castle flourished.

Fyvie Castle in Aberdeenshire is another old castle. It was begun in the 13th century. Many different families owned this castle over the years. There are at least two different ghosts that have been reported haunting the castle. The first is the Gray Lady. In the beginning of the 19th century a skeleton was removed from the secret room in which it was found. At that point many sighting of the Gray Lady took place. When the skeleton was returned to the secret room and put to rest, the sightings quieted down. A second ghost that is known as the Green Lady also roams the castle. She is said to be Dame Lillias Drummond who Sir Alexander Seton, her husband, starved to death. After she died he remarried. I guess he didn't believe in divorce. A tale states that the ghost scratched her name into the window sill of the bedroom of the newlyweds. It can be seen there to this day. The castle has five towers and each one is associated with a family that ruled it.

Inveraray Castle is perhaps one of the most famous haunted castles. It was ruled by the Campbell's and was burnt in 1644. It was rebuilt and we have to consider it one of the newer castles. The castle was rebuilt by the 3rd Duke of Argyle. When he rebuilt the castle he also rebuilt the town. Several ghosts roam the halls of this castle. There is a ghost harpist. The harpist was killed during an attack on the castle. It is said that when a Campbell chief is close to death another ghost appears. Lastly there is the ghost of a young woman who was murdered by the Jacobites. I didn't see any of these ghosts when I visited the castle, but parts of the castle are off limits to visitors as it is still the home to the Argyles.

The most famous castle in Scotland has to be Edinburgh castle. It sits up on a huge hill which was a former volcano. There has been a castle in this location for so long, it is believed that fortifications existed here long before recorded history. For the last 800 years the castle has been over run and retaken many times. Many of these battles were between Scotland and England. As late as 1745 it was being attacked by the Jacobites but stood fast. There is a drummer who walks the castle grounds, but he is a bit unusual, you see he has no head. There is also a ghostly piper who plays his whaling song from the battlements. The drummer was last sighted in the 1960s however, and there are no reports of him since then. This castle is considered one of the most haunted places in Scotland. Even the city of Edinburgh has been called the most haunted city in Europe. Besides the ghosts I talked about above, tourists have reported seeing French prisoners from all different periods of time, colonial prisoners from the American Revolution and a ghost dog and these are only some of the sightings.

Sterling Castle
Photo Source: Me

There are so many more haunted castles in Scotland that you could spend days visiting them all. Many of the ghosts that are sighted are said to be those of women who have died from violent deaths. It seems some of the rich and powerful families of the times were quite cruel to their enemies and sometimes even to their close relatives including wives and children. One has just to look at the legend of the ghost of Fyvie Castle. Can you imagine starving your wife to death so you can marry again? You can't help but think of the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II and the conditions of the prisoners in the concentration camps. One of these days I'll move on to haunted castles in other areas.