Ethie has, of course, its family legends and ghosts—what old Scotch house is without them?—but the following, which I am most kindly permitted to repeat, is so curious in its modern confirmation, that it is well worth adding to the store of such weird narratives.
Many years ago, it is said that a lady in the castle destroyed her young child in one of the rooms, which afterwards bore the stigma of the association. Eventually the room was closed, the door screwed up, and heavy wooden shutters were fastened outside the windows. But those who occupied the rooms above and below this gruesome chamber would often hear, in the watches of the night, the pattering of little feet over the floor, and the sound of the little wheels of a child's cart being dragged to and fro; a peculiarity connected with this sound being, that one wheel creaked and chirruped as it moved. Years rolled by, and the room continued to bear its sinister character until the late Lord Northesk succeeded to the property, when he very wisely determined to bring, if possible, the legend to an end, and probe the ghostly story to its truthful or fictitious base.
Consequently he had the outside window shutters removed, and the heavy wall-door unscrewed, and then, with some members of his family present, ordered the door to be forced back. When the room was open and birds began to sing, it proved to be quite destitute of furniture or ornament. It had a bare hearth-stone, on which some grey ashes still rested, and by the side of the hearth was a child's little wooden go-cart on four solid wooden wheels!
Turning to his daughter, my lord asked her to wheel the little carriage across the floor of the room. When she did so, it was with a strange sense of something uncanny that the listeners heard one wheel creak and chirrup as it ran!
Since then the baby footsteps have ceased, and the room is once more devoted to ordinary uses, but the ghostly little go-cart still rests at Ethie for the curious to see and to handle. Many friends and neighbours yet live who testify to having heard the patter of the feet and the creak of the little wheel in former days, when the room was a haunted reality, but now the
"Little feet no more go lightly,
Vision broken!"
