The Bible which plays so prominent a part in the story is an old black-letter edition, printed by Robert Baker, A.D. 1634. It is covered with old calf-skin, and inclosed in a massive brass-bound box made out of one of the old beams of Spedlins Tower itself, which, needless to say, is most carefully preserved.
The spirited ballad of “The Prisoner of Spedlins,” by Robert Chambers, may here not inappropriately be included:—
To Edinburgh, to Edinburgh,
The Jardine he maun ride;
He locks the gates behind him,
For lang he means to bide,
And he, nor any of his train,
While minding thus to flit,
Thinks of the weary prisoner
Deep in the castle pit.
They were not gane a day, a day,
A day but barely four,
When neighbours spake of dismal cries
Were heard from Spedlins Tower.
They mingled wi’ the sighs of trees
And the thud-thud o’ the linn;
But nae ane thocht ’twas a deein’ man
That made that eldrich din.
At last they mind the gipsy loon
In dungeon lay unfed;
But ere the castle key was got
The gipsy loon was dead.
They found the wretch stretch’d out at length
Upon the cold, cold stone,
With starting eyes and hollow cheek,
And arms peeled to the bone.
······
Now Spedlins is an eerie house,
For oft at mirk midnight
The wail of Porteous’ starving cry
Fills a’ that house wi’ fright:
“O let me out, O let me out,
Sharp hunger cuts me sore;
If ye suffer me to perish so,
I’ll haunt you evermore.”
O sad, sad was the Jardine then,
His heart was sorely smit;
Till he could wish himself had been
Left in that deadly pit.
But “Cheer up,” cried his lady fair,
“’Tis purpose makes the sin;
And where the heart has had no part
God holds his creature clean.”
Then Jardine sought a holy man
To lay that vexing sprite;
And for a week that holy man
Was praying day and night.
And all that time in Spedlins House
Was held a solemn fast,
Till the cries waxed low, and the boglebo
In the deep red sea was cast.
······
There lies a Bible in Spedlins Ha’,
And while it there shall lie
Nae Jardine can tormented be
With Porteous’ starving cry.
But Applegarth’s an altered man,
He is no longer gay;
The thought of Porteous clings to him
Until his dying day.
The mansion-house of Knockhill, in the parish of Hoddom, was the scene of a tragedy in the earlier part of last century, which had the sequence of ghost visitation. It is referred to in the “Irvings of Hoddom,” an interesting contribution to the family history of the district. Shortly the story is as follows:—A young man named Bell who had been surreptitiously visiting his sweetheart, one of the maids in the house, was heard by the butler, who shot him as he was escaping through a basement window. The butler was tried and acquitted, but Knockhill was afterwards haunted by the ghost of the victim so much that servants would not remain. At last the proprietor, then a Mr Scott, asked the Rev. W. Wallace Duncan, then helper to Mr Yorstoun, parish minister, to sleep in the house, with the result, it is told, that from then the ghost disappeared from Knockhill.[(89)]
In this same parish of Hoddom, the student of Carlyle will remember that “old John Orr,” the only schoolmaster that Carlyle’s father ever had, “laid a ghost.” It was in “some house or room at Orchard, in the parish of Hoddom. He entered the haunted place, was closeted in it for some time, speaking and praying. The ghost was really and truly laid, for no one heard more of it.”[(90)]
Bonshaw Tower, on the Kirtle (parish of Annan), the original home of the Irvings, also contributes to the ghost-lore of the district.
Tradition tells that a daughter of the house was thrown from the battlements of the Tower by her own relatives, whom she had deeply incensed by her determination to marry a “Maxwell,” with which family the Irvings held long and bitter feud. It is, or rather was, the ghost of this young lady who haunted the Tower of Bonshaw, but she has not been visible within living memory.
Blackett Tower, also on the Kirtle (parish of Kirkpatrick-Fleming), was a border fortress well known in the records of border raid and foray. It was for long the home of the family of Bell.
The ruined tower has a ghost legend which claims it as the abode of a spectre known as “Old Red-Cap, or Bloody Bell.” A poetical descriptive reference to the tower and its phantom occurs in the poem of “Fair Helen.” The passage is of undoubted vigour and masterly touch, and is here given, the author, William Scott Irving, at the same time offering the opinion “that the legends and anecdotes of ‘Bloody Bell’ would fill a large quarto volume”:
Of Blackett’s Towers strange tales are told:
The legendary lore of old,
That dread belief, whose mystic spell
Could people Gothic vault or cell
With being of terrific form,
And superstition bound the charm.
’Tis said, that here, at the night’s high noon,
When broad and red the eastern moon
Beams through the chinks of its vast saloon,
A ghastly phantom takes its stand
On the wall that frowns o’er wear and strand,
A bloody dagger in its hand,
And ever and aye on the hollow gale
Is heard its honorie and wail
Dying along the distant vale.
The ’nighted peasant starts aghast
To hear its shriekings on the blast;
Turns him to brave the wintry wind,
Nor dares he lingering look behind,
But hurries across the moaning flood,
And deems its waters swollen with blood—
Such are the tales at Lyke-wake drear,
When the unholy hour of night draws near,
When the ban-dog howls, and the lights burn blue,
And the phantom fleets before the view;
When “Red-Cap” wakes his eldrich cry,
And the winds of the wold come moaning by.[(91)]