Powis Castle had once its ghost, and Cullaby Castle, Northumberland, the seat of Major A. H. Browne, is haunted. According to a correspondent,[267] in the older part of the castle, which was the pele-tower of the Claverings, there was known to be a room walled up, ‘which Mrs. Browne, during her husband’s absence, had broken into;’ but the room was found to be quite empty. She says, however, that ‘she let a ghost out who is known as “The Wicked Priest.” Ever since they have been annoyed with the most unaccountable noises, which are sometimes so loud that one would think the house was being blown down. I believe the ghost has been seen—it is a priest with a shovel hat.’ The seat of the Trevelyans is haunted with the incessant wailing of a spectral child, and the ruins of Seaton Delaval Castle are said to be haunted. Churton Hall, at one time the seat of the Duke of Argyll, ‘has marked Tyneside with the ghost of the Duke’s mistress, who is locally known as “Silky.”’ ‘Tyneside,’ writes Mr. W. T. Stead, ‘abounded with stories of haunted castles; but, with the doubtful exception of Dilston, where Lady Derwentwater was said to revisit the pale glimpses of the moon to expiate the restless ambition which impelled her to drive Lord Derwentwater to the scaffold, none of them were leading actors in the tragedies of old time.’
Bisham Abbey, report says, is haunted by the ghost of Lady Hoby, who treated her son by her first husband so unmercifully, on account of his antipathy to study, that he died. As a punishment for her unnatural cruelty she glides through a certain chamber, in the act of washing blood-stains from her hands. One of the rooms at Combermere Abbey, Cheshire, formerly known as the ‘Coved Saloon,’ is tenanted by the ghost of a little girl, the sister of Lord Cotton, who had died when fourteen years old.[268] Then there was the famous ‘Sampford Peverell’ ghost, which created much interest at the commencement of the present century,[269] and Rainham, the seat of the Marquis Townshend, in Norfolk, has long been haunted by the ‘Brown Lady.’ At Oulton House, Suffolk, at midnight, a wild huntsman with his hounds, accompanied by a lady carrying a poisoned cup, is said to take his ghostly walk; and Clegg Hall, Lancashire, long had its restless spirits, and the laying of these ‘Clegg Hall boggarts,’ as they were called, is described elsewhere. At Samlesbury Hall, near Blackburn, a lady in white attended by a handsome knight is seen at night;[270] and a headless lady walked about Walton Abbey. Hermitage Castle, one of the most famous of the Border keeps in the days of its splendour, has for years past been haunted, and has been described as—
Haunted Hermitage,
Where long by spells mysterious bound,
They pace their round with lifeless smile,
And shake with restless foot the guilty pile.
Till sink the mouldering towers beneath the burdened ground.
The story goes that Lord Soulis, ‘the evil hero of Hermitage,’ made a compact with the devil, who appeared to him in the shape of a spirit wearing a red cap, which gained its hue from the blood of human victims in which it was steeped. Lord Soulis sold himself to the demon, and in return he could summon his familiar whenever he chose to rap thrice on an iron chest, on condition that he never looked in the direction of the spirit. Once, however, he forgot or ignored this condition, and his doom was sealed. But even then Lord Soulis kept the letter of the compact. Lord Soulis was protected by an unholy charm against any injury from rope or steel; hence cords could not bind him, and steel could not slay him. When, at last, he was delivered over to his enemies it was found necessary to adopt the ingenious and effective expedient of rolling him up in a sheet of lead and boiling him to death:
On a circle of stones they placed the pot,
On a circle of stones but barely nine;
They heated it red and fiery hot,
And the burnished brass did glimmer and shine.
They rolled him up in a sheet of lead—
A sheet of lead for a funeral pall;
They plunged him into the cauldron red,
And melted him, body, lead, bones and all.
This was the end of Lord Soulis’s body, but his spirit still lingers on the scene. Once every seven years he keeps tryst with Red Cap on the scene of his former devilries:
And still when seven years are o’er
Is heard the jarring sound,
When hollow opes the charmèd door
Of chamber underground.[271]
Hugh Miller, in his ‘Schools and Schoolmasters,’ says that, while working as a stonemason in a remote part of Scotland, he visited the ruins of Craighouse, a grey fantastic rag of a castle, which the people of the neighbourhood firmly believed to be haunted by its goblin—a miserable-looking, grey-headed, grey-bearded old man, who might be seen, late in evening and early in the morning, peering out through a narrow slit or shot-hole at the chance passenger. He further adds that he met with a sunburnt herd-boy who was tending his cattle under the shadow of the old castle wall. He asked the lad whose apparition he thought it was that could continue to haunt a building whose last inhabitant had long been forgotten. ‘Oh, they’re saying,’ was the reply, ‘it’s the spirit of the man who was killed on the foundation-stone, soon after it was laid, and then built intil the wa’ by the masons that he might keep the Castle by coming back again; and they’re saying that a’ varra auld hooses i’ the country had murderit men builded intil them i’ that way, and that all o’ them hev their bogie!’
Among Irish haunted houses may be noticed the castle of Dunseverick, in Antrim, which is believed to be still inhabited by the spirit of a chief, who there atones for a horrid crime; while the castles of Dunluce, of Magrath, and many others are similarly peopled by the wicked dead. In the abbey of Clare the ghost of a sinful abbot walks, and will continue to do so until his sin has been atoned for by the prayers he unceasingly mutters in his tireless march up and down the aisles of the ruined nave.