If the gods of travel are willing, my husband and I will be visiting the Scottish Highlands in less than a month. Most of the planning has fallen to me. So naturally, I booked us a stay in one of the most haunted places in Scotland.

Historical foundations

Tulloch Castle is old. A keep stood there as far back as 1116, and the site possibly once served as a Viking stronghold (the nearby town of Dingwall recently uncovered the remains of a Viking parliament buried under a parking lot). 

Tulloch watched over the brutal battle between Clan McKay and Clan McDonald in 1411, and then housed a series of families until one went bankrupt and sold it to Henry Davidson, a West India merchant, for a whopping £10,500 in 1762. The Davidson Clan held the castle for a long time, and have a lot of history there. The 4th Davidson to own it was Duncan Davidson, a favorite of Queen Victoria who earned the nickname “The Stag” for marrying five times and having 18 children and a reputed 30 illegitimate offspring. (More on him later.) 

After the Davidsons came the Vickers, and then hospital staff nursing casualties from the battle of Dunkirk. Tulloch became a hostel for students of a nearby university until 1976, and then finally, in 1988, the hotel it is today. 

Throughout its history, the castle was neglected and restored, added to, and partially burned down and rebuilt twice, until it appeared as it does now: a crouching mass of stone with several dormers and a single turret, a stone farm, and an overgrown graveyard full of familial remains. It still boasts several original features, including a grand fireplace and secret staircase. A dungeon waits in its basement, along with a collapsed underground tunnel to the picked-over remains of Dingwall Castle. There is even a variety of original antique furniture. At Tulloch, the past is very much alive. 

Spectral cornerstones

Given all its history, it’s no surprise that Tulloch’s said to be haunted. No one bothers to deny it: Scotland’s own National Tourist Board describes the castle jauntily as “full of character, with its own resident friendly ghosts and fine cuisine.” There have been (and hopefully still are) ghost tours available from the staff. They even named the castle bar after Tulloch’s most famous apparition: the Green Lady. 

The Green Lady (apparently a moniker for many castle ghosts in Scotland) has achieved special notoriety in the last twenty years thanks to a couple of hotel guests capturing her image (allegedly). In the most famous example from 2012, the camera looks down at a red-carpeted spiral staircase, where a transparent hand grips the railing, fog stretching down like a leg stretching for the next step. You can even see the white cuff of a sleeve.

The location of the photo is significant: it’s the same spot where people’s feet catch unexpectedly–where teenage Elizabeth Davidson is said to have plunged to her death. Elizabeth’s portrait still hangs in the Great Hall, where her eyes supposedly follow you around the room. She stands posed with the rest of her family—her mother, her two brothers, and, behind her, a deliberately blackened-out corner where her father, Duncan the Stag, once stood.

Duncan’s promiscuity is what gave us this ghost. The story goes that Elizabeth caught him in flagrante with a maid in what now is Room 10. Horrified, Elizabeth fled blindly toward Room 15, but fell on the way, breaking her neck. Now she roams the halls, peering out of windows and whispering “why?”

Another commonly seen ghost is a pacing maid who mutters to herself and wrings her hands. It’s unclear if it’s the maid, but odds seem pretty good. 

Then there is the apparition of two teenage girls–doubtless a consequence of the two female bodies unearthed from the dungeon (rumored to be two nuns buried alive). These girls are less friendly than the Green Lady; various Tulloch guests have reported waking up from the force of them pressing down on their chest, squeezing out their air as they slept.

Watchful walls 

Vivid as the Green Lady, the maid, and the teenagers are, they’re just a fraction of Tulloch’s spectral population. It’s one of the reasons that ghost hunters love the place. 

Medium Rachel Keene stayed the night in 2004, and reported some wild things. She couldn’t walk five feet without a ghost interrupting her. A little boy popped out in her room to play with her hair, a 16th century guard accosted her in the hall, and when she tried to sit by the fireplace in the lobby, a man in a dirty tartan leaned over the stair banister and spat, “You’ll no be sitting there long, lassie!” 

Keene hated the dungeon, where she got impressions of gleeful torture and men packed into cages like sardines (fun fact: you can capitalize on that delightful atmosphere by getting married down there now). On the main floor, she witnessed men in powdered wigs thrusting a boy’s arm into the fireplace, a group throwing someone out a window, and an angry old woman bustling around the breakfast room, knocking the tablecloth in such a way that Keene’s fiance caught it on tape. 

Less sensitive guests have reported cold spots, orbs, footsteps in the hall, banging, and tapping from outside of third-story windows (especially in Room 8). One Tripadvisor reviewer reports his cousin talking in his sleep with a voice that wasn’t his. A Youtube commenter describes how despite his best efforts, his phone (and then his phone and his wallet) were repeatedly picked up off the middle of the nightstand and dropped on the floor. “This,” he finishes, “is one of the most amazing and inexplicable experiences of mine to date.”

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So anyway, that’s where we’re headed. So long as we don’t have any ghost-induced reception issues, I’ll be posting about it on Instagram (along with everything else on the trip…we probably won’t have the necessary gear to summit Ben Macdui and seek out the Am Fear Liath Mor, but who knows). For an in-depth recap, sign up for my mailing list (I promise you won’t get inundated…I tend to communicate through it once a month or less). We’ll see you on the other side! 

Hopefully.

What are your recommendations for securing a brand new cell phone from a Scottish poltergeist? Share your tips in the comments below.

IMAGE CRED: Jeremy from Albuquerque for the 1920’s poky thing, Dave Conner from Inverness for the lovely wedding, Elliott Simpson for the castle with the bench, and Richard Dorrell for the featured image (plus a mild “spooky” filter).