The story most often told is that a Highland servant girl looked after Mary, Queen of Scots at the castle. She had a premonition that disaster would strike the queen on 13 September 1561. Determined to guard her mistress through the night, she knocked a candle against the bed curtains, and the fire that followed killed her. In another telling she wakes to find the curtains burning and saves the queen, and in that version her spirit stays on, still looking to serve. The Historic Environment Scotland blog notes that a fire is recorded, but nothing documents the servant herself.
A second tradition makes her a governor's daughter who was engaged to an officer of the garrison. When he was accidentally killed, she is said to have thrown herself from the battlements. One account describes a castle cook who turned round while preparing a meal for soldiers and found a see-through green figure standing behind him; he fainted. Castle staff are reported to treat a sighting as a sign of coming bad news, often connected with fire. The skeptic Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Inquirer, treats the cook's sighting as the only firsthand claim he could find and considers the whole tale folklore. The place itself is real and the ghost stories are traditional, with no dated first-hand report behind them.
Comments