The Newmanswalls House Ghost, Montrose

 There is a forlorness to lost places which lingers long after they have vanished, though traditions can be left behind. Newmans Walls House, on the north side of Montrose, was near the grounds of the ancient hospitaal. The ancient owners of the estate were named Paniter or Panter, and they held the crown charter of Newmans Walls from 1410 until 1610, when it was sold to the Scotts, In 1809 it became the property of a family named Tailyour.

   Several of the Paniter family were notable ecclesiastics. Patrick Panter was born at Newmans walls, near Montrose, in 1470, and became abbot of Cambuskenneth in 1510. In 1516 he created the hospital at Montrose. Carved wooden panels which come from the long-vanished hospital are now in the National Museum of Scotland. (They are the subject of a previous post: Lost Treasures of Angus - Patrick Paniter's Panels from Montrose)

The Paniter Panels from Montrose Hospital

   Despite the occasional prominent cleric, there was little of any consequence recorded in the old house of Newmanswells, and there are few records of what it actually looked like, which makes the following story all the more intriguing.

The Montrose Standard reported on Friday 30 September 1938 that the house had almost completely been destroyed by fire on the previous weekend. There had never been a tradition of the mansion being haunted in former times, but three weeks before the blaze a blind man and his wife had come to stay in one of the upper bedrooms where there was a four-poster bed. In the middle of the night he woke his wife to say that he heard someone moving about by the dressing table. The lady jumped out of bed but discovered nobody there. Worse was to come. Three days before the fire the same unfortunate gentleman was shaving himself when he was grabbed by two spectral hands which turned him completely around. He groped around to find who had laid hands on him, but nobody at all was there. He and his wife left the property shortly thereafter. And the house then mysteriously went up in flames. It was completely demolished in the 1960s and modern housing now stands on the site. 

   No-one has, to my knmowledge, identified the very transitory ghost that occupied Newmanswalls in its dying days.