I wrote not long ago about a ghost which haunted Newmanswalls House in Montrose. There was no solution to the rather short tradition of a ghost there. This piece also ends indecisively in the same town, but first looks at the experiences of Elliott O'Donnell (1872-1965) wrote many books about ghosts. His most substantial investigation into ghosts in our area was a study about Glamis Castle which is contained in his Scottish Ghost Stories (1912). I also wrote of his thoughts in a previous post called The Secret Tunnel of Lintrose. The following stories come from his book Confessions of A Ghost Hunter (London, 1928).
Following schooling in Bristol, O'Donnell came to Angus around the year 1890, learning farming somewhere near Montrose. He resided with an unnamed 'gentleman farmer' and one day the farmer and family took a wagonette on a day out to visit a ruined castle, with O'Donnell following behind on a bicycle. On the way there, O'Donnell unluckily suffered a puncture, which he mended quickly and set off again, hoping to catch up with the farmer's family. Pedalling furiously, he came to a downhill stretch of road and was suddenly overwhelmed with the conviction that he recognised this place, which he had certainly never visited before. Then it came back to him - he had recurrently dreamed of this exact landscape for several years. The scene, as he describes it, was as follows: 'There, in front of me, was the white, dusty road, with a low stone wall on either side of it; here, on the offside of these walls, the bare undulating pasture land and beyond, away in the distance, the gloomy hills.'
O'Donnell was considering this when his bike came to a turning and there, an open carriage drawn by two black horses careered across his path, forcing him either to crash into it or veer into the right into the stone wall. He chose the wall, smashed into it, and knocked himself unconscious. When he woke up he found that his bike had broken into two parts, which again he had seen in his dream. The carriage driver, who must have seen him, had driven on and left him for dead. When he was able to, O'Donnell picked himself up and continued shakily on his way. He wondered afterwards whether the precognitive dream actually saved his life and was a warning - from somewhere - that he should choice crashing into the wall, for if he chose colliding with the carriage, he would have died.
The thing that strikes me when considering Elliott O' Donnell's dream is that it parallels, to some extent, another remarkable dream that changed the fate of someone in the exact same patch of countryside over a century previously. This was the case of William Imrie, an Aberdeenshire man who was travelling south when he spent the night in the ruins of Redcastle at Lunan Bay. Here he dreamt that he would go to London, marry a rich woman, and return here to buy an estate. His life afterwards was exactly in accord with this vision. He bought an estate at Lunan Bay and died here in 1798 (though some sources say 1790). The story is related in my previous blog post The Fortunate Dream of William Imrie of Lunan.
In the same book, O'Donnell tells the story of a haunted house in the centre of Montrose which was occupied by a spinster who was giving him French lessons. On the first occassion he went there he heard someone with a racking, consumptive cough in a part of the room screened off from where he was. When he questioned the lady, she said she was alone in the house and hoped he had not been upset by the sound. The next day he heard the same again and ran out of the room, encountering a servant who burst into tears. She explained that the sound came from a ghost, but she daren't say anything in case she was dismissed. The story ends rather flatly. Nobody could tell him much about the haunting beyond the face that it was reputedly an old man who had died in suspicious circumstances in the house some years before.
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