Welcome to the House of Dun - Very, Very Haunted (or Not Haunted at All)

The beautiful House of Dun, near Montrose, is now in the guardianship of the National Trust for Scotland.  Its long history is intertwined with the Erskine family, whose most famous member John Erskine, the famous 16th century religious reformer, will be considered at length in future.  This article considers some of the other history and folklore of Dun.

The old church of Dun in a mid 19th century representation

 The shades of the dead seem to favour grand properties more than average dwellings, as if spirits develop an inexplicable sense of snobbery after death. The House of Dun in the north-east of the county, was built in the Georgian era for the Erskine family who lived here into the 20th century. The house can be said, without exaggeration, to be fully infested with ghosts. The House of Dun probably first came to national prominence after its inclusion in Catherine Crowe’s classic compendium The Night Side of Nature (1848):

Not very long since, a gentleman set out, one fine midsummer’s evening, when it is light all night in Scotland, to walk from Montrose to Brechin. As he approached a place called Dunn, he observed a lady walking on before, which, from the lateness of the hour, somewhat surprised him. Sometime afterwards, he was found by the early labourers lying on the ground, near the churchyard, in a state of insensibility. All that he could tell them was that he had followed this lady till she had turned her head and looked round at him, when seized with horror, he had fainted. “Oh,” said they, “you have seen the lady of Dunn.” What the legend attached to this lady of Dunn is, I do not know. [The Night Side of Nature, 226.]

  This ghost cannot be definitely identified, but in more recent times there have been sightings of an woman riding a horse through the grounds; unusually, she is facing backwards on her horse. Other ghosts on the estate include a headless horseman, plus – near a certain yew tree - the spirit of a knight killed after he returned here from the east and found his lover had betrayed him. In recent years voices have been heard inside the house, plus the sound of a crying baby and an invisible harpist. More bizarrely, a phone has been heard ringing in a part of the house where there was no actual physical telephone. Diverse other phenomena include: unseen dogs, a dress floating around without a body inside, plus an array of spirits both male and female, some of whom resented modern, living intruders.

   All very romantic, no doubt. But - and this is a major - but, someone who knew this mansion well  and wrote about it directly contradicts the supposed prevalence of spectral inhabitants within the mansion house. The person in question was the great Violet Jacob (1863-1946), poet and writer and daughter of the Laird of Dun.  Her birth name was Violet Augusta Mary Frederica Kennedy-Erskine and she wrote a history of the house and her family, The Lairds of Dun, in 1931.  

   This is what Violet has to say about alleged supernatural associations of her home:

There is no well-authenticated ghost to trouble Dun; neither monk nor white lady to scare the loiterer in the Den nor uncomfortable shadowy inmate of the house. Vague traditions exist of a limb falling from one of the spreading yew trees of the kitchen garden at the death of a Laird, and, in the event of twins being born in the family, the arrival of one of them in the world with a black leg. But, though the generation that is thinning every day has seen the death of two Lairds and the birth of twin sons in the direct line, these tales have been proved by the event to be futile; and only the Scottish poet, George Beattie, has thought fit to invent a spectre for the place in his ballad of 'The Murderit Minstrel.'[The Lairds of Dun, pp. 14-15.]

   Was she being coy, disingenuous, or was she genuinely ignorant of the darker traditions about the House of Dun?  I know which one I want to believe.

   Alleged hauntings in the mansion feature prominently in Forbes Inglis's book Phantoms and Fairies, Tales of the Supernatural in Angus and Dundee (Brechin, 2010). One of his informants was Mary Brownlow, house manager on site in the early part of the present century.  Among the strange phenomena she reported were the eerie sound of a baby crying and the sound of a phone ringing in part of the property where there was no phone, plus her husband hearing voices at night which wakened him up, despite being quite alone in the house at the time.  A visitor in the holiday apartment within the house states that their children had seen a spectral dress - minus body wearing it - floating around the place, while other have witnessed a white shape wearing a bonnet on the top landing.

   A psychic visited the property in 2005 and heard chatter and sensed many spirits, including long gone (but friendly) dogs, a girl with dark hair and an austere and imposing gentleman who was evidently to the manor born.  Several other ghosts were sensed or seen, mostly servants attached to the place lost after their mortal servitude had ended.  Inglis also quotes a fascinating snippet of apparently genuine local folklore from the Montrose Review, 4th January 1850. The correspondent stated that old people in the district made a habit of giving the old mansion a very wide berth if forced to pass by on dark nights, the reason being that they did not want to encounter 'the aerial rider, commonly called the "headless huntsman" who was said to gallop nightly in that locality.'

   Those reckless souls who wish to delve further into the alleged paranormal occurrences and atmosphere at Dun can read the online summary of the Ghost Club's investigation of the famous old mansion here.

Part of the contents of this article were incorporated in the previous post Some Ghosts to Keep You Going.