Scottish Ghost Stories

Selected by Rosemary Gray. Scotland has a notoriously rich and diverse cultural tradition when it comes to the supernatural. Many of her greatest writers from Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg to Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan have explored the country s unique folkloric heritage to spine-chilling effect. From Highlands to Lowlands, from blasted heath or remote glen to wretched hovel or austere castle, the very topography lends itself somehow to the strange and unexplainable. Leading off Edinburgh's colourful Royal Mile, which runs from the Palace of Holyrood to the gaunt castle on the rock, there are many narrow ‘wynds’ – passages ancient and mysterious. As soon as you leave the sunshine and enter these dark and reeking ways you know that you are in the company of ghosts and spirits unhappy souls condemned for ever to roam this antique city. Tormented spectres like them wander the pages of this disquieting collection. Lock your door, turn up the lights, put extra logs on the fire and as you start to read, pray to be delivered from ‘ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night’.