January 31, 2025 • 32 mins
From eerie legends to real-life horrors, castles have long concealed secrets behind their ancient walls—secrets that refuse to stay buried. In this episode, we uncover the possible sinister past of Scotland's Glamis Castle, where devils, ghosts, and a monstrous family secret blur the line between myth and terrifying reality.
Written by Neil McRobert and produced by Richard MacLean Smith
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, it's Richard McLean Smith here, not the impostor you've
been listening to on the podcasts, the real one. Join
me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com Forward Slash
Unexplained pod. In August twenty twenty three, workers were in
(00:30):
the middle of a restoration project on the eight hundred
year old Johnstown Castle in County Wexford Island. A carpenter
was repairing a window frame in the east wing when
he inadvertently knocked a hole in the wall. After the
team made further excavations, they discovered a secret room under
(00:50):
the tower. Though the empty space is assumed to be
nothing more alarming than a small bedroom, news of the
discovery made head lines around the world. Adding fuel to
the speculative fire was the estate manager's enigmatic suggestion that
the room could have been sealed off due to an
(01:11):
unspecified tragedy in the castle's past. Castles, tragedies secrets three
ingredients that have come together darkly and deliciously over the centuries.
Back in Unexplained Season six, episode one, The Chasm Below,
we detailed the legend surrounding the Czech Republic's Hauska Castle.
(01:36):
In episode thirteen of the same season a place of forgetting,
we plumber the secrets of Lepp Castle, supposedly Ireland's most haunted. Clearly,
there is something about the idea of a castle and
its mysteries that just ignites the imagination. Maybe we are
conditioned by their prominence in our darker stories, from Shakespeare's
(02:00):
to the great Gothic novels. Maybe it's the irony of
buildings designed to withstand battle, bombardment and siege being ultimately
impotent to withstand the human capacity for manufacturing terror, that
no matter how impregnable we make our defenses, we cannot
(02:21):
ever escape ourselves. Or maybe it's just that castles have
been the stage for so much horror and violence that
they now impose themselves and our psychogeographical landscape just as
heavily as they sit on their hilltops, as vast monuments
to the worst that humans can do. There is one
(02:42):
castle where legend and history is woven so tightly that
the twin strands are now impossible to unpick. A castle
where devils are said to have visited, monsters are said
to rome, and secrets are kept at any cost, and
where it appears there may be more than a little
(03:05):
truth to the rumours you're listening to unexplained, and I'm
Richard mc lean smith. For a thousand years, Glam's Castle,
located just north of Dundee in the East of Scotland,
(03:27):
has been bound up with secrets and stories. They are
as integral to the structure as the mortar between its stones.
In ten thirty four, when GLAMs was still the site
of a royal hunting lodge, it played host to the
death of King Malcolm the Second of Scotland. The details
of Malcolm's demise are lost to history, but documents from
(03:51):
the period suggest he was likely murdered. In the late
fourteenth century, an early rudimentary tower was built on the
site and established as the family seat of the Lyon
family as reward for Sir John Lyon's services to the crown.
Ten years later, Sir John would also be murdered by
(04:12):
his rival, James Lindsay of Crawford. The castle and its
estate was surrendered back to the Crown in fifteen thirty seven,
after Jane Douglas, the Lady of GLAMs, was found guilty
of witchcraft and intent to poison the king. In punishment,
she was burned at the stake, and for the next
(04:32):
two centuries, GLAMs bounced in and out of the Lyon
family's possession, eventually settling with them when the family was
awarded the earldom, though they would later change the family
name to Bow's Lion. They remained the Earls and Ladies
of Strathmore and Kinghorn to this day. But even with
its ownership secure, GLAMs regularly sat empty, as few of
(04:57):
the earls chose to inhabit its coal drafty halls. It
is a place of thick walls and heavy atmosphere, consistently
associated with the Macarbre. When Shakespeare adapted the real historical
Macbeth into one of the most cursed figures in all
of literature, where else did he appoint his home but GLAMs.
(05:22):
And just as Shakespeare promoted the castle's notoriety in the
sixteenth century, it was another writer who plucked it from
obscurity in the eighteenth Walter Scott, the famed author of
historical epics such as Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, visited in
the summer of seventeen ninety three, requesting the opportunity to
(05:44):
stay overnight in one of the rooms. Forty years later,
Scott wrote an account of his stay in his letters
on Demonology and Witchcraft, I must own he reminisced, as
I heard door after door shut, I began to consider
myself as too far from the living and somewhat too
(06:06):
near to the dead. Scott was a lifelong scholar of
folklore and the supernatural, so it's likely his perception of
the half empty Castle was colored by an awareness of
its many ghost stories. Several are of a notably cruel
and violent strain. One of the more benign supposed specters
(06:28):
is that of Jane Douglas. After she was burned at
the stake on trumped up charges of treason, her spirit
was said to remain at GLAMs. Known as either the
White or Gray Lady, she is said to appear most
frequently in the castle's small chapel, often kneeling at the altar,
(06:49):
where she has apparently been seen by some of the
most prominent members of the family, including the mother of
Queen Elizabeth, the second Elizabeth Bow's Lion, who grew up GLAMs.
It has long been traditioned to leave one of the
forty six chapel seats vacant for Lady Jane. Even today,
(07:10):
when large family gatherings can quickly fill the space to capacity.
No one is allowed to sit in her place. Other
tales paint GLAMs in a less wholesome light. It was
late one Saturday night in the fifteenth century when a
(07:33):
group of drunken noblemen were playing cards in the Old
Square Tower, the original core of Glam's Castle. As midnight
drew near, the group began to slip away, feeling a
little guilty, perhaps at gambling on the Sabbath. One man, however,
had no such reservations, declaring that he would happily play
(07:55):
on the Sabbath or until doomsday Hell. He insisted he
would play with the devil himself if needs be. In
some versions of the legend, this man is Alexander Lindsey,
the fourth Earl of Crawford. Other tellings have it that
it was the then Lord of Glance himself, Alexander Lyon.
(08:17):
Either way, the outcome is always the same. A heavy
knock is heard at the door, and a black cloaked
figure passes into the room. Like the drunken Earl, the
stranger has no fear of the Sabbath and asks to
be dealt in The two play into the early hours
(08:38):
of the night, and after some time the Earl's luck
begins to falter. First he loses his money, then his land,
and then his title. At one point, it said, he
had cause to look beneath the table and saw that
a long leg which extended out of his opponent's cloak,
(09:00):
ended in a cloven hoof. Realizing he was faced with
the devil himself, and with nothing left to up the ante,
the earl gambled his soul and lost. Thus the devil
cursed him to continue his game, just as the earl
bragged he would all the way until doomsday. Some say
(09:22):
that the pair are playing still somewhere in the dark
depths of GLAMs. The castle's most grotesque ghost is also
perhaps its most telling in several meanings of the word.
The so called tongueless woman has apparently been seen many times,
most often in the courtyard, with blood gushing from her mouth.
(09:48):
Some claim to have seen her appear suddenly in one
of the castle's many barred windows, her face fixed in
a silent scream. There is an unverified, yet intriguing specificity
to one sighting of the tongueless woman in the mid
nineteenth century, An unnamed visitor to Glance was touring the
(10:10):
grounds one evening when he looked up to see a
woman at one of the castle's first four windows. As
he approached, the apparent apparition is said to have disappeared.
Moments later, the visitor heard a shriek, followed by the
pounding of feet on stone, loud enough that a noticeable
(10:30):
limp could be discerned in the steps. Just then, a
wooden door onto the courtyard burst open, revealing the woman,
fresh blood caked around her mouth and a stuffed sack
on her back. She is then said to have rapidly
fled the courtyard and disappeared out of sight. It was
(11:00):
some years later when the same visitor who'd apparently seen
the bloody woman flee the courtyard at Glance was abroad
in Italy. Some bad weather forced him to seek shelter
in a local monastery. In the throes of conversation with
the hospitable monks, the man mentioned his experience at GLAMs,
(11:22):
only for the monks to become suddenly excited. The monks
apparently told the man of an englishwoman living in the
local nunnery. She'd been a member of staff at Glam's castle,
where she'd unintentionally stumbled across the details of some hideous secret.
When she relayed what she knew, the Lyon family had
(11:44):
her tongue removed, after which she fled the castle and
the country. When he was taken to meet the still
living woman, the Englishman was horrified to find it was
the exact same woman he'd seen in the castle courtyard.
The story doesn't clarify whether the man had seen the
tongueless woman in the flesh on the night of her escape,
(12:07):
or whether he was supposed have witness some kind of
crisis apparition, an apparent phenomena that is said to occur
during moments of intense stress, in which one person witnesses
an event like a holographic film being played out from
a distance. Certainly it's a good story, but like the
(12:28):
Wicked Earl's card game, it has the neat yet in
substantial logic of folklore, no dates or names to substantiate
what is a very tall tale. However, there is one
element of the Tongueless Woman's story that bears scrutiny, the
hint of a terrible secret within Glans, because it has
(12:50):
long been thought that the castle does indeed contain a secret,
one that has been glimpsed over the years, with names,
dates and facts attached. And though the violence apparently committed
upon the tongueless woman may be a gross exaggeration, there
is some evidence that the Lyon family have gone to
(13:12):
great lengths to hold their real secret close. If you
could even guess at the nature of this castle secret,
you would get down on your knees and thank God
it is not yours. Those are apparently the words of
(13:34):
Claude Bow's Lion, the thirteenth Earl of Strathmore and King Horn.
He took up the lordship of GLAMs on the death
of his brother in September eighteen sixty five, and held
it until his own death in nineteen oh four. The
span of his and his brother's lordship roughly parallels a
(13:54):
period in which the so called mystery of Glance was
a common topic of conversation in the salons and dinner
parties of high society Europe. It centers on rumors of
a secret room hidden within Glams's thick walls. The room
was said to be both home and prison for a
(14:15):
supposedly monstrous occupant who'd spent his entire life within its confines.
One nineteenth century description of the so called monster referred
to a human toad. A fuller picture was given by
a twentieth century earl who talked about the legend of
a figure with an enormous barrel chest, as harry as
(14:39):
a doormat, and whose head ran straight into his shoulders,
with toy like arms and legs. Regardless of how unusual
its body may have been, the so called Monster of
GLAMs had to be cared for, kept safe, and even exercised.
That job, it said, was a war or did to
(15:00):
the Factor, the man responsible for the overarching administration of
the estate. What made this story more scandalous and appetizing
for high society gossip was the widely held belief that
the so called monster was actually a member of the
Bow's Lyon dynasty. He was thought to be a male
(15:22):
heir to the castle, the firstborn son of Thomas George
Bow's Lyon and his wife Charlotte. The two married in
December of eighteen twenty, and the peerage records note that
on October twenty first of the following year, Charlotte gave
birth to a boy, Thomas Junior, who it was claimed
(15:44):
died that same day. Whispers immediately began to swirl in
the local villages when the midwife spread word that the
child had in fact been born deformed as she described it,
but was in good health when she left him and
his mother, And so when Thomas's death was announced two
(16:05):
days later, on the twenty third, it was met with suspicion.
Villagers were particularly perturbed by a lack of gravestone to
mark the boy's resting place. Word of the alleged cover
up spread rapidly, but only hints ever found their way
into print. During the nineteenth century, the author Walter Scott,
(16:27):
for one, had mentioned the legend of the secret chamber
in his report of his visit to GLAMs, but he
made no mention of any occupant. In nineteen o eight,
an article in the journal Notes and Queries relates the
mystery of GLAMs as if it was common knowledge. The
uncredited author begins by assuming that the reader is aware
(16:51):
of the story, which he says was told to him
sixty years earlier, when he was just a boy. And
though the article repeats the oft quoted theory that the
secret is only ever revealed to three living people, the
current Earl, his heir and the factor. Word had clearly
(17:11):
gotten out some time ago. In eighteen sixty five, a
laborer employed by the twelfth Earl to make repairs to
the older parts of the tower struck a seemingly solid wall,
only to see it crumble away to reveal a long
(17:34):
corridor beyond. The man ventured inside, but was soon stopped
by a heavy iron door. Other tellings of the story
say that he ran from the sight of a slumped,
distorted figure in the shadows. Either way, the man fled
the passage and reported it to his foreman. When word
(17:56):
reached mister Ralston, the long serving and loyal factor of
the day, he quickly summoned the Earl back from London.
According to the conspiracy, Ralston and the Earl interrogated the laborer,
then paid him off handsomely on the one condition did
he and his family leave on a one way trip
(18:17):
to Australia. Other anecdotes suggest there is at least some
truth to Glams' supposedly anomalous architecture. Lord Ernest Hamilton spent
many summers of his boyhood at the castle, and returned
often as an adult. He wrote how once he was
playing in a dressing room known as the Blue Room
(18:40):
when he lifted a rug on the floor, only to
find a trapdoor underneath it. When he opened it up,
he too found a hidden passage. A few years later,
a doctor paid a professional visit to GLAMs that required
him to stay for a couple of days. Speaking of
the trip later, he explained that when he retired to
(19:02):
his bedroom in the evening, he saw that a mark
he'd previously noticed on the carpet was now at the
opposite end of the room. For some reason, the carpet
had been taken up and relaid. Curious to know why,
the doctor quickly moved the furniture out of the way
and lifted the carpet up, under which he also found
(19:25):
a trapdoor, and beyond that the hidden passage. Moments later,
the doctor found himself in a narrow stone walled corridor
that ended abruptly at a blank cement wall. When he
pressed his hand against it, he apparently found the cement
still soft enough to leave an impression. The doctor returned
(19:49):
to his room and resettled the carpet and told nobody
of his unnerving excursion. Nonetheless, he was met early the
following morning by mister Ralston, who, after presenting him with
the check, informed him that a carriage was waiting outside
to escort him immediately to the train station. Though all
(20:11):
this may sound like a Gothic tinged gossip or an
early tabloid scandal, there is compelling testimony to support the rumors.
Several prominent members of late Victorian society were willing to
put their name to their experiences. One such individual was
Virginia Gabriel, the romantic singer and composer. Virginia Gabriel had
(20:47):
a lengthy stay at GLAMs in the winter of eighteen
sixty nine and eighteen seventy, after which she was inspired
to write the piano composition The GLAMs Castle Waltz. She
also returned from her trip convinced that the family and
their castle did indeed ours a horrible secret. Over the
(21:09):
course of that winter, Virginia was witnessed to a number
of strange incidents, which she relayed to former Chancellor of
the Exchequer and First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Charles Wood,
an ardent collector of ghost stories. In November of eighteen
sixty nine, Virginia was at a dance to celebrate the
(21:29):
completion of a brand new dining room. The party went
on until the early hours, until everyone eventually made their
way to their rooms. One couple, a Missus and mister Monroe,
were staying in the red room while their young son
slept near by in an adjoining dressing room. The following morning,
(21:51):
over breakfast, Missus Munroe regaled Virginia and the other guests
with a tale. Deep in the night, Missus Munroe had
woken with the feeling that some one was looming over
her in the dark. She even felt what she took
to be strands of a beard tickling her face. She
(22:12):
called out for her husband to find a match to
light the lamp. Seconds later, she saw a shadowy figure
moving towards the dressing room door. When she found matches
of her own, she lit one, only to be shocked
by the sleeping figure of her husband lying beside her
in the bed. It was then that she heard her
(22:35):
son screaming. When they rushed into his bedroom, the Munrose
found the boy in extreme distress, crying about a giant
that had come into his room. Shortly after, all three
heard a loud crash come from elsewhere in the castle,
as if a great door had just slammed. Another guest
(22:56):
at the breakfast table, Lady Trevannion, said that she had
been woken at four a m by the same crashing noise.
Virginia Gabriel would also go on to give the fullest
impression of the castle factor, mister Ralston, a man who
seems to always haunt the background of the castle's most
(23:18):
intriguing stories. Virginia describes him as a shrewd, hard headed
Scotsman who never, under any circumstances, spent the night in
the castle. She mentions one night in early eighteen seventy
when a sudden snowstorm blanketed the area, rendering Rolston's route
(23:38):
home impassable, but rather than accept the invitation of a
bed for the night, the Factor ordered a whole team
of gardeners and stablemen to dig out a mile long
path through the snow to his home. Virginia also shared
a conversation she had with the lady of the manor,
(23:58):
Francis bow'slon or Lady Strathmore, in which Bow's Lion confessed
how she had once asked mister Ralston what all the
fuss was over the supposed mystery. The factor responded gravely,
that it is fortunate you do not know it and
can never know it, for if you did, you would
(24:19):
not be a happy woman. According to Virginia Gabriel, this
speech from such a man was certainly uncanny. It appears
that mister Rolston's warning did not defeat Lady Strathmore's interest
(24:40):
in the family secret. Her attempts to resolve the enigma
of the hidden room has become one of the most
often repeated stories about the castle. It was first mentioned
by Horace Rumboldt, Briton's then ambassador to Berlin. In his
memoir Recollections of a Diplomatist. Rumbold describes a visit to
(25:02):
Glance during the summer of eighteen seventy seven. The Earl
was away on business, leaving Lady Strathmore to host a
small gathering of family and friends. Conversation soon turned to
the mystery. In all of the stories, the secret chamber
was said to have a window, so someone in the
(25:22):
party suggested that cloth be hung from every available window.
Once this was complete, logic dictated that the secret room
would be literally uncovered. Sheets and towels, and even handkerchiefs
were gathered, and visitors and staff joined forces in hanging
them from every window they could find. Once they were done,
(25:46):
the group gathered outside the castle. Some accounts claim that
one window remained clear, others that there were as many
as four. Rumboldt doesn't confirm the result, but he does
describe the Earl's unexpectedly early return and the painful scene
(26:07):
in which he bitterly remonstrated with his wife for treating
so lightly what she well knew was a solemn secret
deeply affecting the family fortunes. Considering that the twelfth and
thirteenth Earls would be younger brothers of the so called
Monster of Glance, its understandable that they felt a particular
(26:28):
discomfort with anyone prying into the mystery. Rumbold writes how Claude,
the thirteenth Earl, had seen both his father and brother
traumatized by the knowledge that was imparted to them, and
that he had asked if he could be spared the burden,
but he was not. On his death bed, Claude's brother,
(26:51):
the twelfth Earl, is said to have passed on the
secret and implored Claude to do all that he could
to thwart the sinister in fluenceants that had supposedly been
such a burden to him. Claude's first act as Earl
was to refurbish the castle Chapel, where not hours after
(27:11):
its completion, he was said to have been found deep
in prayer, still wearing his clothes from the night before.
He was praying for salvation. It seemed that the first
chance he got Claude Bo's lion. The thirteenth Earl of Strathmore,
(27:35):
died in nineteen oh four. Most of the anecdotes and
rumors that constitute the mystery of Glance came to light
after his death, but they all relate to incidents that
took place during his life. Interestingly, there are no new
reports after the late eighteen hundreds. Later generations of the
(27:56):
beau's Lyon family were relatively happy to discuss the legend
and confident that it was just that a legend. In
nineteen sixty, the writer James Wentworth Day interviewed the sixteenth
Earl for a biography of the Queen Mother. The new
Earl mentioned that he'd heard the legend, and it is
(28:18):
he who gave the description of a monster with a
hairy barrel chest However, he claimed to have never been
told of the reality and responsibility of the secret, as
his forebears were said to have been. The Earl reasoned
that the story may have died with his father or
with his brother, who was killed in the First World War.
(28:42):
But there are some who think it isn't word of
the secret that died, but the secret himself. If the
so called Monster of GLAMs really was a disabled heir
born in eighteen twenty one and sequestered away in the
castle's recess, then that man would have been approaching eighty
(29:04):
at the turn of the century. It's likely that he
would not have long outlived his brother Claude, the thirteenth Earl,
and there would not have been any cause for the
fourteenth Eirl to pass the story down any longer. Today,
(29:24):
the legacy of the story lives on in the architecture
of Glam's Castle. There is a section of parapet that
runs along the roofline, and it's there that the newest
addition to Glance its roster of apparent ghosts is said
to have been seen. Reports describe it as a strange
(29:45):
shuffling shadow walking to and fro, as if taking the
opportunity to stretch. Rarely used legs. That section of parapet
as a name to the precise origins of w which
can't be pinned down in history, it's known as the
mad Earl's Walk. This episode was written by Neil McRobert
(30:17):
and produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Neil is the
creator and host of his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared,
in which he discusses the craft of horror, writing with
everyone from Ta Nanerieve Do to the God of Horror himself,
Stephen King. I can't recommend it highly enough. Unexplained as
(30:40):
an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLain Smith.
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are
also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book
and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can
purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble Stones and other bookstores.
(31:02):
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with
any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own
you'd like to share. You can find out more at
Unexplained podcast dot com, and reach us online through Twitter
at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward
(31:26):
Slash Unexplained Podcasts
Hello, it's Richard McLean Smith here, not the impostor you've
been listening to on the podcasts, the real one. Join
me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com Forward Slash
Unexplained pod. In August twenty twenty three, workers were in
(00:30):
the middle of a restoration project on the eight hundred
year old Johnstown Castle in County Wexford Island. A carpenter
was repairing a window frame in the east wing when
he inadvertently knocked a hole in the wall. After the
team made further excavations, they discovered a secret room under
(00:50):
the tower. Though the empty space is assumed to be
nothing more alarming than a small bedroom, news of the
discovery made head lines around the world. Adding fuel to
the speculative fire was the estate manager's enigmatic suggestion that
the room could have been sealed off due to an
(01:11):
unspecified tragedy in the castle's past. Castles, tragedies secrets three
ingredients that have come together darkly and deliciously over the centuries.
Back in Unexplained Season six, episode one, The Chasm Below,
we detailed the legend surrounding the Czech Republic's Hauska Castle.
(01:36):
In episode thirteen of the same season a place of forgetting,
we plumber the secrets of Lepp Castle, supposedly Ireland's most haunted. Clearly,
there is something about the idea of a castle and
its mysteries that just ignites the imagination. Maybe we are
conditioned by their prominence in our darker stories, from Shakespeare's
(02:00):
to the great Gothic novels. Maybe it's the irony of
buildings designed to withstand battle, bombardment and siege being ultimately
impotent to withstand the human capacity for manufacturing terror, that
no matter how impregnable we make our defenses, we cannot
(02:21):
ever escape ourselves. Or maybe it's just that castles have
been the stage for so much horror and violence that
they now impose themselves and our psychogeographical landscape just as
heavily as they sit on their hilltops, as vast monuments
to the worst that humans can do. There is one
(02:42):
castle where legend and history is woven so tightly that
the twin strands are now impossible to unpick. A castle
where devils are said to have visited, monsters are said
to rome, and secrets are kept at any cost, and
where it appears there may be more than a little
(03:05):
truth to the rumours you're listening to unexplained, and I'm
Richard mc lean smith. For a thousand years, Glam's Castle,
located just north of Dundee in the East of Scotland,
(03:27):
has been bound up with secrets and stories. They are
as integral to the structure as the mortar between its stones.
In ten thirty four, when GLAMs was still the site
of a royal hunting lodge, it played host to the
death of King Malcolm the Second of Scotland. The details
of Malcolm's demise are lost to history, but documents from
(03:51):
the period suggest he was likely murdered. In the late
fourteenth century, an early rudimentary tower was built on the
site and established as the family seat of the Lyon
family as reward for Sir John Lyon's services to the crown.
Ten years later, Sir John would also be murdered by
(04:12):
his rival, James Lindsay of Crawford. The castle and its
estate was surrendered back to the Crown in fifteen thirty seven,
after Jane Douglas, the Lady of GLAMs, was found guilty
of witchcraft and intent to poison the king. In punishment,
she was burned at the stake, and for the next
(04:32):
two centuries, GLAMs bounced in and out of the Lyon
family's possession, eventually settling with them when the family was
awarded the earldom, though they would later change the family
name to Bow's Lion. They remained the Earls and Ladies
of Strathmore and Kinghorn to this day. But even with
its ownership secure, GLAMs regularly sat empty, as few of
(04:57):
the earls chose to inhabit its coal drafty halls. It
is a place of thick walls and heavy atmosphere, consistently
associated with the Macarbre. When Shakespeare adapted the real historical
Macbeth into one of the most cursed figures in all
of literature, where else did he appoint his home but GLAMs.
(05:22):
And just as Shakespeare promoted the castle's notoriety in the
sixteenth century, it was another writer who plucked it from
obscurity in the eighteenth Walter Scott, the famed author of
historical epics such as Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, visited in
the summer of seventeen ninety three, requesting the opportunity to
(05:44):
stay overnight in one of the rooms. Forty years later,
Scott wrote an account of his stay in his letters
on Demonology and Witchcraft, I must own he reminisced, as
I heard door after door shut, I began to consider
myself as too far from the living and somewhat too
(06:06):
near to the dead. Scott was a lifelong scholar of
folklore and the supernatural, so it's likely his perception of
the half empty Castle was colored by an awareness of
its many ghost stories. Several are of a notably cruel
and violent strain. One of the more benign supposed specters
(06:28):
is that of Jane Douglas. After she was burned at
the stake on trumped up charges of treason, her spirit
was said to remain at GLAMs. Known as either the
White or Gray Lady, she is said to appear most
frequently in the castle's small chapel, often kneeling at the altar,
(06:49):
where she has apparently been seen by some of the
most prominent members of the family, including the mother of
Queen Elizabeth, the second Elizabeth Bow's Lion, who grew up GLAMs.
It has long been traditioned to leave one of the
forty six chapel seats vacant for Lady Jane. Even today,
(07:10):
when large family gatherings can quickly fill the space to capacity.
No one is allowed to sit in her place. Other
tales paint GLAMs in a less wholesome light. It was
late one Saturday night in the fifteenth century when a
(07:33):
group of drunken noblemen were playing cards in the Old
Square Tower, the original core of Glam's Castle. As midnight
drew near, the group began to slip away, feeling a
little guilty, perhaps at gambling on the Sabbath. One man, however,
had no such reservations, declaring that he would happily play
(07:55):
on the Sabbath or until doomsday Hell. He insisted he
would play with the devil himself if needs be. In
some versions of the legend, this man is Alexander Lindsey,
the fourth Earl of Crawford. Other tellings have it that
it was the then Lord of Glance himself, Alexander Lyon.
(08:17):
Either way, the outcome is always the same. A heavy
knock is heard at the door, and a black cloaked
figure passes into the room. Like the drunken Earl, the
stranger has no fear of the Sabbath and asks to
be dealt in The two play into the early hours
(08:38):
of the night, and after some time the Earl's luck
begins to falter. First he loses his money, then his land,
and then his title. At one point, it said, he
had cause to look beneath the table and saw that
a long leg which extended out of his opponent's cloak,
(09:00):
ended in a cloven hoof. Realizing he was faced with
the devil himself, and with nothing left to up the ante,
the earl gambled his soul and lost. Thus the devil
cursed him to continue his game, just as the earl
bragged he would all the way until doomsday. Some say
(09:22):
that the pair are playing still somewhere in the dark
depths of GLAMs. The castle's most grotesque ghost is also
perhaps its most telling in several meanings of the word.
The so called tongueless woman has apparently been seen many times,
most often in the courtyard, with blood gushing from her mouth.
(09:48):
Some claim to have seen her appear suddenly in one
of the castle's many barred windows, her face fixed in
a silent scream. There is an unverified, yet intriguing specificity
to one sighting of the tongueless woman in the mid
nineteenth century, An unnamed visitor to Glance was touring the
(10:10):
grounds one evening when he looked up to see a
woman at one of the castle's first four windows. As
he approached, the apparent apparition is said to have disappeared.
Moments later, the visitor heard a shriek, followed by the
pounding of feet on stone, loud enough that a noticeable
(10:30):
limp could be discerned in the steps. Just then, a
wooden door onto the courtyard burst open, revealing the woman,
fresh blood caked around her mouth and a stuffed sack
on her back. She is then said to have rapidly
fled the courtyard and disappeared out of sight. It was
(11:00):
some years later when the same visitor who'd apparently seen
the bloody woman flee the courtyard at Glance was abroad
in Italy. Some bad weather forced him to seek shelter
in a local monastery. In the throes of conversation with
the hospitable monks, the man mentioned his experience at GLAMs,
(11:22):
only for the monks to become suddenly excited. The monks
apparently told the man of an englishwoman living in the
local nunnery. She'd been a member of staff at Glam's castle,
where she'd unintentionally stumbled across the details of some hideous secret.
When she relayed what she knew, the Lyon family had
(11:44):
her tongue removed, after which she fled the castle and
the country. When he was taken to meet the still
living woman, the Englishman was horrified to find it was
the exact same woman he'd seen in the castle courtyard.
The story doesn't clarify whether the man had seen the
tongueless woman in the flesh on the night of her escape,
(12:07):
or whether he was supposed have witness some kind of
crisis apparition, an apparent phenomena that is said to occur
during moments of intense stress, in which one person witnesses
an event like a holographic film being played out from
a distance. Certainly it's a good story, but like the
(12:28):
Wicked Earl's card game, it has the neat yet in
substantial logic of folklore, no dates or names to substantiate
what is a very tall tale. However, there is one
element of the Tongueless Woman's story that bears scrutiny, the
hint of a terrible secret within Glans, because it has
(12:50):
long been thought that the castle does indeed contain a secret,
one that has been glimpsed over the years, with names,
dates and facts attached. And though the violence apparently committed
upon the tongueless woman may be a gross exaggeration, there
is some evidence that the Lyon family have gone to
(13:12):
great lengths to hold their real secret close. If you
could even guess at the nature of this castle secret,
you would get down on your knees and thank God
it is not yours. Those are apparently the words of
(13:34):
Claude Bow's Lion, the thirteenth Earl of Strathmore and King Horn.
He took up the lordship of GLAMs on the death
of his brother in September eighteen sixty five, and held
it until his own death in nineteen oh four. The
span of his and his brother's lordship roughly parallels a
(13:54):
period in which the so called mystery of Glance was
a common topic of conversation in the salons and dinner
parties of high society Europe. It centers on rumors of
a secret room hidden within Glams's thick walls. The room
was said to be both home and prison for a
(14:15):
supposedly monstrous occupant who'd spent his entire life within its confines.
One nineteenth century description of the so called monster referred
to a human toad. A fuller picture was given by
a twentieth century earl who talked about the legend of
a figure with an enormous barrel chest, as harry as
(14:39):
a doormat, and whose head ran straight into his shoulders,
with toy like arms and legs. Regardless of how unusual
its body may have been, the so called Monster of
GLAMs had to be cared for, kept safe, and even exercised.
That job, it said, was a war or did to
(15:00):
the Factor, the man responsible for the overarching administration of
the estate. What made this story more scandalous and appetizing
for high society gossip was the widely held belief that
the so called monster was actually a member of the
Bow's Lyon dynasty. He was thought to be a male
(15:22):
heir to the castle, the firstborn son of Thomas George
Bow's Lyon and his wife Charlotte. The two married in
December of eighteen twenty, and the peerage records note that
on October twenty first of the following year, Charlotte gave
birth to a boy, Thomas Junior, who it was claimed
(15:44):
died that same day. Whispers immediately began to swirl in
the local villages when the midwife spread word that the
child had in fact been born deformed as she described it,
but was in good health when she left him and
his mother, And so when Thomas's death was announced two
(16:05):
days later, on the twenty third, it was met with suspicion.
Villagers were particularly perturbed by a lack of gravestone to
mark the boy's resting place. Word of the alleged cover
up spread rapidly, but only hints ever found their way
into print. During the nineteenth century, the author Walter Scott,
(16:27):
for one, had mentioned the legend of the secret chamber
in his report of his visit to GLAMs, but he
made no mention of any occupant. In nineteen o eight,
an article in the journal Notes and Queries relates the
mystery of GLAMs as if it was common knowledge. The
uncredited author begins by assuming that the reader is aware
(16:51):
of the story, which he says was told to him
sixty years earlier, when he was just a boy. And
though the article repeats the oft quoted theory that the
secret is only ever revealed to three living people, the
current Earl, his heir and the factor. Word had clearly
(17:11):
gotten out some time ago. In eighteen sixty five, a
laborer employed by the twelfth Earl to make repairs to
the older parts of the tower struck a seemingly solid wall,
only to see it crumble away to reveal a long
(17:34):
corridor beyond. The man ventured inside, but was soon stopped
by a heavy iron door. Other tellings of the story
say that he ran from the sight of a slumped,
distorted figure in the shadows. Either way, the man fled
the passage and reported it to his foreman. When word
(17:56):
reached mister Ralston, the long serving and loyal factor of
the day, he quickly summoned the Earl back from London.
According to the conspiracy, Ralston and the Earl interrogated the laborer,
then paid him off handsomely on the one condition did
he and his family leave on a one way trip
(18:17):
to Australia. Other anecdotes suggest there is at least some
truth to Glams' supposedly anomalous architecture. Lord Ernest Hamilton spent
many summers of his boyhood at the castle, and returned
often as an adult. He wrote how once he was
playing in a dressing room known as the Blue Room
(18:40):
when he lifted a rug on the floor, only to
find a trapdoor underneath it. When he opened it up,
he too found a hidden passage. A few years later,
a doctor paid a professional visit to GLAMs that required
him to stay for a couple of days. Speaking of
the trip later, he explained that when he retired to
(19:02):
his bedroom in the evening, he saw that a mark
he'd previously noticed on the carpet was now at the
opposite end of the room. For some reason, the carpet
had been taken up and relaid. Curious to know why,
the doctor quickly moved the furniture out of the way
and lifted the carpet up, under which he also found
(19:25):
a trapdoor, and beyond that the hidden passage. Moments later,
the doctor found himself in a narrow stone walled corridor
that ended abruptly at a blank cement wall. When he
pressed his hand against it, he apparently found the cement
still soft enough to leave an impression. The doctor returned
(19:49):
to his room and resettled the carpet and told nobody
of his unnerving excursion. Nonetheless, he was met early the
following morning by mister Ralston, who, after presenting him with
the check, informed him that a carriage was waiting outside
to escort him immediately to the train station. Though all
(20:11):
this may sound like a Gothic tinged gossip or an
early tabloid scandal, there is compelling testimony to support the rumors.
Several prominent members of late Victorian society were willing to
put their name to their experiences. One such individual was
Virginia Gabriel, the romantic singer and composer. Virginia Gabriel had
(20:47):
a lengthy stay at GLAMs in the winter of eighteen
sixty nine and eighteen seventy, after which she was inspired
to write the piano composition The GLAMs Castle Waltz. She
also returned from her trip convinced that the family and
their castle did indeed ours a horrible secret. Over the
(21:09):
course of that winter, Virginia was witnessed to a number
of strange incidents, which she relayed to former Chancellor of
the Exchequer and First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Charles Wood,
an ardent collector of ghost stories. In November of eighteen
sixty nine, Virginia was at a dance to celebrate the
(21:29):
completion of a brand new dining room. The party went
on until the early hours, until everyone eventually made their
way to their rooms. One couple, a Missus and mister Monroe,
were staying in the red room while their young son
slept near by in an adjoining dressing room. The following morning,
(21:51):
over breakfast, Missus Munroe regaled Virginia and the other guests
with a tale. Deep in the night, Missus Munroe had
woken with the feeling that some one was looming over
her in the dark. She even felt what she took
to be strands of a beard tickling her face. She
(22:12):
called out for her husband to find a match to
light the lamp. Seconds later, she saw a shadowy figure
moving towards the dressing room door. When she found matches
of her own, she lit one, only to be shocked
by the sleeping figure of her husband lying beside her
in the bed. It was then that she heard her
(22:35):
son screaming. When they rushed into his bedroom, the Munrose
found the boy in extreme distress, crying about a giant
that had come into his room. Shortly after, all three
heard a loud crash come from elsewhere in the castle,
as if a great door had just slammed. Another guest
(22:56):
at the breakfast table, Lady Trevannion, said that she had
been woken at four a m by the same crashing noise.
Virginia Gabriel would also go on to give the fullest
impression of the castle factor, mister Ralston, a man who
seems to always haunt the background of the castle's most
(23:18):
intriguing stories. Virginia describes him as a shrewd, hard headed
Scotsman who never, under any circumstances, spent the night in
the castle. She mentions one night in early eighteen seventy
when a sudden snowstorm blanketed the area, rendering Rolston's route
(23:38):
home impassable, but rather than accept the invitation of a
bed for the night, the Factor ordered a whole team
of gardeners and stablemen to dig out a mile long
path through the snow to his home. Virginia also shared
a conversation she had with the lady of the manor,
(23:58):
Francis bow'slon or Lady Strathmore, in which Bow's Lion confessed
how she had once asked mister Ralston what all the
fuss was over the supposed mystery. The factor responded gravely,
that it is fortunate you do not know it and
can never know it, for if you did, you would
(24:19):
not be a happy woman. According to Virginia Gabriel, this
speech from such a man was certainly uncanny. It appears
that mister Rolston's warning did not defeat Lady Strathmore's interest
(24:40):
in the family secret. Her attempts to resolve the enigma
of the hidden room has become one of the most
often repeated stories about the castle. It was first mentioned
by Horace Rumboldt, Briton's then ambassador to Berlin. In his
memoir Recollections of a Diplomatist. Rumbold describes a visit to
(25:02):
Glance during the summer of eighteen seventy seven. The Earl
was away on business, leaving Lady Strathmore to host a
small gathering of family and friends. Conversation soon turned to
the mystery. In all of the stories, the secret chamber
was said to have a window, so someone in the
(25:22):
party suggested that cloth be hung from every available window.
Once this was complete, logic dictated that the secret room
would be literally uncovered. Sheets and towels, and even handkerchiefs
were gathered, and visitors and staff joined forces in hanging
them from every window they could find. Once they were done,
(25:46):
the group gathered outside the castle. Some accounts claim that
one window remained clear, others that there were as many
as four. Rumboldt doesn't confirm the result, but he does
describe the Earl's unexpectedly early return and the painful scene
(26:07):
in which he bitterly remonstrated with his wife for treating
so lightly what she well knew was a solemn secret
deeply affecting the family fortunes. Considering that the twelfth and
thirteenth Earls would be younger brothers of the so called
Monster of Glance, its understandable that they felt a particular
(26:28):
discomfort with anyone prying into the mystery. Rumbold writes how Claude,
the thirteenth Earl, had seen both his father and brother
traumatized by the knowledge that was imparted to them, and
that he had asked if he could be spared the burden,
but he was not. On his death bed, Claude's brother,
(26:51):
the twelfth Earl, is said to have passed on the
secret and implored Claude to do all that he could
to thwart the sinister in fluenceants that had supposedly been
such a burden to him. Claude's first act as Earl
was to refurbish the castle Chapel, where not hours after
(27:11):
its completion, he was said to have been found deep
in prayer, still wearing his clothes from the night before.
He was praying for salvation. It seemed that the first
chance he got Claude Bo's lion. The thirteenth Earl of Strathmore,
(27:35):
died in nineteen oh four. Most of the anecdotes and
rumors that constitute the mystery of Glance came to light
after his death, but they all relate to incidents that
took place during his life. Interestingly, there are no new
reports after the late eighteen hundreds. Later generations of the
(27:56):
beau's Lyon family were relatively happy to discuss the legend
and confident that it was just that a legend. In
nineteen sixty, the writer James Wentworth Day interviewed the sixteenth
Earl for a biography of the Queen Mother. The new
Earl mentioned that he'd heard the legend, and it is
(28:18):
he who gave the description of a monster with a
hairy barrel chest However, he claimed to have never been
told of the reality and responsibility of the secret, as
his forebears were said to have been. The Earl reasoned
that the story may have died with his father or
with his brother, who was killed in the First World War.
(28:42):
But there are some who think it isn't word of
the secret that died, but the secret himself. If the
so called Monster of GLAMs really was a disabled heir
born in eighteen twenty one and sequestered away in the
castle's recess, then that man would have been approaching eighty
(29:04):
at the turn of the century. It's likely that he
would not have long outlived his brother Claude, the thirteenth Earl,
and there would not have been any cause for the
fourteenth Eirl to pass the story down any longer. Today,
(29:24):
the legacy of the story lives on in the architecture
of Glam's Castle. There is a section of parapet that
runs along the roofline, and it's there that the newest
addition to Glance its roster of apparent ghosts is said
to have been seen. Reports describe it as a strange
(29:45):
shuffling shadow walking to and fro, as if taking the
opportunity to stretch. Rarely used legs. That section of parapet
as a name to the precise origins of w which
can't be pinned down in history, it's known as the
mad Earl's Walk. This episode was written by Neil McRobert
(30:17):
and produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Neil is the
creator and host of his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared,
in which he discusses the craft of horror, writing with
everyone from Ta Nanerieve Do to the God of Horror himself,
Stephen King. I can't recommend it highly enough. Unexplained as
(30:40):
an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLain Smith.
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are
also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book
and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can
purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble Stones and other bookstores.
(31:02):
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with
any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own
you'd like to share. You can find out more at
Unexplained podcast dot com, and reach us online through Twitter
at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward
(31:26):
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