Slay The Spirits Abyss: in which a Vampiric marsh dwelling Cryptid refuses us the courtesy of a social call.
A diarising of the particular sense of dread called forth by presbyterian aesthetics, and the internal mythologising of the Lochmaben Vampire into a Meat Loaf tribute act.
A bleak and chilly Sunday in the month of February, Ringcroft of Stocking, Dumfries and Galloway.
I squared my bosom against the chill of the night and faced into the press of trees leading away from the road and into a thicket of sinister woodland abutting a farm field. This, the woodland in the immediate airt of the Ringcroft of Stocking, had the disturbing weight of occasion and evil hanging over it before we even crossed through the first several yards of dried leaves and brittle twigs.
All of us had met the occasion with the dark gravitas it afforded, dressed to a one in black. Having made a semblance of effort for the occasion over and above her choice of outfit for Dunskey Castle, Jo was ethereal in a dress of loose black fabric that snapped in the biting wind; Devine more staid and secure in a black patent trench-coat-over-tee combination. Camille looked far less like the haunted secretary of a data processing conglomerate, this time, and sported a distressed ensemble of wispish and sheer black fabrics. Kirsty and I made a more conventional pairing in simple but no less black casual attire, myself in a hoody which I prepared to defend me against the cold which already felt unseemly in a spiritual way.
The dawning trepidation I felt as we embarked into the woods seemed not to be shared by the others, least of all Jo who even managed to skip through the trees at times with a jollity ill matched to the doom-laden oppressive dark, her yards of flowing fabric billowing ethereally behind her as she galloped majestically into the woodland. The dry bracken and twigs underfoot stood not a chance against her booted feet.
Ringcroft of Stocking is purported to be haunted by a terrifying and malevolent poltergeist, which makes absolute sense because the experience of being there was, from start to finish, absolutely chaotic and coloured by an almost comical madness. From the moment we established ourselves in the heart of the wood, spiritual hijinks and tomfoolery ensued with rapid abundance. The horrifying little gramophone device that plays “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” kept setting off, indicating the presence of at least one curious ghost midst the copse of trees, and all of us began to take leave of any sense of order and discipline and simply amble through the wildwood animated by the singular desire to meet and interrogate a deceased person.
During the course of these chaotic proceedings, we split off into smaller groups. Devine led Camille and myself some way toward the left extremity of the wood, where we encountered a low stone wall. Over the wall was a sweeping farm field leading ominously, dreadfully up to a bare, solitary tree on the crest of a hill. Local legend holds that when this, the last of a line of mighty trees, falls down, the malevolent poltergeist will return to wreak havoc on the people of the area, spelling trouble for today’s residents of the nearby Auchencairn. Mesmerised and a little afraid of the tree, I watched from behind the wall while Devine and Camille set about preparing the instruments of our seance.
Almost immediately we were contacted, through the spirit box, by a spirit identifying herself as a teenage girl possibly named Stephanie. Little interested in answering questions, Stephanie revealed herself as a playful soul by requesting a game of hide and seek which we were happy to indulge her in. But, after she instructed us to search for her (or something) behind a specific tree (indicated by her manipulation of Camille’s divining rods), we followed her instructions to a grim discovery. Just as I was stepping away from behind Stephanie’s tree I noticed the stark white shine of something poking out from amidst the fallen leaves. It was the upper half of a fox’s skull, absolutely immaculately clean with no residual carrion clinging to it. Ritualistically clean? Alarmed by this grim discovery we ran back through the woods to reconvene with Jo and Kirsty and lead them back to the skull.
Titillated so by this turn of events we decided to try the Estes method. Installed on a lump of granite on the forest floor, Jo was blindfolded with the black silk tie and the effect was altogether marvellous to behold; a vision facing into the wind with black fabric from her dress and the tie billowing behind her. But immediately Jo began to channel a congregation of spirits gathered in the wood, all of them provincial Scottish voices of yesteryear and seemingly puritan religious conviction.
Something about the spirits coming through and their manner of speaking, their fixations, seemed to call up the aesthetic of the ‘witch panic’ times, where sad little puritans wrung their hands and gnashed their teeth and bemoaned liberty of all kinds as Satan’s own handiwork. I didn’t like them.
By turns we all attempted the Estes method, but it wasn’t until Kirsty was installed in the apparatus that I fully noticed that the oppressive dark of the forest seemed to be intensifying, deepening. I stood with my back to the deeper heart of the forest and felt the shadow creep behind me, a yawning chasm of doom and terror opening somewhere further down the gently sloping hill. The wind picked up some, and the chill of the night intensified. I felt myself tremble, my teeth chattering, and I pulled the hood of my jumper up against the bite. Very shortly after doing so, a word came through Kirsty: “brunette”. As the only true brunette in the troupe, Camille asked if the spirit speaking was referring to me, and a response came back quickly: “hood”. Alarmed, clocked, and fearful of being scrutinised in any way by the demented spectre of a radical christian of the burning times, I stiffened my spine and felt the panic and fear rising in me.
Shortly thereafter, another expression came: “here horsey”. This immediately was followed by a rattling of a gate somewhere, a burst of ferocious wind, and the strange laboured galloping of some creature just beyond the reach of our torchlight, the crashing and cracking of the undergrowth a signal for us to haphazardly stuff our equipment back into the long-suffering bag for life and run from the forest in fear.
The “here horsey” moment left a particularly dreadful residue of doom on me, because it felt, in some way, targeted at me. My family, long-suffering readers will know, have a tradition of equestrian sport, with my Great Grandfather described as “legendary Scottish horseman” Hugh Barclay in ‘Jockeypedia’. The reason it felt particularly targeted though, is that during the mounting sense of dread that was building as we proceeded through the last leg of the Estes method, I was beginning to wonder, privately, whether we might be reaching communion with an entity closer to, or at least resembling, the classic ‘Devil’ figure. This would not be unheard of in a wooded clearing on the Solway Coast.
In a more fanciful telling of the Scottish history of the salt crusted western coast, one Fergus de Barclay, purported to be an ancestor of mine (almost certainly confirmed by our family’s enduring appetite for horsemanship among many other voracious sins), earned the moniker of ‘The Deil o Ardrossan’ by making a deal with the devil; his soul in exchange for a magic bridle to make him the most fearsome horseman in Scotland. However, my wily ancestor challenged and tricked the Devil by low cunning (again, consistent with our family’s public image) and sparked his ire. Upon his death, his corpse laid out for burial on the sacred isle of Iona was said to have been claimed by a mythic surge of the sea and violently re-deposited on the beach under those very Ardrossan cliffs where he’d ruled from his imposing stone castle.
I arrived at two conclusions. The first, that I have, like all my kin, inherited the weight of our family’s debt to the Devil courtesy of my Barclay blood. The second, that it was perchance a Devil-like spirit (or mischievous poltergeist with an ego problem who masquerades as the Devil) who was contacting us, building strength with every expanded layer of panic and dread that we came to as the night got colder and the dark fuller.
I posit that a long line of my Barclay ancestors since the time of Fergus must have carried the weight of this hellish covenant, that very pact likely responsible for our many gifts and privileges (including excellent hair), but also defects like crippling allergies and pathological demand avoidance; this is, I feel, consistent with traditional expectations leveraged against those purported to be witches, the whores of Satan, blessed and cursed in equal measure and expected to be called on at any moment to be the instrument of his hellish will. Full of the unsettled dread of this reflection, I joined the others as we fled the scene and made haste to spontaneously visit another haunted location with deep personal significance.
Later that same night, Lochmaben Castle, Dumfries and Galloway.
We journeyed eastward, the wild countryside of the Solway Coast giving way to a more tilled and furrowed landscape of ancient farmland, less rocky and populated with dour presbyterian ghosts. When we arrived at the Royal Burgh of Lochmaben, my home, we made for the Castle.
The contrast between the Ringcroft of Stocking and Lochmaben Castle is visceral, the former, while outwardly maintaining the appearance of a jolly copse of woodland near a coastal farmstead, carries an air of doomsday heft; whereas the latter, although the crumbling skeleton of a once strong stone fortress set amidst ancient oak woods on the shore of a deep black loch, has the charming lightness of a fairytale place, an almost Arthurian romance about it.
Energy and vibes notwithstanding, though, Lochmaben castle and the woodland surrounding it is said to be the home of a Vampire. The veracity of these rumours is perhaps best attested, if attested is the correct word, by the persistent local belief that Michael Jackson once purchased a house in Lochmaben in pursuit of the vampire and the immortality it might confer; and perhaps less famously by my very own mother who, when playing in the forest with a childhood friend, swears to have encountered a horrifying hunched figure in dirty sack-cloth robes flitting between the high branches of the ancient oaks behind the ruined castle wall.
Considerably after my mother had this experience (in the 1970s), the legend was given an unexpected second life in 1991 when Scottish ghost hunter Tom Robertson claimed to have encountered a tall grey figure among the castle woods, which he described as similarly clothed in atrocious sack cloth robes. Eight years later he returned, grieving the death of his wife, and insisted he found it again. Neither my mother nor Tom Robertson had cause to cross paths in the course of their lives, so both accounts of a swaggering creature sporting unfashionable and infelicitous hessian garb seem plausible; but whether or not it’s felt they encountered an ancient penitent Vampire amid the woods, or just a particularly long-suffering off-grid resident of the forest and marshland with a penchant for monk-habit fashions, I shall leave to your own deduction.
I myself have never encountered the Vampire, even though I do spend an above average amount of time wandering the woods surrounding the formidable ‘Castle Loch’, engaged in all flavours of Witchcraft to usher in prosperity, or guard against the predations of the villainous townsfolk who wish for my ultimate demise, as appropriate. Indeed, I have often reassured my fiance that the scariest thing in the darkling woods at any given moment is me, armed as I may be with herbs, a cunty little mushroom picker’s trug or, on one notable occasion, a particularly cumbersome poppet-dolly constructed crudely from rowan branches and fleshed out in kitchen twine.
Yet almost immediately the vampire demonstrated an extraordinary reluctance to participate in its own legend.
We arrived primed for encounters with some pale aristocrat of the night stalking romantically between ruined battlements in the approved Transylvanian fashion. Instead we seemed to stumble into what can only be described as a ready-salted ordinary domestic disagreement.
One by one, names began surfacing through the various infernal contraptions we’d carted with us.
Neil.
Doris.
Lily.
None of them possessed the glamour or gravitas one hopes for from supernatural entities of the ancient blooded Vampire elite. They sounded less like immortal predators and more like neighbours one might grudgingly entreat for the lend of a lawnmower.
Such was the lack of glamour or effect that Jo made the asinine remark that she felt she was just ‘sitting in someone’s front room’ when listening to all the voices bickering and bandying in the Estes method. I found this perplexing on multiple fronts. Firstly, that an eternity beyond the pale of mortality could be as banal as a night in someone’s sitting room over finger-sandwiches and strong cocktails. Secondly, that spirits this urbane and clearly rooted in the social currency of a time between the 1940s and the present day should find themselves here in the darkened woods surrounding a ruined castle with all the contextual relevancy of a freesian cow finding itself in the middle of a Texas beauty pageant. It occurred to me that ghost stories concern themselves almost exclusively with remarkable deaths while paying scandalously little attention to ordinary lives, and I found a strange sort of comfort in exploring the trivialities of this spiritual assortment.
Outside of the Estes method and the tamer, more domestic discussions we were witnessing like a sort of distended soap opera set beyond the grave, we still yearned for the drama and high camp theatrics that were sure to unfold with an encounter with the Lochmaben Vampire, now thoroughly mythologised. Kirsty busied herself with setting out a plethora of mystical machinery from cat-balls to REM pods, including that one horrifying REM pod that plays the hateful ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’.
All the machinery and equipment laid out and prepared, we continued in our various lines of inquiry, until we made contact with a spirit and Jo asked them if they would touch the aforementioned musical REM pod. No sooner had Jo uttered “can you touch it?” than the harrowing strains of that cursed tune rang out through the woods, startling crows in the trees, waterfowl across the loch, and in no small part, us, the Ghoul Friends.
Riding high from the thrill of that particular little victory, but also under the yoke of a dawning fear brought on by the stark fact of being alone in the ruins with something so perniciously responsive, we continued to search for evidence of the Vampire. At one juncture, Camille felt she could see a figure, or the impression of a figure, high up on the embattled castle ramparts; at another, the spirit box kept encouraging us to “look up” which felt utterly dread-inducing when one considered that we were standing under the robustness of an ancient oak tree that felt, to me, like it had the girth and stage presence to be a passable gallows tree in bygone climes.
I remark now that “look up” is a damnably inconsiderate instruction to receive in the middle of a haunted woodland under cover of night. Human beings are, as a general rule, conditioned to react passably to threats that approach from roughly eye level. One feels equipped, however unrealistically, to negotiate with a ghost emerging from a doorway or advancing through a ruin. To be repeatedly encouraged to examine the canopy of an ancient woodland, however, is to invite the imagination into a wild bushel of hateful outcomes.
Examining the impressive tree under these conditions, every knot in the bark briefly became a face. Every broken branch seemed, for one impossible second, to possess shoulders. More than once I became entirely convinced that I had seen a pale figure leaning casually against the trunk of one of the great oaks, only for it to dissolve immediately back into the entirely innocent geometry of branches and moonlight. Ancient woodland has a remarkable ability to manufacture people from shadows when sufficiently encouraged.
Although the drama was building, and although under these circumstances I was beginning to channel my very best Ellen Hutter as portrayed by Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu, waiting with my breast squared and my breathing ragged to be ravaged by some dark and mysterious entity of the night, no such apparition came to us (other than to Camille, who remained convinced she had seen something upon the castle walls that resisted any satisfactory qualification).
Instead, in the absence of the vampire itself, my imagination quietly got on with the work it seemed unwilling to perform.
I began constructing an image of the alleged Vampire that responds to the brief laid out by my mother and reinforced by Tom Robertson. The unhappy sack-cloth clothing, the hunched posture, and the general impression of unkempt forest hygiene as described conjure for me one specific and particular visual: late Rock legend Meat Loaf in the costume he sported in the 1993 music video for his classic belter “I’d Do Anything for Love”.
This produced an altogether unexpected crisis of imagination.
I had wandered into those woods labouring under the misapprehension that, should we somehow encounter the Lochmaben Vampire, there existed some deluded recess of my subconscious that would immediately begin weighing up the practicalities of becoming one of his companions. Readers familiar with my broader body of work will recognise this as an occupational hazard.
But, acknowledging my own standards and boundaries, if I was to surrender myself to a Vampire’s household, it would absolutely only be done under the same aesthetic governance of 2004 action-horror Van Helsing. The prospect of a life as one of three well groomed concubines to a capricious immortal aristocrat with European property interests is one thing; bedraggled pleasure-thrall to a reclusive marshland cryptid in a haggard tatty-sack smock is quite another. I realised then, with no small sadness, that the appeal of the vampire narrative had rather dissipated.
Immortality may be an attractive proposition at first glance, but I struggled enough to adapt, within the span of a single lifetime, to the transition from skinny jeans to baggy jeans. Forever is a very long time in which to remain sartorially relevant. Indeed, the sackcloth robes suddenly began to make rather more sense.
We made our way back to the car in good spirits (or, at any rate, in the company of several) and I made my peace with the fact that the Lochmaben Vampire had, whether through cowardice or simple good taste, declined to make himself known to us.
I cannot altogether blame him.
Five figures dressed head-to-toe in black converging upon your ancestral ruin shortly before midnight, armed with spirit boxes, REM pods and a Tesco bag-for-life bulging ominously with paranormal apparatus, presents, I should think, a reasonably formidable prospect even for an immortal.
Perhaps he watched us quietly from the canopy of one of those regal old oaks and simply decided he couldn’t be arsed with the hassle. Perhaps, despite the sackcloth, he possesses a discernment considerably keener than his wardrobe suggests.
I shall return here time and time again, mostly to walk my dogs or conduct witchcraft amid the marshes. Occasionally, though, I suspect I shall also return in the hope of finally meeting Lochmaben’s elusive vampire.
Persistence, after all, is another of those Barclay traits the Devil did absolutely nothing to discourage.