Castle Levan is a location reputed to be haunted in Inverclyde, Scotland, GB. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.
Where is Castle Levan?
Location
Inverclyde, Scotland, GB
Type
Castle
Coordinates
55.947, -4.859
Testimonies
0
Last updated
LOCATION
Why is Castle Levan said to be haunted?
On the lip of a wooded ravine above the Firth of Clyde at Gourock stand two towers welded at the corner: a keep of the late 14th or 15th century and a second raised on the barmkin wall early in the 16th. It passed from the Mortons to William, second Lord Sempill, in 1547, and much later to the Shaw Stewarts of Ardgowan, who in the 19th century built a large house beside it and confusingly gave it the same name. Castle Levan is said to be haunted by a White Lady — Sempill's widow Marion Montgomery, who supposedly murdered her tenants, was condemned by Mary of Guise and was starved to death in the tower by her own husband. The court record printed in 1833 tells the same story inside out. Her servants really did kill a man, Gilbert Rankyne, in 1553; she was charged with sheltering them, and with holding two prisoners in the castle for twenty-four hours without food or drink. There was no death sentence, her husband was already dead, and she went on to marry the man who stood surety for her. The bed and breakfast that briefly opened the tower to guests closed in 2022.
The tower roofed and harled, as Ian Begg left it in 1987. The listed-building record of 10 June 1971 still describes it in four words — "Roofless, existing to wallhead" — so the photograph shows the state after the restoration, not the one on file.
Image:
easylocum from Gourock, United Kingdom · CC BY 2.0
What is the history of Castle Levan?
Castle Levan stands on the steep bank of the Leven Burn between Gourock and the Cloch, with the whole width of the Firth of Clyde in front of it. It is not one building but two joined at the corner, and the join is the key to reading it.
The northern block is a rectangular keep of the late 14th or 15th century, about 10.6 metres by 7.9, with walls a metre and a half thick, rising three storeys to a garret inside a corbelled parapet with roundels at the angles. Inside are two vaulted cellars, a straight stair set in the thickness of the wall, and a first-floor hall whose windows have square recesses fitted with stone seats. Early in the 16th century a second three-storey tower was raised on the line of the barmkin's east wall and welded to the south-east corner of the first, bringing with it what the older tower lacked: a kitchen. MacGibbon and Ross, surveying it in 1887, judged from the style of the ornamental corbel table that the wing was added "about the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the old keep seems to have been remodelled, and the same cornice continued all round the building" — and argued that the big newel stair between the two towers was inserted at the same time, since the straight stair and the guarded entrance lobby were plainly the original arrangement.
The first owners were a family surnamed Morton. George Crawfurd, writing in 1710 and reprinted with additions by William Semple in 1782, records that the line "failed in the person of Adam Morton of Leven, who alienated these lands, anno 1547, to William lord Semple", and that Robert, Lord Sempill made over Leven to his uncle Andrew, Master of Sempill, in 1584.
That 1547 is the only date this castle has ever really had, and it is worth being precise about what it marks: a change of owner. MacGibbon and Ross added a guess to it — "it is not unlikely that the remodelling was carried out about that time" — and closed their entry with a sentence written from 1887: "It is now the property of the Shaw Stewarts." Later summaries fused the guess and the sentence, which is how a 16th-century Sempill remodelling ended up credited, on this page until today, to an 18th-century family.
The Sempill who bought it, William, second Lord Sempill, is well documented. The Scots Peerage records that he bought the lands of Auchinfour and others in the parish of Inverkip from Sir James Hamilton of Finnart on 31 August 1529; that he sat on the Privy Council of James V and was Justiciar and Bailie of the regality of Paisley; that he was acquitted in February 1533-34 of art and part in the slaughter of William Cunynghame of Craigends; that he sat on the jury at the trial of Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, in July 1537; and that he took a remission in March 1540 for every crime short of treason. He married three times. Sources disagree on when he died — Crawfurd says 1547, Pitcairn says 1548, the Scots Peerage says Edinburgh, 3 June 1552, citing the Acts and Decreets — but on the point that matters they agree: by the middle of the 1550s his widow was a widow.
Her name was Mariota, or Marion, Montgomery, and she is the reason anyone tells stories about this tower. What she actually did is on record, and it is on record because she was tried for it.
On 8 November 1555 she appeared before the Justiciary Court in Edinburgh. Robert Pitcairn printed the entry in his Criminal Trials in Scotland in 1833. The charge is headed "Ratihabition of Slaughter, Wounding, &c. — Imprisoning — Usurpation of the Queen's authority", and it says that her servants killed Gilbert Rankyne in Lecheland on 17 March 1553, "under silence of night"; that at the same time they cruelly hurt and wounded John Fynné, mutilating his arm, and wounded John Roger in sundry parts of his body to the effusion of his blood; that she received those servants red-hand that same night within the Castle of Laven; that two more men, Humphry Malcolmesoun and Archibald Scherare, were taken and brought to the castle by them; and that she held those two prisoners inside it "by the space of twenty-four hours, without food or drink; thereby usurping the Queen's authority".
She came in the Queen's will — that is, she submitted rather than stood trial — during the regency of Mary of Guise, and a note in the margin of the record reads Deletur, quo ad partem Regine, per preceptum: the Crown's part of the penalty was struck out by warrant. The jury is named, the local gentry of Renfrewshire among them. And the man who stood surety for satisfying the injured parties was John Campbell of Skipness — the man she went on to marry, between 31 August 1553 and 20 December 1556.
After the Sempills the estate passed to the Stewarts of Ardgowan, said to have taken it in 1649, with a ratification of 1672 in favour of Sir Archibald Stewart of Blackhall naming Levan. In the 18th century that family became the Shaw Stewarts. In the 19th they built a large new house a short distance north of the old towers and called it Castle Levan as well, which is why the medieval tower is "Levan Castle" and the mansion is "Castle Levan" and almost every account since has muddled them.
The parish minister writing the New Statistical Account in January 1842 lists both among the inhabited houses of Inverkip — "Leven House, belonging to Mrs M'Inroy; and Leven, the seat of Mr Crooks". Hugh Macdonald walked up to it in the 1850s and was let in by Mrs Crooks, who "generously permits such wayward wanderers as ourselves to spend a passing hour or two in the tower of other days", and found it ivy-smothered and roofless inside, with nettles on the hearth and wallflowers in the crevices, and open to any passing stranger except on Sundays. By 1879 the property is said to have belonged to John Polson, co-founder of the Brown & Polson cornflour firm; through the early 20th century the tower survived as a picturesque folly in the grounds of the newer house.
A housing proposal brought the archaeologists. Renfrewshire's planning authority needed to know how far the barmkin and outbuildings ran, and after first work in 1966 there were seasons in 1970, 1971 and 1972. They traced the barmkin, found foundations in the courtyard read as a possible gatehouse, and dug a kitchen midden against the east side of the south tower holding some 5,000 fragments of bone and shell — oysters among them — with green-glazed pottery of the mid-15th to early 16th century, continental imports included, and a spurred clay pipe bowl of the mid-17th.
When the tower was listed at Category B on 10 June 1971 the record described it in four words that date it exactly: "Roofless, existing to wallhead", with an archaeological dig in progress. The mansion was listed separately at Category C on 10 September 1979, as "3-storey; plain; stone-built; slated; (early XIX cent.)".
Reconstruction began in 1980; between 1984 and 1987 the architect Ian Begg carried out a full refurbishment for the owners, the advertising executive and art collector David Pearson and his wife Sheila. They lived in it until they retired and sold in 1995, after which it became a bed and breakfast. Kim Munro took it on in 2016 and renovated again, and on 11 July 2018 she and Maria Hockin registered Castle Levan Bed and Breakfast LLP at the castle, both as designated members. The partnership shortened its accounting period to 31 December 2021, filed its last accounts in March 2022, applied to be struck off on 12 May and was dissolved on 9 August 2022.
Timeline: the documented record of Castle Levan
31 August 1529William, second Lord Sempill, buys the lands of Auchinfour and others in the parish of Inverkip from Sir James Hamilton of Finnart — the family's documented arrival in the parish.
1547Adam Morton of Leven, last of his line, alienates the lands to William, Lord Semple, as Crawfurd records in 1710. This is a change of owner, not a building campaign, and no Shaw Stewart is involved — the family our previous text credited with an enlargement here did not arrive for another century.
17 March 1553Servants of Lady Sempill kill Gilbert Rankyne in Lecheland "under silence of night", wounding John Fynné and John Roger. She receives them red-hand in the Castle of Laven the same night, and holds two men, Humphry Malcolmesoun and Archibald Scherare, prisoner there for twenty-four hours "without food or drink".
8 November 1555Dame Mariota Montgomery, Lady Sempill, comes in the Queen's will before the Justiciary Court for those offences, during Mary of Guise's regency. The margin records that the Crown's part was struck out by warrant; John Campbell of Skipness stands surety. There is no death sentence, and she is already a widow.
Between 31 August 1553 and 20 December 1556She marries John Campbell of Skipness — the man who had gone surety for her — years after the moment at which the legend has her starving to death in a locked room at Levan.
1710 and 1782Crawfurd's description of Renfrewshire, and Semple's enlarged reprint, carry the same unchanged paragraph on "the ruinous castle of Leven" and the full Sempill genealogy. In 257,317 words, ghost, haunt, spectre, apparition, legend and phantom return zero.
1833Robert Pitcairn prints the 1555 Justiciary record in Criminal Trials in Scotland. He publishes the crime and no legend, and his footnote identifies the accused as the relict of the second Lord Sempill.
1845 (written January 1842)The New Statistical Account lists both houses among the inhabited mansions of Inverkip — "Leven House, belonging to Mrs M'Inroy; and Leven, the seat of Mr Crooks" — and gives its "Antiquities" paragraph to Ardgowan's tower and the Dunrod bridge. The neighbouring parish fills the same heading with the Bargarran witch trial.
1878 (visited in the 1850s)Hugh Macdonald, admitted by Mrs Crooks, describes the ivy-covered roofless tower in Days at the Coast and writes of it: "It has no tale to tell." The same book prints eight ghosts, thirty hauntings and a full ghost ballad for Rothesay Castle.
1887MacGibbon and Ross survey the castle over two pages, date the south-east wing to the early 16th century, and close: "Before 1547 this castle belonged to the Mortons. At that date it passed to the family of the Sempills, and it is not unlikely that the remodelling was carried out about that time. It is now the property of the Shaw Stewarts." Later summaries fused the conjecture with the closing sentence — the origin of this page's error.
10 June 1971The medieval tower is listed at Category B as "Levan Castle (restored ruin)", described as "Roofless, existing to wallhead" with an archaeological dig in progress. The statutory record mentions no ghost.
1966 and 1970-72Excavation prompted by a housing proposal traces the barmkin, a possible gatehouse and a kitchen midden of some 5,000 bone and shell fragments with late medieval pottery, continental imports among it, and a 17th-century clay pipe bowl.
10 September 1979The 19th-century mansion is listed separately at Category C as "Castle Levan and West Lodge", confirming in the statutory record that two different buildings carry the same name.
1980-1987Reconstruction begins in 1980 and a full refurbishment is carried out from 1984 to 1987 by architect Ian Begg for David and Sheila Pearson, who live in the tower until they sell in 1995. The White Lady's earliest reachable printed home is no older than this period.
10 May 2012A Scottish paranormal research group publishes its file on the castle, quoting the owners' own website: "Castle Levan is reputed to have a ghost - not that we've ever seen her!" The ghost is female and is the White Lady; nobody mentions Sleeping Beauty.
11 July 2018Kim Munro and Maria Hockin register Castle Levan Bed and Breakfast LLP at the castle, both as designated members. Accounts of the castle, ours included, have credited Munro alone.
9 August 2022The partnership is dissolved by voluntary strike-off, having applied on 12 May. The website had stopped being archived after October 2021 and the domain no longer resolves. The bed and breakfast is closed.
Is there a rational explanation for Castle Levan?
This entry has to begin by retracting itself.
Until today Enigma Atlas told readers that "local tradition claims the castle as the true setting behind the Sleeping Beauty story", with a daughter of the house cursed at birth, a spindle, an enchanted sleep and a suitor's kiss. There is no such tradition. We could find no source of any kind attaching Sleeping Beauty to this castle: not the castle's own former website, not the Gazetteer for Scotland, not the specialist Scottish ghost-research site that keeps an A-to-Z of Scottish castles and has a page for this one, not the castle literature, not the statutory records, and not Wikipedia — whose article, from which our text was rewritten, contains no legend at all. Four differently worded searches returned Castle Levan material every time and Sleeping Beauty none of the times; the control is that the same searches consistently returned the castle's real ghost story, which does exist. Inside our own database the words are just as lonely: "spindle", "enchanted sleep" and "cursed at birth" appear in exactly one of 354 place entries, ours, and the only other file mentioning "Sleeping Beauty" is the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, where it is the real and documented nickname of the mummified child Rosalia Lombardo — an entry that came out of the same source file as this one.
The dates finish it. The tale is ATU 410; it is written down in the French Perceforest between 1330 and 1344, printed by Basile as "Sun, Moon and Talia" in the Pentamerone of 1634-36, by Perrault in 1697 and by the Grimms in 1812. Even a genuine local claim arriving after 1697 could not be the story's origin. But there is no local claim. The earliest appearance of this attribution that we can date is our own page, and we are deleting it rather than dressing it up.
The sentence that followed was borrowed too. "Residents and renovators have described unexplained footsteps and cold spots in the older stonework" shares the six-word run "described unexplained footsteps and cold spots" with our entry for Inveraray Castle and with no other entry in the catalogue. Neither castle's source text mentioned a ghost of any kind; both paranormal halves were written on top of purely architectural stubs. No named residents, no named renovators, no dates — because there was nothing underneath.
The legend Castle Levan really has is the White Lady, and the interesting thing about it is not that it is false. It is that it is the document turned inside out.
In the version told today, Marion Montgomery tortured and murdered her tenants, was condemned to death by Mary of Guise, had the sentence commuted to imprisonment in the castle, and was then starved to death there by a husband home from the wars and appalled at what he found. Set that beside the Justiciary Court record of 8 November 1555, printed by Pitcairn in 1833, and every element has been reversed or moved.
The killing is real, and it has a victim with a name: Gilbert Rankyne of Lecheland, killed by her servants on 17 March 1553 under silence of night, with two other men wounded. She was charged not with doing it but with harbouring the men who did, red-hand, inside the castle that same night. There was no death sentence: she came in the Queen's will, and the margin of the record notes that the Crown's part was struck out by warrant. The husband could not have imprisoned her, because he was dead — Pitcairn's own footnote calls her, at the time of the trial, the relict of William, second Lord Sempill. And the starving is the sharpest inversion of all. It is in the record, but it runs the other way: the charge is that she held Humphry Malcolmesoun and Archibald Scherare prisoner in the castle "by the space of twenty-four hours, without food or drink". The woman the legend starves to death is the woman the document accuses of starving other people. Finally, the man who stood surety for her that day, John Campbell of Skipness, is the man she married afterwards — so the person the story kills went on to remarry her prosecution's guarantor.
The genealogy has been shuffled as well. Pitcairn, in 1833, believed she was Lord Sempill's first wife, eldest daughter of Hugh, first Earl of Eglinton. The Scots Peerage, in 1910 and with the charters in front of it, distinguishes them: the first wife was Margaret Montgomery of the Eglinton family, and the third and surviving wife was Marion, daughter of Hugh Montgomery of Hazelhead and widow of Thomas Crawford of Auchinames. Every modern retelling makes her father "John Montgomerie of Hessilhead", which is neither. There is also a name-mirror that may have helped the confusion along: Pitcairn's volumes carry a separate case in which Marioun Sempill, Lady Hesilheid, wife of Hew Muntgumrie of Hesilheid, is the victim of violence and a killing at Hessilhead — the same ingredients with the surnames swapped.
So how old is the ghost? Older than the story is the silence, and it was measured. Six independent works covering this exact building, across 177 years, contain no ghost, no White Lady, no torture, no condemnation and no immurement: Crawfurd in 1710; Crawfurd enlarged by Semple in 1782, where ghost, haunt, spectre, apparition, legend and phantom all return zero in 257,317 words against 286 mentions of Semple and 39 of Leven; Pitcairn in 1833, who prints the crime and no legend; the New Statistical Account of 1845; Macdonald in 1878; and MacGibbon and Ross in 1887, whose two-page architectural entry contains no ghost, haunt or apparition in a 145,762-word volume that uses "castle" 2,334 times and "Leven" 33.
One of those six is a proper control rather than an absence. Hugh Macdonald was a lover of ghost stories who printed them freely on the same Clyde tour: his book uses "ghost" eight times, "haunt" thirty, "tradition" thirty-six, and gives Rothesay Castle a full haunting ballad, "The Bluidy Stair", about a murdered lady. He had the appetite, the genre and the space. Standing inside Leven Castle, he wrote: "Who were the inhabitants of this dreary pile before the glory had departed? Who? who? is the question; and echo answers, 'who?' … It has no tale to tell." The two parish memoirs say the same by omission: between the Old Statistical Account of 1793 and the New of 1845, 3,945 words of parish text contain not one instance of ghost, haunt, spectre, apparition, legend, tradition, superstition or witch — while the 1845 volume uses "tradition" 158 times elsewhere, and the neighbouring parish of Erskine, beginning three lines after Inverkip ends and under the very same heading "Antiquities", spends two pages on the Bargarran witches with names, a nickname and the barrel of tar. The heading was available; Inverkip's minister filled his with an old tower and a bridge.
A caution on method, because it nearly produced a false negative here: the castle is never called "Levan" in any of these books. It is Laven in 1555, Leven from 1710 to 1887. A search on the modern spelling returns zero from every one of them, and that zero would have meant nothing at all.
Where the legend does come from cannot yet be fixed, and it is more honest to say so than to guess. The standard modern bibliography for this castle lists two pre-20th-century works — Macdonald 1878 and MacGibbon and Ross 1887 — and we have now read both in full and neither has it. Everything else on that list is modern: Tranter 1970, Slater 1993, Mason 2000, Coventry 2015. On the evidence we can reach, the earliest printed home for the White Lady is Tranter or later, which would put her arrival close to the tower's restoration in 1980-87 and its opening as a business. Two books that could still overturn that dating were not reachable: Tranter's Fortified House in Scotland volume V is lending-restricted with search disabled, and Mason's Castles of Glasgow and the Clyde has no digital copy at all. That is a gap, not a proof.
One last voice, and it is the owners'. When a Scottish paranormal research group wrote the castle up in May 2012, it quoted the castle's own website: "Castle Levan is reputed to have a ghost - not that we've ever seen her!" A business with rooms to fill, declining to claim the sighting. That was more careful than anything this page had been saying.
Can you visit Castle Levan?
Castle Levan is not open to visitors, and the bed and breakfast that made it briefly visitable has closed.
Castle Levan Bed and Breakfast LLP, registered at the castle on Stirling Drive, Gourock PA19 1AH, applied to be struck off the register on 12 May 2022 and was dissolved on 9 August 2022. Its website was last captured by the Internet Archive in October 2021 and the domain no longer resolves — an old castle-levan.com link now returns nothing. Booking aggregators still carry the listing; it is stale. Do not travel on the strength of it, and do not turn up at the door expecting a tour. This is a private house.
What can be done is to look at it. The tower stands on the seaward side of Cloch Road, the A770, at the south-west edge of Gourock, on the rim of the Leven Burn ravine, at grid reference NS 21584 76365 — 55.9471, -4.8587. It is a Category B listed building. The coast in front of it is public and worth the walk: Cloch Road runs south-west along the shore to the Cloch Point lighthouse, first lit on 11 August 1797 and built by Thomas Smith and Robert Stevenson, and on to Lunderston Bay, which has parking, paths and a beach. Gourock's railway station and the ferry terminals for Dunoon and Kilcreggan are some three kilometres north-east, and buses along Cloch Road pass the castle.
One thing to settle before you go looking, because nearly every account confuses it: there are two buildings here with the same name. The medieval tower is listed as "Levan Castle (restored ruin)"; the plain three-storey early 19th-century house eighty-odd metres to the north is listed separately as "Castle Levan and West Lodge". That mansion has since been divided into flats and is now addressed as Castle Levan Manor, Cloch Road, PA19 1AY, where individual flats changed hands in 2023. The tower with the corbelled parapet and the round angle turrets — the one photographed on this page — is the old one. Note that the photograph shows it roofed and harled, as Ian Begg left it in 1987; the listing text, written in 1971, still calls it roofless.
The other castles of the parish are mostly gone. Chrisswell, Gourock and Dunrod survive as sites only, and Inverkip Castle is about 3.6 kilometres away. The Kempock Stone, a standing stone long bound up with local superstition, is in Gourock itself, under three kilometres off, and makes a better stop than a locked gate.
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