Fyvie Castle

The document that ought to anchor the ghost story undoes it. Lilias Drummond is said to have been shut up at Fyvie and starved for failing to produce a son; the Trust's own page says she was "allegedly starved to death" in a lonely room shown on the tour. But the testament registered in the Commissariot of Edinburgh in 1609, printed by George Seton in 1896, states that she died at Dalgety in Fife on 8 May 1601. Dalgety was Seton's favourite residence, on the other side of the country. Whatever happened to her did not happen in the room visitors are shown. Then there is the date of the story itself. The Green Lady is absent from every substantial account of Fyvie written before the twentieth century. She is not in Pratt's Buchan (1858), which gives the castle ten pages, the Rhymer's prophecy and the secret chamber; not in Walter Gregor's Notes on the Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland (1881), which prints two versions of the prophecy and the tradition behind it; not in Groome's Ordnance Gazetteer (1882); not in MacGibbon and Ross (1887); and not in George Seton's eight-hundred-page family history of 1896, where "Fyvie" appears 151 times and "Drummond" 42. Seton does print a green lady, at another house: in a footnote on Pinkie, the Musselburgh mansion that the same Alexander Seton enlarged, he describes a female portrait in the painted gallery that "is said to come forth in shadowy embodiment, and stalk through its gloomy length by night", "usually called the 'Green Lady,' from the colour of her dress, and supposed to be a member of the Seton family". In the family's own history of 1896 the Seton green lady walks at Pinkie, and the index lists her there. The strongest measurement is Charles Harper's Haunted Houses (1924 edition), a book devoted to exactly this subject: it gives Fyvie three pages, prints the Rhymer's rhyme in full, describes the walled-up chamber beneath the charter room - and says nothing whatever about Lilias Drummond, a green lady or a carved window. The control in the same file: "castle" 156 hits, "Glamis" 47, "green lady" none. The oldest dated Fyvie ghost that the Press and Journal cites from its own archive is from January 1920, and she is not Lilias. The Press and Journal, reproducing its own archive in 2020, quotes the headline: "Green Ladye's ghost seen in Fyvie Castle. Maid's remarkable story. Skeleton built in the wall: What followed its removal." A wall had been taken down to investigate a damp patch and a complete skeleton was found cemented in the rubble; the bones were buried in the local churchyard, and, the paper reported, "their removal was the signal for boisterous disturbances throughout the castle." A maid named Miss Massie, who told the reporter she had no belief in the supernatural, described a figure "dressed in a wide, flowing white gown" that stepped out of the wall by her bed shortly before five in the morning. In the passages the paper reproduced, the figure is white, has no name and is tied to the skeleton; neither Lilias Drummond nor a windowsill appears in them. By 2022 the same newspaper was telling the same episode as a Grey Lady, dating it to the late 1920s and identifying her as a Lady Meldrum dead in the thirteenth century. That drift, inside one newspaper's own files, is the clearest thing in the whole dossier. The curse has been read backwards as well. In both nineteenth-century texts the doom falls on the women of the house: "Fyvyns riggs and towers, / Hapless shall your mesdames be, / When ye shall hae within your methes, / Frae harryit kirk's land, stanes three", with one stone in Preston's tower, one in my lady's bower and one below the water-yett. Pratt adds that the prophet "says nothing of the peculiar nature of the haplessness of his mesdames", and a few pages later, describing the neighbouring weird of Towie Barclay, writes: "At Fyvie the malefic influence was against the fair sex; here it is the reverse." Gregor's second version is blunter still - "Fyvie, Fyvie, thou'se never thrive / As lang's there's in thee stanes three" - and its object is the castle itself; Gregor adds that two of the stones had been found and the one below the water-yett "has as yet baffled search". The succession reading is in print by 1924, when Charles Harper wrote that until the three stones were all recovered the family owning the castle would not "perpetuate itself beyond the next generation". The direction of the condition matters as well: the Trust says the curse holds "until the three stones are discovered and removed", the guides say until they are returned to the ground they came from. The stones have to leave. Any version in which reuniting them inside the castle lifts the curse has inverted the rhyme. The sealed chamber has an ordinary explanation on the record since 1887. MacGibbon and Ross, measuring the ground floor, wrote that "there is no entrance to the ground-floor chamber in the Meldrum Tower, which was probably reached through a trap-door down from the floor above, as is so frequently the case in Scottish houses." On their reading, a chamber without a door, entered from the floor above, is a common arrangement in a Scottish tower house. In September 1930 the Press and Journal reported the Deeside Field Club making "an attempt to solve the mystery of the secret chamber"; the same report told how in 1885 Sir Maurice Duff-Gordon set workmen to break into the room, how they came on the top of a staircase leading down, and how the work stopped and everything was put back when the laird fell and broke his leg and his wife's eyesight began to fail. The readings of the window inscription that circulate differ - D. LILIAS DRUMMOND in some retellings, D LILLIAS DRUMMOND in Richard Jones's version, letters about three inches high, cut upside down on an outer ledge more than fifty feet up. The carving is real enough to be shown: in November 2022 the guide Joe Malster took a Press and Journal reporter to it and she wrote that "the carved name remains to this day". What is documented in stone is something else, and better. Lilias Drummond's arms are carved on the great staircase beside Grizel Leslie's, recorded there by MacGibbon and Ross in 1887 - put up by the husband the legend accuses. When staff are named, they are careful. Joe Malster lifts the carpet on the bloodstains that supposedly cannot be washed out and is sceptical: "There are various stories. Some say Lilias was killed here, others say her family rescued her. Others say her relatives were killed here. Who knows!" Stuart Stockley, the gardener, who lived in the castle with his family for eight years, says he is not a great believer in ghosts, that the alarm below the Drummond Bedroom goes off for no reason and that engineers have never found a fault, and that new arrivals are told on arrival that the smell of roses means Lilias is present - which is a fair description of how an expectation is transmitted. Fyvie's musical ghost is a trumpeter: Andrew Lammie, Lord Fyvie's trumpeter in the ballad of Mill o' Tifty's Annie, printed by Alexander Laing in 1823, and Pratt says a stone figure of him stands on one of the turrets blowing his horn towards Tiftie. The two datings do not sit together: the Trust describes the roofline finials of sportsmen and musicians as sixteenth-century, while Groome gives Agnes Smith's death as 1678. Her grave in Fyvie kirkyard is not an independent witness either - the New Statistical Account records that the original stone had decayed and that Mr Gordon of Fyvie had a new one cut.