Haunted Scotland Read Online Free Page A

Highland gift of second sight, warning of the 1993 Braer oilfield spill on Shetland only days before it occurred. With Swein, all of the clichés were in place. He was a seventh son born on
the seventh day of the seventh month. He predicted the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer, the birth of Prince William within a year of their wedding, and the subsequent break-up
of their marriage.
    A portly, red-faced crofter with a shock of white beard, Swein enjoyed his whisky and there was a childlike naivety about him. I visited him whenever I found myself in the vicinity of his
smallholding overlooking the Dornoch Firth, and always came away with the conclusion that he was as baffled by his powers as were the rest of us. Swein’s predictions were simplistic, but
touched a chord. His readings, as he called them, were calculated to reassure rather than to disturb. In the bar of a local hotel he was denounced by a stranger who called him a crook and a
fantasist. Swein responded by warning him to be careful what he said because in a year’s time he would have no shoes. A month later, this same individual was driving towards Tain when his car
collided head-on with another vehicle. The unfortunate man spent the ensuing three years of his life in a wheelchair.
    But there was no malice about Swein. Often he totally failed to comprehend the significance of what he predicted. On more than one occasion he told me that he found the
burden of his gift deeply troubling.
    Another such individual with an extraordinary gift was Henry Torrance, whom I had been sent to for advice when researching a project on the Knights Templar. He was immensely
knowledgeable on matters both spiritual and occult, and we rapidly embarked upon a firm friendship, to the extent that I would occasionally invite him to accompany me when I went on excursions.
    On one occasion, we had driven to have lunch with a mutual friend in Innerleithen and we were passing through the village of Clovenfords, west of Galashiels, when Henry requested I pull over to
the side of the road. There was an urgency in his voice and I was concerned. He was elderly. At first I thought he had been taken ill.
    ‘Can’t you see them?’ he asked in an agitated voice.
    ‘Who?’ I replied.
    ‘There, in that field. Those poor children.’
    I looked across the fence towards a copse beside the Caddon Water. The sun shone hazily, but the enclosure of trees at the water’s edge appeared gloomy, in dark shadow. So far as I could
see, there was nobody there.
    ‘They look so sad,’ continued my old friend. ‘So frightened.’
    ‘But I can’t see anybody,’ I protested.
    He looked disappointed. This was most unlike him. A man of substance in that he weighed around twenty stone, Henry was used to being in control.
    ‘You probably think I’m mad,’ he said reproachfully after a pause. ‘But I can assure you they are there. Clear as daylight. But it seems I’m the only one who can
see them.’
    We had had a similar conversation once before when he had asked me if I believed in faith healing. A retired Edinburgh banker, survivor of a German prisoner-of-war camp
during the Second World War and awarded a Military Cross, Henry was not somebody one might expect to be preoccupied with the occult. But he was perfectly serious.
    Ever since his childhood, he confessed to me, he had seen things that nobody else was aware of.
    ‘At first I thought it was perfectly normal,’ he said. ‘It never occurred to me that it was a gift or a curse, or whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t happen very
often, but sometimes I’m somewhere I haven’t been before and I know something is wrong. That’s when they appear, figures from the past, or at least, that’s what I assume
them to be, almost as if they’re wanting to tell me something. What should I do? I can’t ignore them. They don’t mean me any harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. They need help.
That’s why I became