Scottish Ghost Stories

By James W. Robertson and James Robertson

Inheriting the tradition of Hugh Miller, the nineteenth century folklorist and stonemason (whose own haunted life is the subject of the opening chapter), James Robertson has, where possible, researched the original or oldest written source and visited the site of each story to compile the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of the Scottish supernatural. Some of the stories gathered here are deservedly famous, such as those associated with Glamis Castle or the tale of Major Weir, while others ('The Deil of Littledean' and 'The Drummer of Cortachy') are less familiar or even contemporary accounts related to the author personally - but all are equally intriguing and fascinating reflections of the culture and period to which they belong.

Neither a wary sceptic nor a fanatical believer, but an advocate of the validity of individual experience of the strange and unexplainable, James Robertson's Scottish Ghost Stories is an imaginative and chilling recasting of an established Scottish ghost-hunting and story-telling tradition - a homage to the particular mystery and character of a land which continues to produce ghosts whether from den to glen, Highlands to Lowlands, Catholic to Protestant.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0751513938
• ISBN13: 9780751513936
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Sphere
• Length: 283 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

How they're told in Scotland.

I have read helpful and detailed appreciations of this book on the Internet. I shall just add two points. Firstly, I think the book's great strength is that it is written by a skeptic. Ghost stories are not likely to be taken seriously if their reporting is sensationalized. James Robertson has collected and presented them with just the right mix of detached scholarship and narrative simplicity. Secondly, it should be obvious that ghost stories are ideal material for old-fashioned listening rather than for reading. Accordingly, I strongly recommend the Soundings audio version of this book, enabling you to hear the Scottish ghost stories told by a Scotsman. James Bryce delivers them beautifully, tossing the place names off with ready familiarity. With its prolific folklore and long history of civil strife, its many ancient castles and churches, its many bleak, windswept and lonely locations for human habitation, Scotland has been a fertile place for the growth of tales of the supernatural. Most such tales date from earlier more credulous times than ours but Robertson's collection includes recent examples.