Ballechin House haunting and the Society for Psychical Research inquiry

Ballechin House stood near Grandtully, on the edge of Strathtay in Perthshire. A Georgian house, built in 1806 on land the Steuart family had held since the 15th century. A maid reported the first incident in 1876.

The legend starts with Major Robert Steuart. He served in the Indian Army and took up beliefs in "reincarnation and transmigration." He was reported to have said that he would return in the form of a dog. After his death, all his dogs were shot. Including a black spaniel.

Summer 1896. A tenant, Mr Heaven, took the house with his family. The disturbances came "every night." Violent knockings. Shrieks. Groans. A loud clanging, like a metal bar struck with a wooden mallet. The butler, Harold Saunders, woke to find his bedclothes pulled off his feet. "I held the clothes around my neck with my hands, but they were gently lifted in spite of my efforts." He felt cold, "like suddenly entering an ice-house," and sensed someone "about to speak." Once, something like a large dog threw itself against his door. The family left two months earlier than usual.

February 1897. Ada Goodrich-Freer arrived with her companion, Constance Moore. The sponsor was John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute. The inquiry ran under the Society for Psychical Research, and about 40 guests came and went, among them F. W. H. Myers and Oliver Lodge. They tried hypnotism, crystal gazing and a Ouija board. The record lists close to 100 sounds. Raps in threes. Heavy footsteps. A voice of "continuous speaking or reading," like a priest saying his office.

The Ouija board sent them out: "go at dusk, and in silence, to the glen." It gave names. Ishbel. Marget. Later accounts describe a figure dressed as a nun moving slowly up the glen, then disappearing under a tree. Others spoke of a grey lady pacing the corridor "with noiseless footfall," and a hunchback figure gliding up the stairs. A visitor, "Mr Q.", saw a faceless figure. Goodrich-Freer reported disembodied dogs' paws on a table. Her own dog, Scamp, growled at the fir plantation.

June 1897. The Times ran "On the Trail of a Ghost," later credited to a former guest, J. Callender Ross. It blamed pipes, rats, sounds from nearby rooms and perhaps a prankster. Letters followed. Goodrich-Freer, signing as "X," defended the inquiry. Myers defended the Society's methods. Saunders wrote of "tremendous thumping."

Yet Myers found "no such evidence as could justify us giving the results of the inquiry a place in our Proceedings." In 1899 Goodrich-Freer and Bute published the material themselves, with names disguised because the Steuart family objected. Myers and Goodrich-Freer quarrelled and never made it up.

Mr Heaven blamed hot-water pipes. Others suggested earth tremors. Comrie, Scotland's main earthquake centre, lies about 20 miles away. The book itself noted a resident priest-chaplain who read his office aloud. Frank Podmore said Goodrich-Freer was liable "in a quite unusual degree, to hallucinatory experience." Campbell and Hall later accused her of "a lifetime of falsification and deception." Nandor Fodor called her "a well-known and capable investigator."

Ballechin stood empty by 1932. After a fire, most of it was demolished in 1963. In Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Dr Montague plans to copy the Lady who stayed at Ballechin House and held a summer house party for sceptics and believers. Its ghost nun still invites comparison with Borley Rectory.