The Deil o' Baldarroch: the Baldarroch farm poltergeist

Baldarroch was a farm in the parish of Banchory-Ternan, near Crathes on the North Deeside Road, east of Banchory. The farmer, his wife and their two servant girls are not named in any account that survives. Nearly everything known comes from Charles Mackay's retelling in Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, first published in 1841. He names no source.

The 5th of December, 1838. The household at Baldarroch was "alarmed by observing a great number of sticks, pebble-stones, and clods of earth flying about their yard and premises." It went on for five days. They concluded that "the devil and his imps were alone the cause of it."

Then it moved inside. Household objects "appeared suddenly endued with the power of self-motion." Spoons, knives, plates, mustard-pots, rolling-pins and flat-irons "were whirled from room to room, and rattled down the chimneys in a manner which nobody could account for."

With scores of people watching, the servant girl put the lid of a mustard-pot in a cupboard. Minutes later it came bouncing down the chimney. In their beds, the family "were attacked with stones and other missiles", "some of which came below the blankets." Knocking sounded on the door and the roof.

Word travelled "within a circle of twenty miles". Mackay wrote that "hundreds of persons came from far and near to witness the antics of the devils of Baldarroch." The heritor, the minister and all the elders of the Kirk came to look into it. The farmer went further. He "travelled a distance of forty miles" to pay an old conjuror, Willie Foreman, to lift the enchantment.

As the story spread, it grew, and people said the devil had been seen hammering on the roof. Each potato in the goodwife's pot changed into a demon as the water boiled. Ricks in the corn-yard "danced a quadrille together". There were tales of a butter-churn and "the devil's bagpipes". Mackay set all of this down as rumour.

"After a fortnight's continuance of the noises, the whole trick was discovered." The two servant lasses "were strictly examined, and then committed to prison." The noises stopped. Later retellings say the girls had loosened bricks in the chimney and set dishes so that the slightest movement would knock them over. Some suggest they were answering harsh treatment, and that a credulous master, mistress and neighbours "helped the mischief along." No court, sheriff or charge is named anywhere.

Mackay blamed the believers' credulity on failures in education and the law. In 1899, A. R. Wallace disagreed. He listed the case, as Banchory, among nine poltergeist cases that "rest upon emphatically good evidence" and were "quite inexplicable on any supposition of delusion or imposture." Nobody, he noted, actually saw the girls do anything.

Frank Podmore replied in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research that Mackay "does not quote any authority". He pointed to the dancing ricks and the devil on the roof as signs of embellishment. In 1926, Montague Summers counted "the two servant lasses of Baldarroch" among tricksters "of no common sleight and skill."

In 1839, Alexander Walker published a dialect poem, The De'il at Baldarroch. It is the earliest known text about the case. The fiddler James Scott Skinner later wrote a reel, "The Deil o' Baldarroch", published in The Miller o' Hirn Collection in 1881. Today Baldarroch Crematorium stands on the old farmland. It still carries the farm's name.