Glamis Castle, located in the lowlands of Angus, Scotland, is widely considered to be one of the most haunted castles in Europe. This ancient fortress dates way back to the late 14th century when King Robert the Second gave the lands to Sir John Lyon in 1372. Over the centuries, the castle became the ancestral seat of the Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne.
In the early 20th century, it served as the childhood home of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, better known as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Her youngest daughter, Princess Margaret, was also born within its thick stone walls on August the 21st, 1930. While the castle is famous for its royal connections, it is equally famous for its dark history, terrifying legends, and numerous ghost sightings.
The building is traditionally linked to William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, where the main character is named the Thane of Glamis. Although the real King Duncan was killed in battle near Elgin and not inside the castle, visitors can still explore a low-roofed room known as Duncan’s Hall, keeping the old stories alive.
The most famous and tragic legend of Glamis Castle is the story of the Monster of Glamis. According to old village stories, Thomas Bowes-Lyon was born on October the 21st, 1821, as the first child of the 11th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. The official family records state that the baby died on the day he was born.
However, the midwife who helped deliver the baby told local villagers that the child did not die. Instead, he was born with severe physical differences. The family, terrified of losing their noble reputation and title, allegedly decided to hide the child from the world. He was locked away in a secret room built deep within the thick stone walls.
He was described as having a huge barrel-shaped chest, a body covered in hair, a large head that ran straight into his shoulders, and tiny toy-like arms and legs. Despite his physical struggles, he possessed incredible strength and lived far longer than expected, apparently well into the 20th century. He was only allowed out of his dark room late at night to get fresh air on a high path along the roof, which is still called the Mad Earl’s Walk.
This dark secret was heavily guarded by the family. Only three people at any time were allowed to know the truth: the reigning Earl, his oldest son when he turned 21, and the estate manager. It was said that the secret was so terrible that some young heirs who laughed and joked about revealing it before their 21st birthdays became quiet, sad, and serious men the moment they were told the truth.
Claude Bowes-Lyon, the 13th Earl and great-grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, and grandfather of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, reportedly told his wife that if she could even guess the secret of the castle, she would get down on her knees and thank God the property did not belong to her. Several guests and workers at the castle have reported spooky encounters linked to this hidden prisoner.
In the 19th century, a guest named Lady Bond woke up in a room that felt like a prison cell. She saw a strange barrel-shaped figure with spider-like arms and pointed ears rocking back and forth on the floor before the room suddenly returned to normal. Other stories tell of people trying to find the hidden room.
During a visit, a group of guests hung towels out of every window they could reach from the inside of the castle. When they went out onto the lawn, they noticed that at least one window in the high tower had no towel, proving that there was a room with no door. According to some stories, the Earl came back unexpectedly, discovered the trick, and was so angry with his wife for letting it happen that she left the castle that very night and never came back.
Other encounters include a workman who unexpectedly opened a door near the chapel and saw a strange misshapen figure in a long passage. The Earl quickly paid the workman a large sum of money and forced him to move to Australia to keep him silent. Around 1915, a visitor named Steven Tennant saw a servant carrying a massive tray of food up into an unused part of the castle, which many believed was being sent to feed the aging secret heir.
A singer and composer named Virginia Gabriel, who stayed at the castle in 1870, also wrote about the heavy feeling of secrets in the house. The 16th Earl later told biographer Michael Thornton that the entrance to the monster’s room was bricked up forever after he finally passed away. Alternative versions of the story say the family was cursed to have a vampire child born into every generation, and these children were walled up alive inside the castle.
The most frightening ghost at Glamis Castle is Earl Beardie, whose real name was Alexander Lindsay, the fourth Earl of Crawford. He was a notoriously cruel, angry, and violent man who spent much of his life drinking heavily and gambling. The legend states that on a stormy Saturday night in the 15th century, Earl Beardie was playing cards with a friend inside the castle.
As midnight approached, a servant knocked on the door and warned them that Sunday was about to begin and that playing cards on the Sabbath was forbidden. Earl Beardie became furious and threw the servant out of the room shouting that he would play cards until Doomsday or even with the devil himself. His friend, terrified of angering God, put on his coat and left the castle.
Just as the clock struck midnight, a tall stranger dressed in black entered the room and asked to play a hand of cards. He offered a bag of shiny red rubies if the Earl won, but demanded the Earl’s soul if he lost. The Earl, half blind with drink and greed, agreed. They locked the door and began a loud angry game.
Hearing a great commotion, a curious servant peeked through the keyhole. Suddenly, a bright beam of light shot through the keyhole and blinded the servant in one eye. Inside the room, the stranger vanished taking the Earl’s soul with him. People believe Earl Beardie is doomed to play cards with the devil in a hidden bricked-up room in the west tower until the end of time.
Visitors and staff have reported hearing loud stomping, angry swearing, and the sound of rolling dice and shuffling cards coming from the solid walls of the tower after dark. Guests sleeping in the castle have also woken up in a cold sweat to find a dark bearded man in armor standing over their beds staring down at them before vanishing.
Other researchers suggest that Earl Beardie might actually be the ghost of Patrick Lyon, the first Lord Glamis, who died in 1459, or Alexander Lyon, the second Lord Glamis, who died in 1486. A much darker story about Earl Beardie claims that he and his drunken friends once stripped an African servant boy naked and chased him through the castle grounds like an animal.
The poor boy was caught and torn apart by the Earl’s hunting dogs. The terrified ghost of this boy is still seen running in panic across the lawns trying to escape invisible dogs. The family chapel is the home of the Grey Lady, who is believed to be the spirit of Lady Janet Douglas. Janet was a beautiful and noble woman who married John Lyon, the 6th Lord Glamis, in 1520.
They had four children before he died in 1528, leaving her a young widow. Her life was cut short because of a bitter political feud. King James V of Scotland deeply hated the Douglas family. When the king was a boy, his stepfather Archibald Douglas, Janet’s brother, had kept him locked up as a prisoner while ruling Scotland.
Once the young king escaped, he swore to destroy the entire Douglas family. Janet, having lost her husband, had no one left to protect her. The king arrested Janet on false charges of supporting her brothers, practicing witchcraft, and trying to poison the king. Because she was highly respected and had an impeccable character, the king could not find any real evidence to convict her.
To force a confession, James V ordered his guards to savagely torture Janet’s family and servants. Her young son was put on the rack and forced to watch the torture. Using these false testimonies, the king sentenced her to death. On July the 17th, 1537, Janet Douglas was burned alive at the stake on Castle Hill outside Edinburgh Castle.
Her son was forced to watch her die in the flames. The very next day, her second husband, Archibald Campbell of Skipness, died after breaking his neck while trying to slide down the rocks to escape Edinburgh Castle. Following her horrific death, Janet’s spirit returned to Glamis Castle where she had been happy.
Her pale, gray ghost is seen kneeling in quiet prayer at the altar of the castle chapel. A deep feeling of sadness fills the air whenever she is near. To show respect for her suffering, the family keeps one seat in the chapel completely empty and no one is ever allowed to sit in it. During tours of the chapel, some children have been invited to sit in this empty chair.
While some felt nothing, others reported that the seat felt unusually cold and gave them a creepy feeling. She is also seen wandering the high clock tower and the outer lawns. When she appears outside, she is called the white lady and glows with a bright red light that looks like the hot ashes of the fire that killed her.
In 1486, the Ogilvy family was involved in a violent feud with the rival Lindsay family. One dark night, a group of Ogilvies arrived at the castle, desperate and running for their lives from the Lindsays. They begged the second Lord Glamis to give them shelter and protect them. He pretended to be kind and led them into a deep, secret room hidden within the castle’s massive, 16-ft thick stone walls.
He told them they would be perfectly safe there. However, because the Lord was secretly friends with the Lindsays, he locked the heavy door from the outside and walked away, leaving them to die. When the leader of the Lindsays arrived at the castle, the Lord proudly showed him the key and told him he would never have to worry about the Ogilvies again.
Weeks later, servants reported hearing strange noises, scratching, and screaming coming from inside the thick walls. When they finally opened the door, they were horrified to find a pile of rotting bones and bodies. One man was barely alive, having survived for a few extra days by eating the flesh of his own dead family members.
The room was bricked up and sealed forever, but it is still known as the haunted chamber. To this day, visitors and staff feel an overwhelming sense of dread, coldness, and unease whenever they stand near this part of the castle. One of the most terrifying ghosts at Glamis Castle is the tongueless woman. According to old tales, she was a young maid or nun who accidentally stumbled upon a dark family secret.
To prevent her from telling anyone, the lord of the castle ordered his guards to cut out her tongue. The terrified girl managed to break free and ran into the courtyard. However, she was quickly caught and killed by the guards. Today, her ghost is seen running wildly across the lawns, crying out in a bloodcurdling scream, and pointing frantically at her badly injured, bleeding mouth.
Another sad spirit is the young page boy who haunts the sitting room used by the Queen Mother. In the 18th century, he was a little African servant boy who worked at the castle. As a punishment for a minor mistake, he was ordered to sit on a cold stone seat outside the sitting room door. The busy staff forgot about him, and the boy froze to death during a bitter winter night.
His playful ghost still sits on the stone seat. He is known to stick his foot out to trip people as they walk into the room. Guests who have slept in the small dressing room nearby, which has now been turned into a bathroom, have reported having their bedsheets pulled off them in the middle of the night by an invisible hand.
Supernatural stories are tied to the very land on which Glamis Castle sits. Long before the stone castle was built, the site was used as a royal hunting lodge. In 1034, King Malcolm II of Scotland was mortally wounded in a battle nearby and was carried back to the lodge where he died. Legend says his blood made a deep stain on the stone floor that could never be scrubbed away.
The builders eventually covered the stain with heavy wooden boards to hide it. The ghostly shape of the king is still seen wandering through the older parts of the castle. Even the building of the castle was disrupted by magic. The builders originally tried to build the fortress on nearby Hunter’s Hill. However, the fairies who lived on the hill did not want humans taking over their land.
Every night, the fairies secretly dismantled the stone walls and scattered the rocks. Eventually, a loud booming voice from the sky told the builders to move down to the boggy valley instead. The builders obeyed and the castle was built in its current location. Other strange and cursed objects inside and around the estate include the cursed River Dee.
A slow winding stream running through the estate, also called Daowie Dee. Local rhymes say the sluggish waters demand a human sacrifice by drowning every 7 years. The ghost barrel. In the 19th century, a woman bumped into an invisible barrel. When she kicked it, it made a heavy thumping sound and chased her down the stairs. Her cousin warned her never to speak of the barrel, but she ignored the warning and died shortly after.
The lion cup. A large silver gilt beaker shaped like a lion made in Germany by Elias Zorer in the 1600s. A replica of this cup still sits on the castle dining table today. In 1793, the writer Sir Walter Scott visited the castle and was offered a full measure of wine from the cup by the factor, Peter Proctor.
Scott became so drunk and dizzy that he lost his way outside and had to ask the local minister’s wife for directions back to Megil. He wrote in book Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft that the ancient castle made his nerves stand on edge. The residual sword fight. A Victorian guest staying at the castle reported waking up to the loud, terrifying sounds of a medieval sword fight and a heavy body being dragged down the hallway outside her door.
Though she found absolutely nothing when she looked out. Glamis Castle is remembered as a royal childhood home, a place tied to the Queen Mother and the birth of Princess Margaret. But as we have just discovered, beneath that royal image sits something older and darker. Secret rooms, family legends, chapel ghosts, and stories that seem to have clung to the stones for centuries.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
