Haunted Scotland Read Online Free PDF

husband. The girl was startled and alarmed by this, and told Joan defensively that her husband worked for the local brewery, and had been given the money by his boss.
    Joan had then informed the girl that she saw the money being transferred into a series of Tesco carrier bags, and that a body would be found floating in the River Clyde.
    ‘The girl was horrified,’ said Joan. ‘She turned completely white and left in a panic. I never heard from her again, but I can’t help what comes to me when I do a
reading. I only hope she managed to sort things out.’
    Joan remained silent while she thought about this. ‘Everything flashes before you in your mind’s eye,’ she continued solemnly. ‘Sometimes I feel like an interpreter for
the dumb. It’s not that simple either way. I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers. You have to look for symbols, and you try to do your best to work out what’s going on,
but sometimes it is impossible to translate what you see into making sense. It’s often very stressful.’
    However, calling in a medium can definitely solve problems, as Jacqueline Heriot can confirm. I was in St Andrews and had arranged to meet her in the St Andrews Castle Visitor
Centre, where, as one might expect, the past confronts the present in this old university town with dramatic impact.
    But the castle ghosts were not what Jacqueline wanted to talk to me about, at least not to start off with. ‘I’ve always believed in serendipity,’ she began vaguely. ‘If
you are really genuinely interested in something, information comes to you.’
    Having returned from South Africa to live in Scotland some years earlier, Jacqueline had at first moved into a house at Strathkinness, close to St Andrews, but when some
friends put their former spinner’s cottage in the village of Ceres up for sale, she decided to make them an offer. Much to her delight, it was accepted.
    ‘Ceres is a really pretty place with a village green,’ she said. ‘The people who live there really take care of their houses.’
    Once Jacqueline’s offer was accepted, her friends invited her over to celebrate with a bottle of champagne. ‘I was overjoyed,’ she said.
    That was certainly true at the time, but the sense of euphoria did not last for long. As she lay in bed on her very first night under the cottage roof, she felt her face being gently
stroked.
    ‘It felt like someone’s breath,’ she recalled, shivering. ‘At first I thought I must be imagining it, but after that first night it became a regular occurrence. It was
almost as if somebody had climbed into bed with me. Night after night, I’d just lie there, waiting for it to happen again.
    ‘I use candles a lot,’ she added. ‘I particularly like tea lights, and one morning as I was clearing up in my bedroom before going to work, I dropped several used ones into the
wastepaper basket. Of course, it was a wicker basket, so all the soot filtered through the bottom and onto my white carpet. It was so annoying. I tried to clean it up with carpet cleaner, but that
simply made it worse with dirty streaks, so I decided to leave it until later.’
    But when Jacqueline returned home that evening, she was astonished. The carpet was pristine white and there was no sign of the stains. ‘I can remember thinking, that’s great,’
she recalled, ‘the carpet cleaner must have worked.’
    Nevertheless, the sleepless nights continued and they soon began to take their toll on her.
    ‘When I went into work I’d apologise to my boss, saying thatI wasn’t functioning properly. I’d hardly slept for about two months. I used to leave
the bedside light on all night, but that only made it more difficult to sleep. It was probably something to do with the strain I was under, but my back started to play up. I thought I was managing
it, but then as I was trying to fall sleep one night, I felt this strange rubbing sensation, as if somebody or something was pressing into the small