Haunted Scotland Read Online Free PDF Page B

of my back.’
    Not long after this, Jacqueline was sitting on her bed using her mobile phone to send a text message when her legs were pulled from under her and she felt herself being pushed onto the
floor.
    ‘That was too much,’ she complained. ‘I shouted out loud that I didn’t mind whoever it was being there, but they had to leave me alone as I had to work for a living.
Otherwise, I’d have to leave!’
    By then, Jacqueline had become a tour guide for Historic Scotland at St Andrews Castle and, aware of her worsening predicament, one of her colleagues produced a newspaper article about Brion
Keppie, a Bathgate-based psychic.
    ‘So I telephoned him,’ said Jacqueline. ‘I told him that I thought that there was a presence in my home, and he came to see me.’
    Brion wore a striped business suit and glasses and carried a briefcase, which was not at all what Jacqueline had expected. He nevertheless set about his work.
    To begin with, he said he felt nothing untoward about the atmosphere in the rooms, but, as soon as he entered Jacqueline’s bedroom, the mood changed.
    ‘He’s given me his name,’ Brion told her. ‘He’s called James Macpherson. A long time ago he worked as a porter on the coach and horses which used to travel through
the village. He says they used to stop off to see the folk who lived here at the time. He’s only back to visit old friends.’
    Brion concentrated further. ‘Now he’s showing me symbols of travelling trunks and a sailor’s haversack, which suggests that he’sleaving. He’s
telling me that he cleaned your carpet for you. He doesn’t want you to leave because he remembers how happy you were that first night when you came here to drink champagne with your friends.
He says he’s sorry for making you fall off your bed. He says he was bored.’
    The invisible dialogue continued, with Macpherson telling Brion that he was not a regular caller; that it might be another thirty years before he returned. At this point, Brion turned abruptly
to Jacqueline and asked who it was that played bingo?
    Jacqueline was mystified. ‘Bingo? Nobody I know plays bingo!’ she protested.
    ‘But somebody must,’ said Brion. ‘I’m having bingo tokens thrown at me. I can see word counters and an elderly lady. Is it your grandmother?’
    ‘It was then that I remembered,’ Jacqueline told me. ‘When I was a child, my paternal grandmother regularly came to visit me with a cousin of about my own age. She’d
bring a bingo game to occupy us. Nobody else could have known about that.’
    ‘It’s because of your back,’ Brion informed her. ‘Your grandmother says she is sorry if she frightened you the other night when she came into your bed. She was only
trying to send you warmth. It had nothing to do with Mr Macpherson!’ ‘It was altogether extraordinary,’ confessed Jacqueline. ‘I certainly hadn’t told him that
I’d hurt my back.’
    Although the outcome of Brion’s exorcism was that Jacqueline’s mind was eventually put at rest, she did eventually sell the cottage and has since returned to live in Strathkinness.
And she still works for Historic Scotland at St Andrews Castle.
    Searching the internet, I have found no fewer than eight clairvoyants listed in Scotland under the umbrella of UK Psychics.They range from tarot readers
and astronomers in Kirkwall and Aberdeen to the Christian Spiritualist Church in Bathgate.
    This latter intrigued me, so I telephoned the number given and spoke to the Reverend Mhairi Derby-Pitt, who told me that the Bathgate Christian Spiritualist Church was founded in 1946 by
Charlotte Whelan, her grandmother. Charlotte, according to the Reverend Mhairi, was an extraordinary and remarkable woman who, rather spectacularly, was the seventh child of a seventh child of a
seventh child.
    ‘I was brought up on Christian Spiritualism,’ explained the Reverend Mhairi, who, with her father, the Reverend Bernard Brian Derby-Pitt, today oversees a