Posted: Mar 18, 2008, 4:57 PM CST
here a special one from Inverness
Alan Graham was born in New Lanark in 1909. As a young boy he was at home alone one night - his parents were visiting his grandmother in an adjacent building - when he awake due to the bright moonlight shining through his uncovered window. He saw a lady standing in the room, dressed in a tartan or checked Inverness cape. When he spoke to her, she stared straight at him, walked towards him and then turned and disappeared through the closed bedroom door.
When he told his parents, they persuaded him that it had been a dream and it was 30 years before his sister confessed to having seen the same lady. At the age of 96, Mary Graham told her story to the New Lanark Oral Archive…
"I see her yet… It was when we flitted [moved house] to the New Buildings, next to the Bell door. The shop [her parents'] was level with it. It was a surgery in the olden days. We lived in the flat above. … I was mysel' in the back bedroom. I wakened frozen. When I opened my eyes the figure was coming towards me. She had an old fashioned Inverness cloak and a wee black hat but she had a veil over her face… she put her hand out to me, I remember that. She had gloves on… The next thing I saw there was a bright red spark going through the door… the door was bolted and nailed and we never used it. I told my father and mother and they said, 'Don't be frightened - it's supposed to be haunted. But she'll no hurt ye. It's no' you she wants.' It must have been somebody who was killed in the surgery or poisoned… Alan saw her. Alan was a boy. We went to see my granny. Alan was in bed… he didn't know anything about the ghost. My mother and father said that they wouldn't tell him or it would frighten him and he wouldn't stay in the house himself… He got such a fright."
Now there's no way of finding out who the lady might have been, but it seems, according to a medium, that she is just one of many spirits living in the village.