There are stories of hauntings here at the Kinrowan Estate going back centuries. Of ghostly patrons of our Pub in the Kinrowan Hall who came back again and again at last call to hoist just one more pint of their favourite ale, of the gameskeeper (in those long ago days when we had such a post) who is still spotted watching over the deer as they eat acorns in the late fall, of the piper heard playing in the distance as the dawn breaks over the hills where High Meadow Farm is.
And any other of the myriad tales passed down generation after generation ’till they past from being remembered to being part of our history into being simply stories…
There is one ghost, or rather a set of ghosts, that I See in my vision when I’m unable to sleep and leave Catherine sleeping soundly in our bed to roam around Kinrowan Hall and nearby grounds in warmer weather. So it was when some decades back that I first encountered them.
At first all I noticed was the crickets chirping loud in the warm night air. Then I heard the Irish wolfhounds we have to keep the sheep and pigs safe from wolves and other predators growling lowly in their throats as if something was well beyond their ken. So I walked out to where they were and stopped awfully fast when I saw them.
They were I thought that they were just some waking dream I was having, not really there but I son realised that they were really there. They were a King, stocky and red haired, terribly wounded but still standing, fucking huge sword unsheathed and covered with blood and gore, and his foe, equally stocky and blond haired, obviously Viking from the runes etched on his equally bloodied sword. Dead men walking. As I watched, they resumed hacking at each other. Over and over again.
They went on, silently, never saying anything, cutting at each other ’til they were far past the point where they should have been dead, but they went one cutting at each other. They were still having at each other as they faded away.
I’ve seen them several times since, always on the same date. I’ve tried researching the old battles, the old kings of Scotland, but never found anything that even vaguely matches up properly to what I saw. I do know that there are several barrow mounds on the Estate that may indeed be those of Kings lost now to even myth as they live and died so long ago that no one even remembers them even in stories.
