There is no shortage of ghost stories related to the old castles scattered about the world. This is one you may never have heard. While my wife and I were visiting Great Britain in 2021 we were having lunch one day at our hotel in Aberdeen Scotland. Our server started a conversation about our trip. We told him we were exploring places connected to my ancestors from Scotland and exploring old castles. He told us of a few castles that we should visit in the north of Scotland, one of those was the Huntly castle.
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| Huntly Castle |
As we visited this wonderful old ruin and marveled at the architecture, we explored the grounds and the various levels of the castle. When we were on the third floor of the castle we could hear children playing outside, the usual sounds of laughing and screaming as children do. We thought nothing of it until we walked outside and it was suddenly deathly quiet. We looked at each other and commented that we had definitely heard children playing in the yard. Although it was a beautiful day it gave us a very eerie feeling. A few days later when visiting the Urchart castle, on the shore of Loch Ness, which had belonged to my Clan Grant, I read this story in a booklet I picked up at the gift shop.
The third Laird of Freuchie, James of Forres, was a great man of arms and was infamous for raiding and plundering. One of the chief figures in a story of orphans eating at a trough. These were the children of a Deeside clan wiped out by the Grants and their allies, the Gordons. James refused to have anything to do with them so the Gordon chief, the Earl of Huntly, took them all under his care and fed them each day from a trough outside his castle. But when James, on a visit to Huntly's Castle, saw the children huddled and kneeling at the trough, he was conscience stricken and took them home with him to be raised as Grant descendants and they consequently became known as 'the race of the trough'.
Were the children we heard the ghosts of trough children? Since I am a descendant of this James I have to wonder if I am of the ‘race of the trough’. Perhaps these children we heard that day are my real ancestors. But whether or not I am blood or adopted. I'll take it. I love reading and learning about the noble people north of the wall.
