Cortachy Castle

The story

Cortachy Castle is in Angus, Scotland. It is listed Category B by Historic Environment Scotland (LB4831). The HES entry describes a south wing from the sixteenth century or earlier, additions made in 1820 and 1872 (the architect David Bryce is named), and parts removed in 1948. The castle is a private family home. We found no public access to it, and this page gives no way to approach it.

It should not be confused with Airlie Castle, a separate place that Wikipedia describes as partly ruined and partly occupied; the press of the period mixed the two names.

The legend

The Drummer is said to be the spirit of a drummer, or of an officer whose messenger he was, killed out of jealousy by a former lord of the family. He is said to have been thrust into his own drum and thrown from a tower window. His drumming is said to be a sign that a death is coming in the Ogilvy family.

The oldest printed trace we found is Catherine Crowe’s book The Night Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (1848), volume 2, pages 182 to 185, in the edition we read in full on the Internet Archive. Crowe says that “somewhere about Christmas, of the year 1844” a letter was sent to her to read. It was a second-hand account, from a family in Perthshire, of a woman who was invited to the castle. She heard a drum beating below her window, and at dinner she asked about the family’s drummer. The earl is said to have turned pale. The visitor left without prolonging her stay. According to Crowe, the countess died at Brighton five or six months later; Wikipedia gives June 1845, after a birth. Crowe closes the story by giving the legend: that the drummer himself, or an officer whose emissary he was, had become an object of jealousy to “a former Lord A.” The initials are in her 1848 text. She also rejects the argument that the countess might have been killed by anxiety.

The account is therefore dated: the letter is from about Christmas 1844 and was in print by 1848. It is not an eyewitness account written by Crowe, and we did not read the original letter. We found nothing printed earlier, and the American newspapers we searched have nothing on the drum before 1881.

Ingram’s The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (1884) retells the 1844 story, without naming Crowe, and expands her initials into Cortachy and Airlie. He says that of all haunted castles in Great Britain, none had probably gained “a greater amount of notoriety.” He adds an incident of 19 August 1849: a young Englishman heard music and a drum near a shooting lodge called the Tulchan, and the next day the ninth earl died in London, in Regent Street, succeeded by the tenth earl.

American newspapers show the legend still in circulation, which we read in a local text database rather than on the Library of Congress pages, so we give only titles and dates. The earliest we found are of October 1881, such as the Salt Lake Herald of 11 October and the Public Ledger of Memphis of 14 October, linking a drum heard at Airlie Castle to the death of an earl in Colorado. On 29 October the Evening Star of Washington relayed a letter to the London Telegraph from a woman who said she had attended the visitor at Cortachy and heard a fife and drum herself. It is a rival, later account: it has the earl leaving the table, and the year is garbled in the scan. In 1895 the same paper called the “Airlie Drummer” perhaps the most notorious ghost of Scottish mansions, and the Arizona Republican ran “The Ghost of Airlie” on 25 July 1900 after an earl died in South Africa. Some 1881 reports call him the ninth earl, which conflicts with Ingram’s date for the ninth earl’s death in 1849; the Evening Star of 5 November 1881 calls him the tenth, which fits Ingram. A Little Falls Transcript item of 1883 mentions a fire at Cortachy and the Ogilvy ghosts, but the scan is of poor quality.

Wikipedia gives undated variants, such as a messenger for a hated chieftain or a drummer who failed to warn the castle. Our first research also saw websites tying the story to the seventeenth century and to the burning of Airlie Castle in 1640, a burning Wikipedia’s page on that castle records without any drummer. We did not find that link in the nineteenth-century sources we read, and we found no trace of the story earlier than 1844.

What remains today

The castle remains a private residence of the family, listed Category B. The ghost story is public, but the house is not.

Visiting

Cortachy Castle is a private home, and we found no public visits to it. Please respect the privacy of the people who live there. The best way to explore the legend is at a desk: both Crowe’s 1848 book and Ingram’s 1884 book are available on the Internet Archive.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Cortachy Castle — Wikimedia Commons
2. Airlie Castle — Wikipedia
3. Cortachy Castle (LB4831) — Historic Environment Scotland
4. Drummer of Cortachy — Wikipedia
5. The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (Ingram), full text — Internet Archive, 1884
6. The Night Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost-Seers, vol. 2 (Catherine Crowe), full text — Internet Archive, 1848
7. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.