Leith Hall

The story

Leith Hall stands near Kennethmont in Aberdeenshire, not far from Huntly. For close to three hundred years it belonged to one family, the Leiths, later the Leith-Hays, and the house grew with them, one wing at a time, until it enclosed a courtyard.

The oldest part is the north wing, raised in 1650 by James Leith of New Leslie where an older stronghold had stood, known as Peill Castle. An east wing followed in 1756. General Alexander Leith Hay added the south wing in 1797, and the west wing, which carries the present entrance front, closed the square in 1868.

The family's story touches Scotland's turbulent 18th century. After the Battle of Culloden, Andrew Hay of Rannes, who had fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie, hid at Leith Hall before getting away to France. Closer to home, the event that gave the house its best-known ghost happened in Aberdeen. On 21 December 1763 the laird, John Leith, was drinking at Archie Campbell's tavern in the Castlegate when a quarrel broke out. Wikipedia says it started when a fellow diner charged him with selling adulterated grain from his estate; a local history account names the man who shot him in the head as Abernethy of Mayen. Leith died a few days later, around Christmas, though even that source gives inconsistent dates. According to the same account, Abernethy fled the country, murder was never proven against him, and after Leith's widow Harriot brought a case he was fined £150.

In the First World War the house served as a temporary Red Cross hospital and treated more than 500 patients. In 1945 the family gave the house and its grounds to the National Trust for Scotland. In the 1960s the trust let part of the building to tenants, among them the American novelist Elizabeth Byrd and her husband, who took 14 rooms in the east wing after marrying in 1966. The hall itself later closed for several years before the trust reopened it in 2013.

The legend

The ghost most firmly attached to Leith Hall is John Leith himself. He is described as a man in obvious pain, his head and eyes wrapped in a soiled or bloodstained bandage, wearing a shirt with dark green trousers or, in some versions, Highland dress.

Unusually, this haunting has a named, dated witness, and a fairly recent one. Elizabeth Byrd wrote that on 16 July 1968 she woke in the night to find the bandaged figure standing at the foot of her bed. When she cried out, it faded away near a window. She also described her dog refusing to go into one particular room. Byrd told the story in two books, A Strange and Seeing Time and The Ghosts in My Life, and it was retold by the paranormal author Hans Holzer in Yankee Ghosts (1989). That is worth keeping in mind: we found no account of the ghost older than Byrd's time at the house in the 1960s, and her writing appears to be the foundation on which much of the later lore rests.

Over the years the house collected a broader set of stories, recorded mainly on a local history site. They include a Victorian lady seen in broad daylight in the Leith bedroom; a uniformed young soldier outdoors on the estate, whom some identify as the last laird and who supposedly died in a motorcycle accident; children giggling on the second floor; and a grey haze on the winding staircase up to the third floor that some found menacing. The same source lists footsteps on the empty top floor, doors slamming on windless days, the sound of drums and pipes, odors of camphor and of cooking, flashes of light, cold spots, the sounds of a party and a woman's laugh. Poltergeist-style incidents are mentioned too: a bottle of sherry launched from a table in the hall, a standard lamp toppling and a pot lid dropping from its hook. The novelist Alanna Knight described waking with a feeling of being smothered and hearing crystal clinking, silk rustling and footsteps, and some guests reportedly dreaded the second-floor master bedroom. A blog adds a Green Lady, called Lady Mary, near the boating pond at dusk and phantom soldiers by the gate. Each of these rests on a single source.

Television arrived in 2003, when Most Haunted filmed series 3, episode 4 at the hall, broadcast on 28 October 2003. Medium Derek Acorah claimed to be in contact with John Leith and tied him to a tree on the estate that he called a hanging tree or duel tree, a link with no historical support in the sources. Public ghost hunts were held at the house in October 2006 and June 2007. We found no skeptical study of the haunting, and the identification of John Leith as the ghost depends essentially on the bandage matching the way he died.

What remains today

Leith Hall is a Category A listed building, and its gardens and designed landscape are on Scotland's national inventory. It sits in an estate of about 286 acres (116 hectares), with gardens. The four ranges around the courtyard show the house's long building history, from the 1650 north wing to the Victorian entrance front.

Visiting

Leith Hall is owned by the National Trust for Scotland, and visiting is straightforward and legal. The gardens and grounds are open all year; the house is shown on guided tours, generally in season, so check the trust's website for current days and times before traveling. No regular ghost tour was running as far as we could confirm, although ghost hunts have been held in the past, so look out for special events. The estate walks and gardens make a good day out in rural Aberdeenshire, combined with Huntly nearby.

Sources

1. Fire main trench, Leith Hall, Aberdeenshire — Archaeology Data Service via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
2. Leith Hall Courtyard, Kennethmont, Aberdeenshire — Archaeology Data Service via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
3. Test pits and drainage 2016, Leith Hall, Aberdeenshire — Archaeology Data Service via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
4. Wikimedia Commons category : Leith Hall — Wikimedia Commons
5. LEITH HALL — National Library of Scotland via Europeana, 1979 · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
6. Leith Hall Ghosts — About Aberdeen (local history site) — About Aberdeen (local history site
7. Official website
8. Trees of grief — Gothic Nature Journal (Jane Mann, 1 Sept 2019, blog) — Gothic Nature Journal (Jane Mann, 1 Sept 2019, blog
9. 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.