Haunted place · Scotland, United Kingdom

Queensberry House

Updated November 20266 sources How to visit

Protected heritage

17th-century Edinburgh mansion, now part of the Scottish Parliament complex. A grim 1707 tale survives, but we found no witness to any haunting.

The story

Queensberry House stands on the Canongate in Edinburgh and is a category A listed building (Historic Environment Scotland LB28440). It was built between 1667 and 1670 for Dame Margaret Douglas of Balmakellie and sold in 1679 to Charles Maitland, Lord Hatton, who altered it in 1681; the Gazetteer for Scotland simply says it was built in 1681. In 1686 William Douglas, first Duke of Queensberry, bought it; he died in 1695.

James Douglas, the second Duke, played a central part in passing the Union of 1707. The duke’s eldest surviving son, James, Earl of Drumlanrig, born on 2 November 1697 and dead on 24 January 1715 according to a transcribed parish register, is described as disturbed. The Gazetteer says the family sold it to the government in 1801, while Wikipedia says it was sold that year to a William Aitchison. Historic Environment Scotland says it became a barracks in 1808; Wikipedia instead says it was a hospital from 1803 until 1996. Hospital use ended in the mid-1990s, the Scottish government acquired the building in 1997 according to Wikipedia, and between 1999 and 2004 it was incorporated into the new Scottish Parliament.

The legend

Here the oldest trace is of an alleged crime, not a ghost. The earliest account we read is in Robert Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh, first published in 1824 to 1825; we read the chapter on Queensberry House in the 1868 edition. The scanned second volume of the 1825 edition does not contain the story, and we could not open the first volume, so we cannot say when Chambers first printed it. Chambers presents it as a tale “preserved by tradition”: on the day the Union was passed, with the house empty, the deranged son escaped, killed a young kitchen boy who turned the spit, roasted him, and was found eating him when the duke came home from his “triumph.” Chambers adds that public opinion saw it as divine punishment for the duke’s part in the Union. He gives no year, no name for the victim and no source, and he mentions no ghost.

There are good reasons for caution. Wikipedia’s entry on the third marquess says the story may have been invented by opponents of the Union, and notes that the young man died in 1715 in England, which Chambers also says. A kitchen oven shown in the Parliament premises is presented by the Gazetteer without proof, and proves nothing about the event. The sources contradict each other on details: the young earl would have been about ten in 1707 and was seventeen at death; and Wikipedia says it was widely believed that the duke had him strangled, but that he was in fact taken to a family estate in Yorkshire. The date is by convention 1707, but Chambers says only “the day the Union was passed.” We found no primary source, no register, letter or journal of 1707.

The ghost is thin. Wikipedia cites the Scotsman newspaper in 2004 for a haunting by the murdered kitchen boy, but we have not read that article, and the author of Mysterious Britain writes that he knows of no real experience. A comment cites Elliott O’Donnell’s Dangerous Ghosts (1954) as saying the house was reputed to be haunted, without a story, but we did not read the book. The one old press item we found, the Mansfield Mirror of Missouri on 19 November 1914, says: “Queensberry house, nearby, has tragic memories of its own, but is haunted by one dear ghost-that third duchess who was Prior’s Kitty.” That ghost is the duchess Catherine, the poet Matthew Prior’s “Kitty,” not the kitchen boy. No American paper we found mentions the kitchen boy. Books cited by Wikipedia (Fry 2010, Wright 1997, Melvin 2014) postdate Chambers; we did not read them.

So the honest summary: an unproven macabre tradition, read here in an 1868 text, and a kitchen-boy ghost we can trace only to 2004, beside a stray 1914 mention of a different ghost.

What remains today

The house is part of the Scottish Parliament complex and holds the offices of the Presiding Officer and Parliament management, according to Wikipedia. The category A listing protects the 17th-century building. We found no documented account of a haunting experience there.

Visiting

Because the building houses working offices, it is not a ghost attraction. We could not verify whether or how the public can enter it; if you want to see inside, ask the Scottish Parliament rather than relying on this page.

The ghosts

Ghostly lady

The Duchess Catherine (“Prior’s Kitty”)

Said to be Catherine, third Duchess of Queensberry, as called by the poet Matthew Prior

A US paper of 1914 called her the “one dear ghost” of the house. No further detail.

First reported: 1914 (Mansfield Mirror). Reported by: Mansfield Mirror, Missouri, 19 November 1914

Spirit

The kitchen boy

Said to be The unnamed victim of the 1707 tradition

The supposed ghost of the boy in the story of the Earl of Drumlanrig. The crime is a tradition read in the 1868 edition of Chambers’s book; no named witness to a haunting has been found.

First reported: 2004 (Scotsman, cited by Wikipedia, not read). Reported by: No named witness; Scotsman 2004 via Wikipedia