I Don’t Believe in Ghosts

‘.it is told that in that time Daeron the Minstrel strayed from the land and was seen no more. He it was that made music or the dance and song of Luthien… he had loved her and set all his thought of her in his music. He became the greatest of all the minstrels of the Elves east of the sea, named even before Maglor…But seeking for Luthien in despair he wandered upon strange paths,…over the mountains into the East of Middle-earth…. and for many ages made lament beside dark waters’

The Silmarillion chapter 19

 

The thing you have to know about this story is that it’s not a ghost story – because, you see, I don’t believe in ghosts. Well, of course I know that it’s Halloween. There’s been coverage of ‘trick or treaters’ (or ‘guisers’ as we call them here in Scotland) everywhere during the week. Everyone’s talking about witches and ghosts, and cutting up pumpkin lanterns. A good friend of mine, who is a story-teller, likes this time of year, as the evenings get longer and darker, because it gives her a chance to tell all her Scottish Ghosts stories (and there are many). All good fun, but does it spook me? Of course not, because I don’t believe in ghosts.

Anyway, it’s a cold Wednesday evening and I walk across the grass, towards my car, after my day’s work and meetings. I’m just a few miles south of Edinburgh, at a place with about two thousand year’s history of continuous habitation, since the Votadini made a peace treaty with the Romans some time around the first or second century of this age. I quite like all those stories about the Celts, their singing, their drinking, their fighting, and their legends. For six hundred years or more they ruled these lands. Plenty of time for ghosts to gather round here, some would say. Not me of course, because I don’t believe in ghosts, do you?

Today, I’ve been right at the other extreme, rational and business-like. Talking to scientists at the Roslin Institute. Research into ‘animal genetics and genomics, animal breeding and conservation, biotechnology and biomedicine’, that’s all pretty modern and pragmatic, isn’t it? Mind you, what it’s really famous for is Dolly the Sheep – the first cloned animal. Some people might think that’s a bit creepy, if not actually ghostly. But not me, because I don’t believe in ghosts.

Walking over towards the car park, a curious person might find their gaze turned north, where the bare trees surrounding the institute raise dark branches into the evening sky. And beyond them, a tower, a ‘folly’ they call it, sticks up above the trees. I don’t know where the builder got his inspiration from, but it looks just like something from one of those Peter Jackson films – it even has two prongs on the very top level. Is that a light glowing from the upstairs window of the supposedly deserted building? No, of course it’s just the last rays of the evening sun. It couldn’t be anything else, because I don’t believe in ghosts.

Or, if you looked west on a clear day, you might see the Pentland Hills and the site of the Massacre at Rullion Green. General Dalyell slaughtered 50 Covenanters there in 1666, and many more perished in the bogs or were captured and hung. Gruesome? Certainly. Spooky? No, because I don’t believe in ghosts.

Of course the trees do hide more secrets. The countryside looks flat all around, but is actually riven with sudden secret dips and glens, guarded by cliffs. Walk through the woods in the wrong direction and you’ll find a surprise overhang where at the edge tree roots cling on to apparently nothing. Roslin Glen, they call it and in places the cliffs are over a hundred foot high. There is a Castle on the edge of the Glen, for a long time a stronghold of the Sinclair family. In 1303, Oliver St Clair (that’s how they spelled it then) and William Wallace (yes, the Braveheart one), with 8,000 men defeated an invading army of 30,000 Normans, English, Welsh and Flemish mercenaries. The invaders had split their huge force into 3, about 5-10 miles apart, so Wallace and St Clair had the time to defeat one at first light, one at mid-day and one in the evening. In each case the Scots caught the invaders with their backs to the Glen and drove them over the cliffs. Some people say that if you walk in Roslin Glen after dark you can hear voices screaming from the cliffs above you – but if you walk on the hill-top you hear the voices below you. I, personally, think its all imagination (‘havers’ in Scots), because I don’t believe in Ghosts.

So I get to the car park, open the car and make a quick mobile phone call home to say I’m on my way. No, I don’t because there is no signal here. Some people would look knowingly and say ‘ah Roslin, of course things like mobile phones don’t work there,’

But there’s really no mystery, it’s just that the car park is down in a dip, and the signal is reduced by the mist that’s appeared. Just wet autumnal Scots mist, not ghostly or spooky mist, because as I’ve already said, I don’t believe in Ghosts.

So anyway I drive through Roslin Village itself, on the way to the main road. I don’t have to tell you about what’s there, I’m sure. Rosslyn Chapel? As featured in the Dan Brown Book?  Not to mention others. So here, in this Scots mining village, we have variously, the burial site of the holy grail, the last descendants of the blood line of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the last burial ground of the Knights Templars, the casket hiding the ancient demons Gog and Magog, a secret Masonic Temple, or evidence that Oliver Sinclair sailed to the New World 100 years before Columbus. Or perhaps nothing more than some fancy mediaeval stone work. Yes, sure, the place is pretty atmospheric, the lower chapel has an astonishing acoustic, and the atmosphere is always cold and clammy. But that’s nothing supernatural, its just that the roof has leaked for years and the sandstone walls have absorbed moisture (and there is a lot of moisture here - I still remember the look of horror on an Italian visitor’s face when I told her Edinburgh was the dry side of Scotland…).  Of course there is a ghost story connected with the Chapel – its haunted by the apprentice stonemason who’s carving far exceeded his Master’s and who was slain by the latter in a jealous rage. One of the nave supports is still called the Apprentice Pillar. But this evening, I’m in my car driving home, with the CD player on, and anyway, I don’t believe in ghosts.

I hit my first problem as I get onto the main road. There’s been an accident in the mist and the police are diverting us south, away from the direction I want to go. There are few alternative routes here, because of the Pentland hills, and they are all blocked with traffic. So unwilling to wait, not quite sure what to do, I find myself carrying on south through the small town of Penicuik, where everything is turned yellow by the sodium street lamps. Already the streets are filling with small figures dressed in sheets, ghoul masks, horns and zombie make-up as the children hobble round guising. In the yellow light they look like small extras from a George Romero movie, and the overall effect might be quite atmospheric, even creepy – well not to me of course, because I don’t believe in ghosts.

And then I remember a way to get home. Just through the town, over a bridge there’s a little side road that climbs steeply east and cuts across country over towards Bonnyrigg and Dalkeith. There I can get on another main road, the old Roman highway the A68, that heads into Edinburgh. It’s a few miles over, and the road is narrow, but I’ve got fuel and there’s no real rush, so I press on the route, feeling the car twist left, right and up onto the side road. Up here the mist is quite thick, and I slow right down. The headlights are just shining into a white wall, reflecting back, dazzling me, so I turn them off and switch to low level fog-lights. I can see dark hedges at the edge of road, which is just about one and a half car widths, and the base of trees that suddenly appear out of the mist. And there are eyes, of course. We are in the country, so the verge and the hedge have rabbits, cats, the occasional fox, and the car lights catch their eyes and reflect them back at me. Some people would be scared of course, but not me, because I don’t believe in ghosts.

But all the same it is atmospheric, out here in the dark. I’m only five miles south, as the crow flies, of the centre of a city of half a million people, but if turned my car lights off I wouldn’t be able to see a thing. Most of us urban dwellers just don’t know what real darkness, country darkness, is. We call a dark night ‘pitch black’ (without even knowing what ‘pitch’ is) but real dark, country dark, on a cloudy night with no moon? When you can wave your hand in front of your face and not see it? When your body has no spatial reference, and you fall over sober because you literally can’t tell ‘which way is up’? That’s how dark it is tonight. Yes, it would be easy to get disturbed, or even a little disoriented, out here. Just like in one of those horror films where the hapless victim stumbles, seemingly unable to stand straight and run from the werewolves/vampires/whatever implied by the camera perspective cutting through the forest undergrowth. Yes, I used to watch them, and get quite scared, when I was younger. But not now, because I’m an adult, and I don’t believe in ghosts (or werewolves, or vampires).

No, its fine here, driving through the dark, in my warm car with the CD player going, actually quite relaxing after concentrating through a business meeting. I go past a turn-off, sign-posted to Temple, and smile because that tiny Midlothian village also features in a number of ‘conspiracy theory’ novels. Apparently it used to be called Balantrodach, and was the headquarters of the Knight Templars in Scotland. Which means it was the refuge of the whole order from 1312 onwards, as Scotland was the only country not to ban them and confiscate their treasure. Some say the superstition of Friday the thirteenth being an unlucky date dates from the arrest and suppression of the Templars on Friday 13^th October 1307. Anyway you still get the odd treasure hunter or sightseer wandering around the village of Temple where according to legend 'Twixt the oak and the elm tree, You will find buried the millions free.' Actually it’s a quiet, rather prosaic village, with no shops or pub, a part-time post office, and a few residents who mainly commute to Edinburgh. Atmospheric, I guess, in autumn or winter (they say there are fairies in the field behind the nursery), but not scary, even for those who can’t say (unlike me) ‘I don’t believe in ghosts’.

So I carry on, winding down the window a little to let in a little cool air, humming along to the music, even waving cheerfully at the scarecrow I see, revealed by a breath of wind in the middle of his grassy field. His arms are at a strange angle, and in the dark it almost looks like he’s holding an instrument, a harp perhaps, or a fiddle slung low in the way some Appalachian performers do.

Aah, music. What’s the saying about the power of cheap music? But I’m not listening to cheap music tonight, I’m listening to a master, arguably the finest guitar-based interpreter of traditional British and American songs on the planet. And these are great songs, dark and evocative ballads, each containing a novels worth of plot, character, and denouement in a compact five-minute setting. The dying sailor of Polly on the Shore, is followed by an exquisite setting of the Scottish ballad Fair Annie (two long separated sisters take gruesome revenge on their bigamous husband). Great stories, great music even if someone dies in both songs. Well a friend of mine did once refer to folk music as ‘sex, violence and coal mining’ and I guess he’s right on this occasion (he is a jazz musician, and I think I’d hurt his feelings by describing jazz as ‘music that’s more fun to play than it is to listen to’…).

But these are quite dark songs for a dark night, so I push the next track button. Only to find more death and darkness. In the morality tale Dives and Lazarus, rich Dives has a ‘place in hell prepared for wicked men like thee’ after refusing alms and beating Poor Lazarus. Betsy the Serving Maid is kidnapped and deported by a jealous mother, whose wealthy son then dies of unrequited love, whereas the servant ‘who courts our sister’ is horribly murdered for daring to cross class barriers in the Bramble Briar.

The music catches me. I’m gripped, unable to push the keys that would take me back to the banality of modern pop radio or a sports commentary. Who wrote all these old songs? What makes the melodies so piercing, so heart-striking, so lasting? Why are themes of thwarted love and melodramatic death so prevalent in nearly every song? Musicologists talk about the ‘folk process’, where tunes and lyrics are subtly honed over generations of ‘oral tradition’, but these songs sound like they have been freshly composed by one mind. Modern geneticists say that all of modern humanity was descended from one woman who left Africa some tens of thousands of years ago. If we could do DNA on old songs would we find they all descend from one singer, one composer, one tragedy? Who was it, this person we call ‘trad’ or anon? Anon, it could almost be a name couldn’t it? Just put back a few missing letters and would we know them? Could we ask them why all the old songs are about unrequited love and tragic death? What was the great event that shaped their life? Did they ever overcome their sadness, their despair?

I’m sweating now, as if someone is playing a grim joke on me, listening to this music, here in the darkness on Halloween. Push the track forward buttons again. In Rounding the Horn two sailors are ‘thrown from the top-sail yards’ and are ‘left for the sharks’, while the faithless lover in Sammy’s Bar meets her end when ‘Johnny tried a hairpin bend’.  Death, darkness and despair….That’s real Halloween, not youngsters in plastic ghost outfits, but something much deeper and darker and I’m not sure I like it.

Push the track forward buttons, stabbing at them now. The previous songs are quite jaunty compared to the mystery/spiritual pieces of Four Angels and Leaves of Life, the latter with a graphic description of the crucifixion, of Jesus’s dying words to his mother. I hadn’t really realised it before, someone really does die on every song. Push, push again, much harder this time. I want to hear about life not death, especially here out in the dark by myself…

And suddenly I’m on a different track. My pulse, (why was it racing so much?) settles down when I realise it’s an instrumental, just a simple melody. I let my breath out. I mean, no-one dies in an instrumental do they? I feel relieved, but slightly foolish. What a lot of nonsense, I’m in a panicky, sweaty, heap, just because of some old (admittedly skilfully played) music. I laugh, because of course (I say firmly to myself), I don’t believe in ghosts. So that’s alright then, let’s just drive quickly home. I grin cheerfully at the scarecrow again, even though he doesn’t seem to be in the same field he was before.

Its only as I start to accelerate that I realise three things.

One.

The music isn’t coming from the CD player. I ejected the disc in my last frantic stabbing, but the tune is still playing, coming in through the open car window….

Two.

The tune (“no-one dies in an instrumental”) that’s being played is on the ejected CD, I suddenly recognise it.  And, I remember the name.

No-one dies in an instrumental, except when it’s called The Lover’s Ghost. ……

Three.

You don’t get scarecrows in pasture – you don’t need to scare birds off grass. That’s not a scarecrow, standing there playing in the grassy field.