Laura Wright 
Some castles are famous for their architecture.
Others are remembered for battles, royal occupants, murders, or ghosts.
Glamis Castle has all of them.
Standing in Angus, Scotland, Glamis has been associated with the same family for more than six centuries. It was the childhood home of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret was born there. Mary, Queen of Scots visited the castle in 1562.
But Glamis possesses another history.
For generations, stories have circulated about hidden chambers, secret passages, unexplained deaths, ghosts, a nobleman condemned to gamble with the Devil, and something so terrible supposedly concealed within the castle that knowledge of it was restricted to only a few members of the family.
During the nineteenth century, the Secret of Glamis became one of Britain’s great mysteries.
At the center of it was a creature, prisoner, or unfortunate human being remembered as the Monster of Glamis.
Yet that is only one of the castle’s legends.
Glamis has sometimes been called Britain’s most haunted castle.
Considering its history, it certainly has enough ghosts to compete for the title.
How Old Is Glamis Castle?
Even the origins of Glamis have generated disagreement.
The castle stands approximately 12 miles north of Dundee. Long before the present structure assumed its familiar appearance, tradition maintains that a royal hunting lodge existed at Glamis.
The official history of the castle places the beginning of the building recognizable today around 1400. The estate itself had already passed into the Lyon family in the fourteenth century, establishing the dynasty that remains associated with Glamis.
Older traditions, however, associate the location with events centuries earlier.
That raises an intriguing question.
Could portions of an earlier structure have survived within later construction?
Original Castle or Centuries of Renovation?
By the nineteenth century, some historical writers argued that the supposed ancient Glamis connected with Scotland’s early kings could not have been the same building standing there in their own time.
Other accounts disagreed.
One tradition maintained that the castle had simply been enlarged repeatedly, with later additions deliberately constructed from similar materials so that the different periods blended together. The same family possessing the estate for centuries made gradual expansion entirely plausible.
The safest conclusion is that the present castle developed over centuries.
That doesn’t prove that a surviving room dates to the eleventh century.
Nor does it necessarily mean that nothing earlier ever stood on the site.
And that distinction becomes important when examining one of Glamis’s oldest traditions.
Malcolm II and Glamis
Glamis has long been associated with King Malcolm II of Scotland.
According to castle tradition, Malcolm was mortally wounded nearby and carried to a royal hunting lodge at Glamis, where he died.
A room within the castle became known as the King Malcolm Room, supposedly marking the place of his death.
The historical details surrounding Malcolm’s death are considerably less certain than the tradition suggests.
But the persistence of the story demonstrates how deeply Glamis became associated with Scotland’s earliest royal history.
And then Shakespeare arrived.
Macbeth, Duncan, and Glamis
For millions of people, Glamis is immediately associated with Macbeth.
Shakespeare gives Macbeth the title Thane of Glamis, and his tragedy transformed the name into one of the most recognizable castle names in literature.
But Shakespeare’s Macbeth is not reliable Scottish history.
The historical King Duncan was not murdered by Macbeth while sleeping as a guest inside Glamis Castle. Duncan died in battle against Macbeth’s forces in 1040.
Nor should Shakespeare’s titles and chronology automatically be treated as accurate representations of eleventh-century Scotland.
The historical Macbeth belonged to a world substantially different from the one Shakespeare created centuries later.
Nevertheless, the literary connection became permanent.
Glamis entered not merely Scottish history but the mythology of Macbeth.
The Lyon Family Comes to Glamis
The documented history becomes considerably firmer during the fourteenth century.
The Glamis estate came into the possession of Sir John Lyon, whose descendants became Lords Glamis and later Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne.
The official castle chronology records a violent event almost immediately.
In 1382, Sir John Lyon was killed by James Lindsay following a quarrel.
It would hardly be the last violent episode associated with the family.
By around 1400, construction of the castle as it developed into its later form was underway.
In 1445, Sir John’s grandson Patrick became the first Lord Glamis.
The family was becoming increasingly powerful.
Power, however, offered little protection from royal hostility.
Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis
One of the most tragic figures in the castle’s history was Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis.
Janet was the widow of John Lyon, 6th Lord Glamis, and the sister of Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus.
Unfortunately for Janet, King James V despised her brother.
That made her vulnerable.
Janet was accused of treason and of conspiring to poison the king.
The charges were false.
Nevertheless, she was convicted.
On July 17, 1537, Janet Douglas was burned at the stake on Castle Hill in Edinburgh.
Her execution became one of the darkest episodes in the history of the family.
And according to tradition, Janet eventually returned to Glamis.
The Grey Lady
The ghost of Janet Douglas is generally identified with the Grey Lady of Glamis.
She has reportedly been seen within the castle chapel, sometimes appearing as a woman kneeling in prayer.
Her apparition has also been associated with other areas of Glamis.
Unlike many castle ghosts whose supposed identities are attached to completely unverifiable people, Janet Douglas unquestionably existed.
She was unquestionably executed.
Whether she returned to Glamis afterward is a rather different question.
But her terrible death provided the castle with one of its most enduring ghost stories.
The King Takes Glamis
Following Janet’s conviction, Glamis was forfeited to the Crown.
James V occupied the castle until his death in 1542.
Afterward, Glamis was restored to John Lyon, 7th Lord Glamis.
Twenty years later, another famous royal visitor arrived.
Mary, Queen of Scots visited Glamis on August 22, 1562 while traveling north during a rebellion.
By then, Glamis was firmly woven into Scotland’s aristocratic and royal history.
But another famous resident supposedly wanted considerably less respectable company.
He wanted someone willing to play cards.
Earl Beardie
One of the oldest supernatural legends at Glamis concerns a mysterious nobleman called Earl Beardie.
His precise identity has varied.
He has commonly been identified either with Alexander Lindsay, 4th Earl of Crawford, who died in 1453, or Alexander Lyon, 2nd Lord Glamis, who died in 1486.
The uncertainty hasn’t hurt the story.
According to legend, Earl Beardie was an enthusiastic gambler.
One Sunday, he wanted to play cards.
Nobody would join him.
It was the Sabbath, and the other people in the castle refused to participate.
Beardie became furious.
Eventually he declared that he would play cards until Doomsday if necessary.
In another version, he announced that he would play with the Devil himself if nobody else would join him.
That was a mistake.
The Stranger at the Door
A mysterious stranger arrived at Glamis.
He was willing to play.
Beardie and the visitor shut themselves inside a room and began their game.
Eventually, someone became curious about what was happening behind the closed door.
According to one version of the legend, a servant attempted to spy upon them.
What he saw revealed the stranger’s identity.
Beardie wasn’t gambling with an ordinary visitor.
He was playing with the Devil.
The game cost him his soul.
Some versions say Earl Beardie was condemned to continue gambling until Doomsday.
And according to Glamis folklore, sometimes the game can still be heard.
The Eternal Game
Visitors and residents have reportedly heard unexplained noises associated with Earl Beardie’s supernatural game.
Cards, dice, arguments, voices, and other sounds have been attributed to the condemned gambler.
Other traditions have his apparition wandering through the castle.
The story is classic Christian folklore.
A man violates the Sabbath.
He curses.
He challenges God.
The Devil accepts the invitation.
And the punishment continues forever.
But Earl Beardie is almost cheerful folklore compared with another Glamis story.
Because somewhere inside the castle, according to generations of rumor, there was a room nobody was supposed to find.
The Secret of Glamis
During the nineteenth century, stories began circulating about an extraordinary family secret at Glamis.
The precise nature of the secret was unknown.
That was exactly what made it so compelling.
It was supposedly revealed only to a tiny number of people.
One tradition maintained that the reigning Earl would disclose the secret to his heir only when the young man reached adulthood.
Another claimed that the Earl, his heir, and the estate factor were the only people permitted to know the truth.
Whatever the rules, outsiders became fascinated.
And statements attributed to members of the family only made matters worse.
Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, was famously quoted as suggesting that anyone who knew the true nature of Glamis’s secret would be grateful it did not belong to them. The story became a major subject of Victorian and Edwardian speculation.
What could possibly be so terrible?
Eventually, one explanation overwhelmed the others.
There was someone hidden inside Glamis Castle.
The Monster of Glamis
According to the most famous version, a child was born into the Bowes-Lyon family during the nineteenth century.
The child was terribly deformed.
Publicly, the family announced that the baby had died.
Secretly, he survived.
Because his appearance would supposedly have brought shame upon the family, the child was hidden within Glamis.
A suite of rooms was set aside for him.
There he remained.
Years became decades.
The child became a man.
And somewhere inside one of Scotland’s grandest castles lived a human being whom the outside world believed had died at birth.
He became known simply as the Monster of Glamis.
Thomas Lyon-Bowes
Later versions of the story identified the supposed monster as Thomas Lyon-Bowes, the first child of Thomas Lyon-Bowes, Lord Glamis, and Charlotte Grimstead.
Thomas was born on October 21, 1821.
Officially, he died the same day.
The legend claimed otherwise.
According to rumor, the infant survived but possessed severe physical abnormalities.
Rather than acknowledge him publicly, the family concealed his existence.
The story grew increasingly elaborate.
Servants supposedly carried food into hidden rooms.
A mysterious figure was glimpsed on the castle battlements.
Only selected family members knew where the concealed chambers were located.
After the unfortunate man’s eventual death, the rooms were supposedly sealed permanently.
There is no reliable evidence establishing that Thomas survived infancy.
But Victorian Britain loved the story.
Searching for the Hidden Room
The architecture of Glamis only strengthened the legend.
The castle contains thick walls, old passages, staircases, rooms added during different periods, and precisely the sort of irregular construction that encourages stories about spaces nobody knows exist.
One famous tale concerns guests who decided to locate the secret chamber themselves.
They hung towels or sheets from the windows of every accessible room.
Then they went outside and examined the castle.
Several windows supposedly had no towels hanging from them.
There were rooms inside Glamis that they had been unable to enter.
Whether the experiment happened exactly as later retellings describe is questionable.
But it became one of the most memorable pieces of evidence in the Monster legend.
Was There Really a Secret Room?
Hidden or inaccessible spaces in an old castle would hardly be extraordinary.
Buildings like Glamis developed gradually.
Walls were moved.
Passages were closed.
Rooms changed purpose.
Renovations concealed earlier construction.
A room inaccessible from the modern interior doesn’t automatically indicate that an imprisoned family member lived there.
But nineteenth-century accounts went considerably further.
Stories circulated about workmen accidentally discovering passages or chambers and then being ordered never to reveal what they had seen.
One tale claimed a worker broke through a wall and discovered a secret passage leading toward a locked room.
After reporting the discovery, he supposedly disappeared from the area.
Rumor claimed he had been paid and sent to Australia.
Again, legend and documentation become extremely difficult to separate.
Which is exactly how Glamis seems to prefer things.
The Ogilvies
There is another possible origin for the Secret of Glamis.
It has nothing to do with a deformed heir.
Instead, it involves an atrocity.
According to an old tradition, members of Clan Ogilvie sought refuge at Glamis after a conflict.
They were admitted into the castle.
Then they were betrayed.
The Ogilvies were supposedly locked inside a chamber and abandoned without food.
They starved to death.
Their bodies remained inside.
The room was sealed.
If such a chamber existed, discovering it centuries later would certainly qualify as a horrifying family secret.
The Ogilvie story has therefore sometimes been proposed as an alternative explanation for the hidden-room traditions that eventually produced the Monster of Glamis.
The Monster Becomes Folklore
By the late nineteenth century, the Monster of Glamis had become internationally famous.
The remarkable thing is how little anyone actually knew.
There was no photograph.
No medical record proving the hidden person’s existence.
No publicly identified chamber.
No body.
No reliable eyewitness account establishing that Thomas Lyon-Bowes secretly survived.
Yet the absence of evidence actually strengthened the story.
Of course there was no evidence.
The family had hidden it.
That makes the Monster of Glamis almost impossible folklore to kill.
Every missing piece of evidence becomes another indication of how successfully the secret was concealed.
The Castle and the Bowes-Lyon Family
Glamis eventually acquired an even greater royal connection.
Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon spent much of her childhood at Glamis.
She later married Prince Albert, Duke of York, who became King George VI following the abdication of Edward VIII.
Elizabeth became Queen Consort and later, after her husband’s death, was known as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
Her second daughter, Princess Margaret, was born at Glamis Castle in 1930.
That distinction made Margaret particularly notable as the first royal baby in the direct line of succession born in Scotland for centuries.
The old castle of ghosts and hidden monsters had become part of the story of Britain’s modern royal family.
The Woman Without a Tongue
Not all Glamis ghosts have such clearly defined identities.
One of the stranger apparitions is a woman reportedly seen wandering the castle or grounds.
According to tradition, she has no tongue.
Some versions claim the woman’s tongue was cut out because she knew a secret she wasn’t supposed to reveal.
Precisely what that secret was varies.
Inevitably, some storytellers connected her with the great Secret of Glamis.
Perhaps she knew about the Monster.
Perhaps she discovered the hidden room.
Perhaps she knew something entirely different.
Or perhaps the story was created because a castle famous for an unspeakable secret almost inevitably needed a ghost who had literally been prevented from speaking.
The Ghostly Boy
Another apparition is traditionally described as a young servant or page boy.
He has reportedly appeared near a doorway or seated in parts of the castle.
Unlike some of Glamis’s more frightening spirits, the boy is generally regarded as mischievous rather than threatening.
Stories claim that he sometimes trips unsuspecting visitors.
The identity of the child is uncertain.
As happens frequently in old haunted buildings, the apparition seems better established in folklore than the biography later attached to it.
Ghosts in the Bedrooms
Glamis also accumulated stories of apparitions appearing beside beds.
Guests reportedly awakened to discover figures standing over them.
Other witnesses described sensations of being watched while sleeping.
Earl Beardie himself sometimes appears in these accounts, although the identities of nocturnal apparitions vary considerably.
Old castles naturally produce strange nighttime experiences.
Wood contracts.
Stone carries sound.
Fireplaces create drafts.
Heavy curtains move.
Moonlight transforms furniture.
But generations of guests at Glamis interpreted at least some of those experiences differently.
They believed someone else was in the room.
A Ghost in Every Room
Eventually, Glamis developed the reputation of having a ghost in practically every room.
That is almost certainly folklore rather than a literal inventory.
But it conveys something important about the castle’s reputation.
Glamis doesn’t possess one famous haunting.
It possesses an entire supernatural population.
The Grey Lady.
Earl Beardie.
The tongueless woman.
The servant boy.
Unidentified apparitions.
Strange noises.
Figures on the battlements.
And, depending upon how one interprets the story, perhaps the unfortunate Monster himself.
The ghosts became inseparable from the architecture.
The Peculiar Effect of Glamis
Older accounts sometimes went beyond individual apparitions and described Glamis itself as having an unusual atmosphere.
One tradition claimed that the castle exerted a peculiar influence upon women and an almost fatal influence upon men.
Such statements are impossible to test objectively.
Yet they belong to an interesting category of haunted-house folklore.
Some places are not merely said to contain ghosts.
The building itself is considered wrong.
People become uneasy without knowing why.
Animals refuse to enter certain rooms.
Visitors experience nightmares.
Arguments erupt.
Illness follows.
Misfortune seems to accumulate.
The structure becomes the supernatural entity.
Glamis acquired something of that reputation.
Shakespeare Could Hardly Have Chosen Better
There is an irresistible irony in Glamis’s association with Macbeth.
Shakespeare needed a setting for ambition, betrayal, murder, prophecy, and supernatural dread.
Centuries later, the real Glamis developed a reputation containing almost exactly those ingredients.
A king supposedly died there.
A noblewoman was burned for treason.
A gambler challenged the Devil.
A hidden prisoner supposedly lived behind secret walls.
Ghosts wandered through bedrooms and chapels.
Something terrible was known only to selected members of the family.
If Shakespeare had invented all of it, critics might accuse him of overdoing things.
Is Glamis Castle Really Haunted?
There is no historical method capable of proving that a ghost walks through the chapel or that Earl Beardie continues his eternal card game.
Some of the castle’s most famous stories are clearly folklore.
Others contain kernels of genuine history that accumulated supernatural details over generations.
Janet Douglas really existed and really suffered a horrific execution.
The Lyon family really has occupied Glamis for centuries.
The castle really does contain architectural features resulting from centuries of construction and alteration.
The Monster of Glamis really became a major nineteenth-century mystery, even though convincing evidence that the supposed hidden heir existed has never emerged.
That mixture is precisely what makes Glamis so compelling.
There is always enough history beneath the legend to keep the legend alive.
The Secret of Glamis Castle
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Glamis is that its greatest mystery has never received a satisfying ending.
If the Monster never existed, what originally produced the extraordinary secrecy?
If there really was a hidden chamber, what was inside it?
Was the story based upon the Ogilvies?
Was it distorted family gossip?
Did an inaccessible architectural space inspire increasingly elaborate speculation?
Or was there genuinely something at Glamis that the family desperately wanted concealed?
More than a century after the Secret of Glamis became famous, there is still no universally accepted answer.
The castle remains standing.
The family remains associated with it.
Visitors still walk through its rooms.
And somewhere behind the walls may be nothing more extraordinary than centuries of stone, renovations, and forgotten passages.
But Glamis has always offered another possibility.
Perhaps there really is a room you aren’t being shown.
And perhaps that’s where its best stories begin.
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