Fyvie Castle began life as a royal stronghold under King William the Lion in the early 13th century, and its pink-walled Scottish Baronial silhouette in the Aberdeenshire countryside is the product of roughly 800 years of continuous building by five successive owning families: the Prestons, the Meldrums, the Setons, the Gordons and the Forbes-Leiths. The castle passed to the National Trust for Scotland in 1984 and opened to the public in 1986, and today holds one of the richest portrait collections in Scotland, including works by Batoni, Romney, Gainsborough and one of the largest collections of Raeburn paintings in the world.

Fyvie’s reputation as, by some tellings, the most haunted castle in north-east Scotland rests on two intertwined legends. The first is a curse attributed to Thomas the Rhymer, the 13th-century Scottish Borders poet and seer: according to tradition, Fyvie’s gates slammed shut in his face after a seven-year wait, and in anger he pronounced that three “weeping stones” built into the castle’s fabric would bring misfortune on the family for as long as they remained there, and that no eldest son would ever inherit while the stones stayed put. Only one of the three stones has ever been recovered, kept today in the Charter Room, where tradition holds it stays wet even when everything around it is dry.

The second, and best-known, legend is the “Green Lady” — the ghost of Dame Lilias Drummond, wife of Sir Alexander Seton, later 1st Earl of Dunfermline. Lilias bore Seton five daughters but no son and, in the story most often told, was effectively cast aside before her death in 1601. Seton remarried within the year, and on the couple’s wedding night in the castle’s Drummond bedroom, they reportedly heard scratching at the window; the next morning, Lilias’s signature was found freshly scratched into the stone windowsill, dated 1601, where it can allegedly still be seen today. Lilias is associated with a claimed drop in room temperature and the smell of roses as signs of her presence. Other, less-elaborated figures reported over the years include a “Grey Lady,” a phantom trumpeter, a little girl called “Annie,” and a cigar-smoking male figure.

Fyvie’s television profile has reinforced this reputation. Most Haunted filmed an episode at the castle in June 2005 with Yvette Fielding, Derek Acorah, Iain Cash and Richard Felix, and the crew described encountering some of the strongest paranormal activity they’d experienced on the series. More recently, the castle featured in Help! My House Is Haunted (Series 1, Episode 8), in which investigators Barri Ghai, Chris Fleming and Jayne Harris spent a night at the property.

Weighed honestly, Fyvie’s evidence is folklore and television rather than anything independently verified: a genuinely old curse legend, a specific and datable, if unverifiable, ghost story attached to a real historical figure, and a high-profile but standard-format TV vigil. Readers weighing how much stock to put in that may find our guide to how ghost hunting evidence gets evaluated useful context. None of which detracts from Fyvie’s status as one of Scotland’s finest and most complete Baronial castles, ghost stories aside.