Glamis Castle sits in the rolling Angus countryside, its grey stone towers rising against the Grampian foothills like something from a darker version of a fairy tale. It has been the ancestral home of the Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne since 1372, and it’s one of those places where centuries of genuine history have blended so thoroughly with legend that the two are almost impossible to pull apart.

Most people know Glamis as the childhood home of HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, and as the birthplace of Princess Margaret. It’s also the castle loosely immortalised in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, though the fictional Thane of Glamis and the real castle share little beyond a name. For anyone drawn to the darker side of Scottish history, the castle has a far older and more troubling story to tell.

The event that defines Glamis’s paranormal reputation more than any other is the fate of Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis. In 1537 she was convicted of witchcraft and treason against King James V — a charge most historians regard as entirely fabricated, the result of a long-running feud between the king and the Douglas family. She was burned alive at Edinburgh Castle, and is said to have never left Glamis entirely. Her presence is reported to this day, most often in the chapel, where visitors describe a quiet, sorrowful female figure drifting between the pews.

Then there’s Earl Beardie — a gambler of legend who supposedly played cards with the Devil on a Sunday and was condemned to play forever in a sealed room somewhere within the castle’s thick walls. Reports of swearing, footsteps and general disturbance from walled-off sections of the building have circulated for generations. The identity of Earl Beardie is disputed; some accounts point to Alexander Lyon, 2nd Lord Glamis, others to the 4th Earl of Crawford. The room itself has never been publicly identified, which only adds to the legend.

Perhaps the strangest legend of all is the Monster of Glamis — the story of a hideously deformed heir, born to the Strathmore family and hidden away in a secret chamber rather than allowed to inherit the earldom. The tale has circulated since at least the 19th century, with various versions suggesting the creature was still alive as late as the 1800s. No credible evidence has ever been produced, and the castle itself dismisses it — though the dismissal, inevitably, only seems to deepen the fascination. Glamis features in our round-up of haunted castles in Scotland, and it consistently tops reader interest by some margin.

Whether these legends reflect genuine paranormal activity or centuries of accumulated storytelling is a question worth sitting with. Scientific investigation methods haven’t been applied rigorously here — what Glamis has is something older and perhaps more interesting: a reputation built not by TV crews or ghost nights, but by the weight of its own history.