The Hermitage Castle is believed to be one of the most haunted buildings in Scotland. The wandering spirit of Mary, Queen of Scots, has supposedly been witnessed in this imposing fortress. It was also the place where a medieval nobleman, Sir Alexander Ramsay de Dalhousie, was imprisoned and starved to death. Occasionally sinister figures in bloodstained armor have been glimpsed on stormy nights, while strange headless shapes have also been sighted, as well as mysterious faces in the upper deck windows.
Now a sinister ruin, Hermitage Castle sits near the English border in Roxburghshire, a few miles north of the village of Newcastleton. It dates back to the mid-1200s and changed hands several times during its long and dramatic history, becoming the property of Douglas, then Hepburn, and finally the Scott family before being handed over to the nation in 1930.
Arguably the most notorious ghost of the Hermitage is that of William de Soulis. Known to posterity as Bad Lord Soulis, he was a Scottish nobleman during the Wars of Independence, with the title Lord of Liddesdale. He was also supposedly a sorcerer who practiced black magic in the castle and murdered many children in the area, using their mortal remains in horrible rites.
Soulis was a great bear and a fearsome warrior. Apparently, he was educated in the dark arts by Michael Scot, a reclusive wizard who resided in Eildon Hills. Scottish folklore relates how Soulis was practically indestructible, having acquired armor with magical properties. It couldn’t be hurt by the rope or the steel. Soulis is also said to have hired the services of Robin Redcap, a mythical creature so named because the cap he was wearing was covered in human blood.
The residents of Liddesdale managed to recruit a powerful champion in their battle with the witcher, a giant known as the Cout of Keilder. Soulis invited the giant and his men to dinner at the Hermitage castle and, despite being warned against by a local seer, he accepted the invitation. At a given signal, Soulis’s entourage slaughtered Cout’s men, but the giant managed to escape the castle, vehemently pursued by Soulis’s garrison. They managed to catch up with the Cout and drowned him in a nearby pool, pinning him underwater with their spears. Two stone studs, separated at some distance, are said to mark the place where the giant was buried.
Not knowing what to do, the locals appealed to the king himself, Robert the Bruce. He is said to have responded with the following: “Boil it if necessary, but don’t let me hear any more from it.” The peasants took the king’s word for it and, after consulting the famous prophet Thomas the Rimer, a group of them surprised Soulis in his castle. They dragged him to a stone circle on a nearby hill called the Nine Stane Rig. Here a terrible fate awaited the evil sorcerer, because in the center of this stone circle, the inhabitants of Liddesdales had prepared a huge cauldron filled with molten lead. They then pushed Soulis, head first, into the cauldron and boiled him alive.
However, the reality of Soulis’s disappearance is not that colorful, as historical records claim that he actually died while imprisoned in Dumbarton Castle for treason. He had been plotting against the king and his estates were lost in 1320. Soulis was descended from King Alexander II and therefore had a remote claim to the crown. His grandmother was Ermengarde Durward, who was the daughter of Marjorie, a bastard daughter of Alexander. The legendary version of Soulis’s death bears some similarity to the ending of Ranulf de Soulis, a distant relative who was supposedly killed by his servants in the early 1200s, as well as the fate of John Melville of Glenbervie, of whom tradition says that It was boiled in a pot in 1421.
Regardless of the way Lord Soulis died, some believe that the witcher has not yet completely left his earthly abode. One theory tells how every seven years Bad Lord Soulis returns to the Hermitage, where he descends into a secret underground vault and indulges in evil rites with the infamous Robin Redcap. The sounds of devilish laughter, attributed to the evil lord and his hideous assistant, as well as the hideous screams of his victims, are still said to echo around the castle in the dead of night.