The Cauld Lad of Hilton Tower

Hilton Tower, Berwickshire, Scotland

A boy's ghost trapped in the rafters of a Berwickshire pele tower, slamming kitchen doors until released by being clothed.

Hilton Tower stands on the Whiteadder Water in Berwickshire, one of the surviving pele towers of the old Border country — square, stone-walled, built for a family's survival when raiders came north from England in the moss-trooping years of the 1500s. The Cauld Lad — the Cold Lad — was said to be a kitchen boy murdered by the laird or his cook, depending on which version is told. Some accounts say he was beaten to death; others that he was simply left to die one winter in the lower chamber where the household stored ale. His ghost was reported continuously from the 1620s onward. He was not malicious. Cold-fingered, restless, audible mostly above the kitchen and store-rooms: doors that opened by themselves, scullery pans set rattling in the night, the small heavy footsteps of a child running where no child lived. The household became used to him. By the eighteenth century the servants spoke of him as one might speak of weather. The deliverance — common to many Border kitchen-ghosts — came when a maid left out a small cloak and hood for him, as one might for a brownie. After that night the slamming stopped, the pans were quiet, and a faint cold voice was heard saying he was gone. The tower was abandoned in the nineteenth century and is now an ivy-thick ruin, but local children are still told not to enter alone, lest the offer be undone and the Cauld Lad return to find his cloak gone.