The Curse of Culloden

Culloden Moor, Highland, Scotland

The battlefield where the Highland clan system died in 1746. Visitors report sounds of battle, the smell of gunpowder, and apparitions of dying Jacobites — and the land itself seems to repel development.

The Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746 lasted less than an hour. In that time, perhaps 1,500 Jacobite Highlanders were killed outright, with thousands more hunted down in the weeks and months that followed. It was the last pitched battle on British soil and the effective end of the Highland clan system. The land at Culloden has been strange ever since. Visitors to the moor — which is maintained by the National Trust for Scotland — report consistent phenomena that have been recorded since the 18th century: the sound of men shouting or screaming in conditions where no explanation is available; the smell of gunpowder on windless days; figures in period dress seen moving across the moor and vanishing. Several visitors have reported feeling sudden, overwhelming grief at specific points on the battlefield — grief that has no personal referent and disappears immediately on leaving the site. Animals behave unusually at Culloden. Dogs refuse to cross certain sections of the moor. Horses that are ridden across the battlefield have bolted without apparent cause at the same coordinates on multiple separate occasions. Development in the area has been persistently difficult. A housing development proposed for the land adjacent to the battlefield in the 1980s was plagued with construction accidents and eventually abandoned. The contractors described the site as 'wrong.' The clan stones — grave markers for the clans that fell — have never been disturbed, even by vandals. Local explanation for this is simple: no one wants to touch them.