The Ghost of Inverawe — The Ticonderoga Prophecy

Bonawe Iron Furnace, Taynuilt, Argyll, Scotland

A murdered man's ghost warned Duncan Campbell of Inverawe to beware a place he'd never heard of. He met it anyway, decades later and an ocean away, at the Battle of Ticonderoga.

Duncan Campbell of Inverawe, born around 1702, held the estate of Inverawe near Taynuilt in Argyll before rising to major in the Black Watch, the 42nd Regiment of Foot. The story told of him begins with a stranger arriving at Inverawe seeking shelter, exhausted and pursued. Campbell, bound by Highland custom to protect anyone under his roof, hid the man without asking his business. Only afterward did he learn that his guest had killed a kinsman of Campbell's own — leaving him torn between the law of hospitality he had already extended and the obligation of vengeance the killing demanded. That night, the murdered kinsman's ghost is said to have appeared to Campbell, demanding he give up the fugitive. When Campbell refused, the ghost gave him a warning instead: that the two of them would meet again, at a place called Ticonderoga. Campbell had never heard the name, and could find no one who had. The name resurfaced decades later, an ocean away, at the Battle of Carillon on the 8th of July, 1758 — a British assault on the French-held fort the Americans and British both later called Ticonderoga. Campbell was wounded in the arm during the fighting; the arm was amputated, and he died of his wounds nine or ten days later, having finally arrived at the place the ghost had named. The story was popularised for a wider audience by Robert Louis Stevenson, who turned it into the poem "Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Highlands," published in 1887 — more than a century after Campbell's death, and proof of how durable the legend had remained in Highland memory in the meantime.