The Grey Friar of Castle Menzies

Castle Menzies, Weem, Perthshire, Scotland

A friar in a coarse grey habit walks the long gallery of Castle Menzies. He is associated with the medieval chapel that pre-dates the castle by two centuries.

Castle Menzies is a fortified 16th-century Z-plan tower-house at Weem, near Aberfeldy. It is the seat of the Chief of Clan Menzies and was the family's principal residence from its construction in 1571 until the line failed in 1918. The castle stands on a site of much greater antiquity: the medieval church of Saint Cuthbert at Weem, founded in the 13th century, lay on the same ground, and the castle's foundations partly overlie its cemetery. The Grey Friar is associated not with the castle itself but with this earlier ecclesiastical layer. He is described as a small man in a coarse undyed grey wool habit, hooded, with the cord-belt of an unspecified mendicant order. He walks the long gallery on the first floor of the castle — the room laid out, by Menzies tradition, directly over the line of the former cloister of the medieval church. The Friar is among the more frequently reported castle-ghosts in Perthshire because Castle Menzies has been a public-access historic house since 1972, after a long restoration. Visitors and volunteer guides have logged encounters with him in the long gallery in every decade since opening. He does not respond to questions. He is described as appearing solid — not transparent — but as fading when looked at directly for more than a few seconds. He is never seen below the first floor. The folkloric explanation is that he was a member of the small Celtic monastic community at Weem in the 13th or 14th century, possibly killed or persecuted during one of the periodic ecclesiastical disturbances of the Highland period, and that his ghost is bound to the cloister-line whose foundations lie beneath the castle. The Menzies family, while it held the castle, treated him with respect: a place was customarily kept for him at family meals in the long gallery for centuries.