The Severed Wife of Meggernie Castle

Meggernie Castle, Glen Lyon, Perthshire, Scotland

A 17th-century laird of Meggernie killed his wife and walled her into the castle tower in two halves. The upper half of her ghost is seen in the north wing, the lower in the south, and they rarely meet.

Meggernie Castle is a 16th-century tower-house in upper Glen Lyon, set in a wooded haugh of the River Lyon. It was built by the Campbells of Glenlyon — the same family responsible for the 1692 Massacre of Glencoe — and is one of the most remote inhabited castles in Britain. The road into Glen Lyon ends within sight of it. The ghost-story is from the late 17th century. The laird of the time was a violent man who, having returned from a long absence to find his young wife in some way unsatisfactory, killed her in a fit of rage. To conceal the body and prevent ecclesiastical investigation, he is said to have cut her in two at the waist. He concealed the upper half in a sealed chamber of the north wing and the lower half in a sealed chamber of the south. He then announced she had run off to be with a lover in Edinburgh, returned to his estate management, and outlived her by some thirty years. The ghost manifests in two parts. The upper half of the murdered wife — head, arms, torso — appears in the corridors of the north wing, sometimes drifting at ceiling height, sometimes hovering at the level of a person's waist. The lower half — hips, legs, feet — walks the corridors of the south wing, apparently independently, with no upper body visible. Both halves are dressed in 17th-century shift and bodice. Guests at the castle over three centuries have reported encountering one or the other. On exceedingly rare occasions, the two halves meet in the long gallery that connects the wings. Witnesses to this — fewer than ten over recorded history — describe seeing the figure briefly complete before the halves separate again and retreat to their respective wings. No account suggests the wife seems to wish anyone harm. The folklorist J.G. Campbell, writing in 1900, noted that "she desires only to be re-membered, in the literal sense." The Meggernie ghost is unusual in Scottish folklore for the specific and unforgettable nature of the wrong. Murder is common in tales. Sequential dismemberment and walling-up is not.