Three Weird Ghosts That Would Make Good Characters
Ghost stories are a staple of genre writing. But their popularity means sometimes writers need to find fresh phantoms. So here are a few lesser known ghosts that might make good characters.
In the same vein (haha), check out some unusual vampires.
The Drummer of Cortachy
Some families are lucky (or unlucky) enough to merit a little fanfare before they depart this world of sorrows. In Ireland, banshees give a wailing lament for those who are about to die. A few important families even have their own private banshee, which is what happened to the Ogilvy family in Scotland, owners of Cortachy Castle in Angus. Except their personal death omen is not a weeping woman, but a drummer.
The legend of the drummer varies, of course, but the basics are that some poor guy with a drum angered the Earl of Airlie, head of the Oglivy family, possibly because the drummer brought bad news to the castle. The Earl seems to have overreacted a tad—he had the drummer stuffed into his own drum and thrown over the battlements. After that, unsurprisingly, the family was plagued with phantom drumming.
Guests at Cortachy Castle are said to have heard the drummer, but mentioning it to their hosts always causes calamity, because the drummer presages a family death. It’s even rumored that frightened Oglivy family members sometimes died as a self-fulfilling prophecy after an appearance from the drummer. However, no drumming has been heard since about 1900, so perhaps the ghost decided he was sufficiently revenged and finally drummed his way to the afterlife.
Ocean-Born Mary
This one’s a wild ride, so buckle up. In 1720, a ship sailing from Ireland to New Hampshire encountered pirates. The pirates were about to kill all those on the ship when their leader, Captain Pedro, heard the cry of a baby. Earlier that day, the wife of the Irish captain had given birth to a baby girl. Captain Pedro vowed to spare the lives of everyone aboard if the baby was named Mary, after his own mother. Everyone obviously agreed, and Captain Pedro even gave the baby a gift of green brocaded silk to use for her future wedding gown. True to his word, he let the Irish ship go and it reached New Hampshire as planned.
Sounds like a great story! But it doesn’t end there. Mary grew up to be a six-foot tall woman with flaming red hair. She married wearing her gown of green silk and had four sons. But her husband died early, leaving her to raise her boys alone.
Meanwhile, pirate Captain Pedro had given up his life of piracy and settled down in a nearby New Hampshire town. He was aging and lonely, so he found Mary again and hired her as his housekeeper, helping her raise the boys in his gorgeous Georgian mansion. Eventually, Captain Pedro’s former life caught up to him, and he was murdered in his own garden by an unknown sailor. Mary inherited the house and lived there until her death at 94.
This being a ghost story—some say she’s still there. The house seems to be protected by a caring spirit who welcomes guests, runs off vandals, and extinguishes the odd accidental fire on the property. Mary is sometimes seen walking around or departing the house in a phantom coach.
It’s a cool story, but believe it or not, Mary Wallace was a real person. Check out the New England Historical Society for what’s fact and fiction (pirates encountering a new baby yes, green silk probably, Captain Pedro finding Mary again in his old age, no).
Radiant Boys
We’ll end with a spookier ghost. Let’s say you’re a guest in a grand house or castle, and you go to sleep in a lovely room with a blazing fire in the fireplace. In the middle of the night, you awake to see a glowing light, but you realize it’s not the fire, which has gone out. Instead, it’s an incredibly beautiful young boy dressed in white, surrounded by golden light, like an angel. After a few moments of gazing at you, the boy floats over to the cold fireplace and disappears. What would you do?
Well, in the stories, the guests uniformly react to this lovely, apparently harmless spirit with terror, which may tell you something about what kind of vibes this kid actually gives off. In fact, radiant boys are omens of bad luck and violent death. In some versions of the legend, someone who has seen a radiant boy will ascend to great power before losing it all in a terrible fall from grace, followed by death. In the stories, frightened guests flee their host’s home the next morning and cannot be convinced to return.
So why are these golden boys so dangerous? Because radiant boys represent innocence and purity meeting a dreadful betrayal and death: they are the ghosts of boys murdered by their own mothers.
Thanks for reading! Good luck writing a legend of your own!
Source: Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. Facts on File, 1992. On Goodreads
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