Rog Wood: A couple of spooky tales for Hallowe'en

A well-documented local ghost, regularly seen by trout fishermen, was also encountered by Lloyd Richards from Liverpool while spending a holiday with his wife's family in 1977 in the Lanarkshire village of Leadhills.

One day Lloyd was walking alone in the Lowther Hills above Wanlockhead when a mist come down, though it was midsummer. Suddenly, out of the mist, came a young woman dressed in strange clothes, carrying a wicker basket and seemingly distressed. As Lloyd went towards her, he heard her say, "Look in the stones!", but before he could reach her, she had disappeared into the mist.

Lloyd later discussed the strange encounter with his family and they told him that 100 years earlier, a young girl called Jenny Miller set out to walk over the hills from Kirkhope Farm, where she worked, to her sister's wedding at Wanlockhead. As she crossed the hills, she was caught in a blizzard and stumbled into the workings of an old mine, where her body was found a few days later.

The locals built a cairn on the spot. On a piece of stone they carved the words "In memoriam, Jenny Miller 1877". The cairn still stood, but the inscription had disappeared. Intrigued, Lloyd and two others, set out to find the cairn. Sure enough, there it was by the old lead mine. Then Lloyd remembered that the ghostly figure had said "Look in the stones". One by one he searched through the rocks in the cairn - and buried there, in two halves, he found the stone bearing Jenny's name. The stone is now in the mining museum at Wanlockhead.

Wraiths differ from ghosts in that they are apparitions in the likeness of people still living and are supposed to be seen either at the time of the death of the person whose likeness is seen, or immediately before. The following is a well authenticated case of one.

A man called Peter Hastie, who lived in my home town of Sanquhar, saw a remarkable apparition when he was a youth. He had been brought up in the nearby village of Kirkconnel and had a school friend called Thomas Blacklock, who, like himself, went to work on a farm after leaving school. Blacklock started work at Nether Cairn, while Hastie started work at Kelloside, a distance of two miles separating the farms.

One day in spring Hastie was engaged in carting manure from the farm steading to one of the fields near the public road. About one o'clock, when he was going with his first load after lunch he saw, just before he reached the gate, his friend Thomas Blacklock coming down the road to meet him, which made him wonder what could be bringing him here at that time of day.

Being at this time at the gate leading into the field, Hastie caught hold of the bridle to lead the horse in, but the beast was startled at something. One of the wheels struck the gate post upsetting the cart, and Hastie narrowly escaped it falling on him.

The people in the field, on seeing his predicament, ran to his assistance and quickly put things to rights. His friend Blacklock, however, instead of lending a hand, stood quietly looking on. Hastie couldn't understand his lack of action in view of the fact they were close friends, but being busy at the time he only gave the matter a passing thought. Once everything was put right again he looked round for his friend, but he was nowhere to be seen nor had any of the field workers seen him.

That evening, when returning from their work, Hastie and his fellow workers were met by a man from nearby Cairn Farm who told them that that day about one o'clock Thomas Blacklock had been accidentally killed.

It appear that at Nether Cairn Blacklock had, like his friend, been carting manure. He had taken a load after lunch and was in the act of returning, sitting on the empty cart, when the horse took fright, ran away and threw him out. His head struck a large stone and he was killed on the spot. The time of Thomas Blacklock's tragic death corresponded exactly with the time Peter Hastie saw the appearance of his old companion and when he himself had an accident with his own cart.