As I embark on the third year of my degree, I’ve become increasingly convinced of the impossibility of attending the University of St Andrews without being subjected to an account of the town’s storied, medieval history or its status as the ‘home of golf.’ However, what’s almost never mentioned by students or locals alike is the darker side of our quaint town’s history; or, more particularly, those troubled spirits that refuse to be left in the past.
It should be noted that I am certainly not the first to recognize this glaring gap in our ghostly education. In fact, William Thomas Linskill, golfer, author, and eventually even Dean of Guild of St Andrews Town Council, compiled some of the spookiest chapters of our town’s macabre history in his 1921 story collection, St Andrews Ghost Stories.
So, in the spirit (no pun intended) of Halloween’s impending arrival, I would now like to impart the histories of a few of my favorite St Andrews spectres:
The Veiled Nun of St Leonards
Along the path to St Leonards Chapel, a small church that’s been in use since 1413, lies the “Nun’s Walk.” How did the lane receive this nickname, you ask? Well, it all began centuries ago, though no one quite knows the exact date, with a young woman who lived in St Andrews. As the tale goes, this woman was blessed with great beauty, a virtue rivaled only by her intelligence. As such, she caught the eye of many young men in town, though she had no interest in any of these suitors or their marriage proposals. That is, until one man caught her eye, and they were soon engaged.
This is where the tale becomes murkier. Some say that her fiancé died in a tragic accident, while others claim that he simply called off the wedding. Regardless, all versions of the legend agree on what happened next: the young woman, suffering the pain of a broken heart, brandished a sharp knife, which she used to sever off her eyelids and lips, slice her nose from either nostril, cut off her ears, and carve deep welts into her cheeks.
She was eventually taken to a hospital near St Leonards Chapel, where she was cared for by the local nuns. Once she had sufficiently recovered from her injuries, the young woman stayed on at the hospital to help treat new patients, always wearing a veil to obscure her face. Tragically, it was not long before the trauma of the ordeal overcame her, and she soon passed away.
In the centuries since her death, there have been countless reports of a ghostly figure walking the path from St Leonards Chapel to the Pends roadway, dressed all in black and wielding a lantern. Though most sightings are harmless, leaving the victim with nothing more than an eerie chill, some encounters are far less innocuous. In the 1960s, one poor student claimed to have seen the Nun lift her lantern and pull aside her veil, revealing the full horror of her mutilated features. According to a news article, the student was later found slumped against the wall at the bottom of Nun’s Walk, unable to speak other than to mumble “the nun, the nun,” until he was taken to hospital.
The Monk of St Rule’s Tower
Our next ghost story predates even the university itself. All the way back in 1393, St Andrews was home to a famously good-natured man, Prior Robert de Montrose. Though Montrose had a reputation as a fair, generous man, his role as the head of St Andrews Priory required him to occasionally discipline or correct the monks under his authority. One such monk, the infamous Thomas Platter, did not take kindly to being reprimanded. Thus, in a fit of resentment towards the Prior, Platter plotted his revenge. According to some versions of the tale, Platter waited for night to fall one unfortunate evening before creeping into the Prior’s room and stabbing him to death. In other accounts, he followed the Prior all the way to the top of St Rule’s tower one night, before murdering him and throwing him over the parapet.
In any case, since the night of Prior Montrose’s death, his spirit is said to have haunted the ancient walls of St Andrews Cathedral. However, unlike his ghoulish peers, Montrose is, by all accounts, a benevolent spirit. In one well-documented interaction with the undead Prior, from the 1950s, a visitor to St Rule’s Tower recalled stumbling along in the darkness of the steep, narrow stairway. However, it wasn’t long before a man, dressed in a cassock, came to his aid, offering him an arm for guidance. Later, when the monk brushed past the man again on those same steps, the man realized with horror that the kind monk had passed right through him. In the decades since, the monk has been spotted countless times around the St Andrews Cathedral, with many even reporting to have seen him tumble over the parapet. His spirit has remained benevolent and helpful to all who cross his path, a virtue unfortunately not shared by the rest of his spectral peers.
The Beautiful White Lady of the Haunted Tower
For our final tale, I’d like to discuss one of St Andrews’ most elusive, and according to many storytellers, most attractive, phantoms. Said to haunt one of the 13 towers surrounding the St Andrews Cathedral, sightings of the “White Lady” date back to the 1800s. The sightings are all eerily similar, describing a beautiful, pale woman with long black hair, wearing a white dress and white gloves. Some report seeing her in a veil, while others claim to see her reading a book. Nearly everyone, however, reports seeing her haunting the chambers of what would later be known as the “Haunted Tower.”
For a long time, these sightings were considered nothing more than local folklore. That is, up until 1893, when the local press published a story about a professor at the university, who led a secret expedition aimed at uncovering what lay beyond the sealed chamber of The Haunted Tower, which had until then been blocked by nine inches of stone. The article detailed their findings, which included ten coffins, all from different time periods. Nine of the coffins contained male corpses, some of which were wrapped head to toe in white wax cloth. The last coffin, however, contained a woman. And not just any woman. She was a young, beautiful woman, four-and-a-half-feet tall and wearing a long white dress. The article reported that she looked “as if she had fallen asleep that very hour.” All of the corpses remained in a perfect state of preservation, with no indication of who they were or why they had been laid to rest in the tower.
However, the members of the expedition were instantly struck by the female corpse’s uncanny resemblance to the White Lady of the Haunted Tower, whose legend had haunted the town for decades. Even now, in the ruins of the ancient cathedral, the White Lady can often be seen waving her handkerchief from the window of St Rule’s Tower, and is said to hate any trespassers who dare approach the grounds of her tower.