Sanquhar Castle

Sanquhar Castle, once home of the Crichtons of Durnfries, stands in ruins now but remains the haunt of the ghost of a man called John Wilson. John Wilson was the innocent party in a dispute that was going on in the late 1590s between Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, John’s master, and Douglas of Drumlanrig, ally of Robert Crichton, Lord of Sanquhar and Sheriff of Nithsdalc. As an act of sheer spite against Wilson’s master, Crichton had John Wilson locked up in jail, falsely accused of certain crimes. When Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick tried to protest Wilson’s innocence, Crichton retaliated by having Wilson hanged. Wilson’s ghost, groaning and rattling its chains, haunts the ruins of Sanquhar Castle as a testament of its
one-time owner’s barbarism and cruelty.

A second, female ghost is also said to haunt Sanquhar. She is a white lady, with long, pale tresses, quite beautiful to behold, So they say. Nobody is certain as to the identity of the White Lady, although she is possibly the ghost of Marion of Dalpeddar, who disappeared suspiciously in the 1590s and was thought perhaps to
have befallen an unfortunate fate at the hands of Robert Crichton. In the 1870s, excavations around the castle uncovered the remains of a woman buried in a pit. The skeleton still had some hair attached to the skull. The hair was long and blond. Was this the skeleton of the White Lady of Sanquhar Castle?

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