Airth Castle - Scotland

Hello, this may seem a little tame for this board, but I want to share my encounters anyway.

I have always enjoyed the paranormal for entertainment but kept with me a healthy dose of scepticism when it came to real-life stories. Growing up, my mother was very much into the supernatural or anything paranormal. Psychic, ghosts, the afterlife, you name it. This installed in me from a very young age a sceptical outlook on things of this nature. Instead, I would learn how psychic and paranormal experts fake evidence or cold read and things of this nature to basically debunk my mum, although I always was entertained by her stories on some level. She would always tell me stories about my supposed 'gift' to communicate with ghosts from a young age and how my family members refused to babysit me because I "creeped them out" too much. I also have a lot of memories of being young and strange, unexplainable and downright creepy things happening to me all the time, but I would cope with it by justifying how there must be some logical explanation such as sleepwalking or just my overactive child's mind or something. There is one experience though that always stuck with me I witnessed as an adult. I wouldn't say it changed my mind but there is something about this I cannot let go of or rationalise away. I even get emotional and start to tear up a little when I think about it today, which is unlike me.

I am now 28 years old, but when I was 21 I worked in a 4-star hotel/spa named Airth Castle in Scotland located just outside of Stirling where many of the bloody and violent wars Scotland is historically known for took place. This is a real place, and already has a reputation for being 'haunted', feel free to Google it if you like. I want to tell you my experiences of working in this hotel, and the strange events I experienced while working there.

To give context, the hotel is made up of 2 main buildings. The first is a new building, a typical hotel where the guests stay with luxury dining and spa etc. The other building is the castle itself, which is mainly only used for weddings and one time Sean Penn stayed with us while filming a movie, that was pretty cool. I worked as a Kitchen Porter. My job was to wash dishes, clean up, basically all the kitchen duties which didn't involve cooking to allow the chef to focus on preparing the food. Whenever there was a wedding which needed to be catered for, some of us would be sent up to the castle to work there. Eventually, I refused to work in the castle.

Of course, the staff there knew about the castle's reputation and would tell each other stories about what they had heard. In my sceptical mind, I simply rationalised it as local entertainment and just got on with my work. One of the most frequent occurrences that would be reported is that whenever guests would stay in the castle, they would phone the front desk in the main building and tell us that they could hear children playing and running around, and ask if we could send someone up to deal with the children... there were never any children in the building. The castle was always reserved for the bride and groom to have the place to themselves. I cannot stress how common this complaint was. Almost everyone who stayed in the castle reported the same story of being disturbed by the sounds of children playing in the hallways. Sometimes, late at night, I could hear the sounds of running coming from the upstairs balcony in the central room of the castle. If I was ever brave enough to go investigate, it would stop.

The basement floor of the castle has been turned into a few guest rooms and storage space for the staff to use. It looked like any other floor of a hotel, not the creepy basement of a castle you would expect. There are reports that this floor is haunted by a groundskeeper and also I have a few stories about people telling me about a phantom dog they could hear barking. I never encountered either of these spirits, but the reason I am mentioning it is that the basement floor of this castle especially terrified me. Every time I was there I felt the most uncomfortable feeling, like when people tell you they 'feel like someone is watching them' or something. That entire floor gave me the most uneasy feeling as if I could feel someone breathing down my neck or I was surrounded by something. I was never able to go down there without feeling stiff and having the most horrible feeling of dread come over me. It's hard to put into words. I hated going down there.

If you stand outside the castle facing it, there is a dining room just to the left of the entrance on the ground floor. In this room, there is an enormous painting of a woman (I forget who she is, a wife of the commander or something who lived there). This painting was also especially creepy. She has such a stern look on her face which I guess was common for that era and style. Very regal looking. There were a lot of unexplained noises that came from the area this painting is located like knocking and banging etc. One time a group of us were standing in that room commenting on how depressing the painting looked, only to be interupted by a slow scratching noise that went all the way from the top to the bottom of the 10-foot high wall the painting was hanging on. Old castles like this do not have hollow walls, not like a loose piece of stone could have been falling inside the hollow wall or anything, which was my first thought. We could not figure out where this noise came from.

My most frightening moment inside that castle happened one night during a wedding. The chefs had finished with their jobs and had taken everything back down to the main building. I was left in the kitchen to finish washing up and cleaning. The guests had left and the bride and groom were, well, it's not my business what they were up to. There only other people in the castle were a few remaining waiting staff also finishing tidying up. I went out the side door to the castle to have a cigarette. Let me take a second to describe the layout of the kitchen for you. The south-west corner of the kitchen was the entrance to the kitchen, the south-east corner was the washing up area where I was working, the north-east corner was a passageway to a small room where we kept plates, cutlery and a walk-in fridge. When I came back into the kitchen after finishing my cigarette, I could hear someone working in the back room, moving cutlery around and stacking plates, normal sounds of someone else working so I paid no attention to it and got back to washing dishes. After a few minutes, I heard the working sounds from the other room stop and the room fell silent for a while. Sounded like nobody was moving which I thought was strange. Another piece of information that you need to know is that me and one of the girls I worked with at the time would play this game where we would try to creep up on each other and scare the other person. When the sounds of working stopped and there was an unusual silence, I figured 'Aha! This is that girl, she is about to try to scare me'. My plan was to continue working like normal, then when she jumped out to try to scare me I would just be cool as a cucumber and be like 'Nice try! haha'. I waited for a full minute, she never jumped out, I waited for a second minute, still nothing. Thinking she was just REALLY committed to this joke, I went to investigate. I walked into this room and nobody was there! I cannot describe how hard my heart jumped when I walked into the room to find nobody there. I started questioning my own sanity and freaking out. I DEFINITELY heard someone working back here for a good 30-60 seconds before it stopped. The workstations the chefs used formed kind of an alley you had to walk through to get out of the kitchen, nobody could have left the kitchen without walking directly by me washing dishes and since I was on high alert I definitely would have noticed someone leaving. The incident really freaked me out! I had to leave the building for a while and really did not want to go back in to finish my shift.

Another time, I was working in the same kitchen and the night security guy came through looking confused and told me to follow him (this security guy also had more than his fair share of creepy stories while walking around this building at night, but we will get back to that in a minute). He took me through to a room at the back which had a small bar and was used to entertain the wedding guests sometimes, this room was not in use that night. He asked me to tell him if I could smell anything. Upon stepping into this room I immediately was hit with an overwhelming smell of cigar smoke. He insisted nobody had been using this room and the guests left a while ago. Apparently, this room was previously used as the aforementioned commander's study where he would draw up battle plans and spend time alone.

Since I was normally working quite late, I knew this night security guy pretty well. We talked about all the creepy stuff we had both encountered in the castle and he was insistent that it was not just stories. He began telling me all of his stories and just how common they occurred, after all, he was the guy who had to go check the castle out every time a guest complained about the children running around. He told me his encounters were so frequent and unignorable he had begun to do deep research into the history of the castle and its previous inbahitants. Apparently, there were 2 children who had died in a fire there once (the children of the woman in the painting in the dining room). Their nanny had run back into the building to try to save them and was also killed by the fire. The night security guy told me he had personally taken a photograph of the castle and in one of the upstairs rooms, slightly left of the entrance you could clearly see a nanny with 2 children standing in front of her looking out the window at him. Although shaken from other strange experiencesa little, my rational, sceptical mind was still there. He was a tall slim man in his 40's, spent a lot of time alone, walking around a castle investigating disturbances constantly. I figured he might have been exaggerating or making it up for a good ghost story but, the next day, he brought in the photo to show me. In the upstairs window, just like he said, was 2 children and their nanny looking directly out the window. Clear as day. I don't know if that man still works there or not, but he owns a picture that will give you the creeps. He doesn't seem to have put it online. I looked. If anyone from Airth Castle reads this, and a man matching that description still works there as a night security guard. Tell him I am looking for this picture. Send it to me!

Once he showed me this photo, that was the last time I was ever in that castle. Every time a wedding was happening I would refuse to go cater for it. "I'm not going! Send someone else!"... eventually, I was fired from that job because me and the manager would frequently fall out over this but I honestly don't care. I never wanted to go near that place again.

Despite keeping my scepticism, I admit there was something about that place that just wasn't right. I will remember that job, and that castle until the day I die. Just thinking about being back in that building gives me the creeps.

One last thing. If you did decide to Google this castle, you may see that there was a national news story about the castle where someone snapped a photo during one of the weddings and captured an eerie green ghost shape in the picture. This photo was taken in the room we smelled the cigar smoke in. Although this is an old news story I didn't read about it or see this picture until today. This is what triggered me to share these stories. I hope you enjoyed them.