71. Samhain and the Haunted Highlands
71. Samhain and the Haunted Highlands  
Podcast: Highway to Hell
Published On: Fri Oct 30 2026
Description: We are back and Happy Halloween! Since Monte just got back from Scotland-we figured we could give you a highland special! Thank you to hellions on patreon.com/highwaytohell - you will get the full download of Monte's entire itinerary there! In 1891 a chemistry professor alone on Ben Macdui heard footsteps behind him in the mist, each stride three times his own, and ran four miles down the mountain. In 1662 a farmer's wife at Auldearn told a notary, without torture, the rhyme she used to turn into a hare. In 1692 soldiers who had eaten the MacDonalds' food for twelve nights got up at five in the morning and shot their hosts. And this week, in a glen in Perthshire, somebody carried a family of stones into a thatched hut and shut the door on them for the winter, the way it's been done every Samhain since at least the 1880s.This episode follows the oldest layer of Celtic belief from the Highlands of Scotland, starting with the Bronze Age cairns at Clava and the Cailleach, the old woman of winter, and moving forward through the first written record of Samhain on a Gaulish calendar, Columba's beast in the River Ness in 565, the Hallowe'en fires, the cup of ale offered to the sea god Shony on Lewis, the bull sacrifices on Loch Maree, the fairy faith of Robert Kirk, Isobel Gowdie's confessions, the water horse, the baobhan sith, the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui, the Brahan Seer, the last witch burned in Britain, the massacre at Glencoe, Culloden, the Clearances, the three keepers who vanished from the Flannan Isles, and the bearded sailor of Sandwood Bay. We go across the sea to the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders of Darien, Georgia, who signed the South's first anti-slavery petition in 1739, the Cape Fear settlements, the dumb suppers of Appalachia, how guising became trick-or-treat and the turnip became a pumpkin, how Walter Scott's fiery cross ended up on Stone Mountain in 1915, and how a god named Samhain who never existed got into American church pamphlets.SourcesAdomnán, Life of St Columba (c. 697), trans. Sharpe (1995)Hugh G. Allison, Culloden Tales (2007)Robert Burns, "Halloween" (1785) and notesAlexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica (1900)J. Norman Collie, address to the Cairngorm Club, Dec. 1925Mike Dash, "The Vanishing Lighthousemen of Eilean Mor," Fortean Studies 4 (1998)John H. Dixon, Gairloch in North-West Ross-shire (1886)Major Robert Duncanson, order to Glenlyon, 12 Feb. 1692Affleck Gray, The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui (1970)Northern Lighthouse Board: Harvie telegram, Moore and Muirhead reports (1900–01)Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth (1691)Donald Macleod, Gloomy Memories (1841)Alexander Mackenzie, The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer (1877)Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703)Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland (1769, 1772)Robert Pitcairn, Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, vol. 3 (1833)Presbytery of Dingwall records, 1656 and 1678R. Macdonald Robertson, Selected Highland Folktales (1961)Alexander Tewnion, "A Shot in the Mist," The Scots Magazine, June 1958The Times, report from Croick, 2 June 1845Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie (2010)Also: Canmore, Spooky Isles (Cape Wrath), Spooky Scotland (Culloden), Undiscovered Scotland, University of Aberdeen (Brahan Seer study), Your Ghost Stories no. 8902, and Alex Cochrane's Sandwood Bay blog with reader comment by Granville Parker.