Do you believe that buildings have the
power to retain the imprints of past events that took place within their walls?
It’s a theme I have explored on a number of occasions – including in my latest
novel, The After-Death of Caroline Rand. Canonbury Manor is a prime
candidate for one such house. and, while that is fictional, the one I am
talking about here is entirely real and was once owned by the infamous Great
Beast himself – Aleister Crowley.
Crowley bought the house at the age of
twenty-three, in 1899 and during his residency was said to have summoned some
115 spirits, including the devil himself. He also conducted an elaborate six
month ‘power-giving’ ceremony there called Abra Melin. It is said that the
grandmaster of the Order of the Golden Dawn – effectively his ‘boss’- interrupted him during the time of this ritual
with an urgent summons to go to Paris. As a result Crowley left, having not shut
the ritual down properly. So, the spirits he summoned to Boleskine stayed
there. These are hardly insignificant ones either – Abra Melin demands the
summoning of the Twelve Kings and Dukes of Hell.
Not that they were alone. Boleskine had a
bizarre reputation for sinister bewitchment dating from long before Crowley’s
time.
Boleskine Kirk, which used to stand on the
shore of Loch Ness, appears to have been one possible source of the cursed land
round and about. Evidently an early minister of that parish was forced to fend
off a wizard who was raising the dead and getting up to all sorts of mischief.
The minister – Thomas Houston (1648-1705) - had to lay the disturbed ghosts to
rest again. But sometime later, fire destroyed the entire church, and all who were
in it, during a sermon.
Fire seems to play a recurring part on
Boleskine’s history – even up to recent times.
In 1762, a visiting bishop noted the
dilapidated state of the church and graveyard, remarking on the lack of walls
of the churchyard and the plethora of human bones scattered everywhere,
including on the floor of the kirk itself. Dogs were witnessed running off with
them.
Soon after this, a committed Jacobite –
Colonel Archibald Fraser – bought the land and built Boleskine House on the
charred remains of the kirk. He also managed to acquire land thereabouts which
had belonged to Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, who switched sides
from Jacobite to Stuart and lost everything including his life (he was
beheaded).
Colonel Fraser’s family retained
possession of the house right up until the time they sold it to Crowley. The
house now entered its darkest time. Crowley had few, if any, redeeming
qualities and took great delight in the suffering he caused the local people by
his sinister practices, which drew in the unwary as well as those with equally
sadistic and perverted preferences. He boasted of how an employee on the
Boleskine estate who had been sober for 20 years was enticed into getting drunk
one night and ended up attempting to kill his wife and children. Then Crowley’s
lodge keeper, Hugh Gillies suffered a series of tragedies. His ten-year-old
daughter died suddenly at school and the following year, his fifteen month old
son suffered convulsions and died on his mother’s knee.
After that a young couple moved in. The
wife was blind. Within a few months, her husband abandoned her there, alone in
the house.
In 1969, film maker Kenneth Anger lived
there during the summer. He saw a heavy painting seemingly detach itself off
the wall, and float down gently to the floor.
A new buyer acquired the house in 1970.
Jimmy Page, legendary guitarist with rock group Led Zeppelin, was fascinated by
Aleister Crowley so much so he had to acquire his house. Yet for all his
enthusiasm for it, he probably spent no more than around six weeks there during
his twenty-year ownership. Instead, Page’s longtime friend Malcolm Dent moved
in with the aim of restoring it. Dent loved living there and raised his family.
A confirmed sceptic when he moved in, by the time he left he acknowledged that
there were some things about the house that he couldn’t explain.
One such instance involved a female guest
who woke up screaming that she had been attacked by some sort of devil. Another
time, Dent himself was woken by what sounded like a wild animal snorting and
clawing at his bedroom door. He was too scared to open the door until morning
whereupon he found nothing there but remained convinced of what he had heard.
Doors opened and slammed shut in the
middle of the night. Rugs would be found in a pile. All of this he put down to
Aleister Crowley – by now long dead.
The next owners, Ronald and Annette
MacGillivray would have nothing to do with Crowley’s legacy and frequently
painted over his occult symbols. Sadly, as soon as the paint dried, the symbols
allegedly kept reappearing. In 2000, a BBC film crew working on a documentary
entitled, The Other Loch Ness Monster were attacked by a plague of
beetles, suffered a variety of unexplained equipment failures, and some photos taken
just down the hill (above a purported tunnel leading to the house) were ruined
by a ‘strange halo of fog’ which could not be explained as lens flare or a
camera fault. The producer said he had never seen anything like it. Exploding
lights and falling camera stands showered the crew in broken glass, a crew
member’s phone rang intermittently for no reason and another colleague’s alarm went
off at the same time each day – even though it wasn’t set. All of this took
place despite the best efforts of a priest and clerics who blessed the project.
In 2002, new owners bought the house.
Fortunately, they weren’t there in 2015 when a devastating fire gutted the
house. It started in the kitchen although there was no one there. and the
actual cause was never determined.
Following that fire, the owners put the
property up for sale and it was bought by the not-for-profit Boleskine House
Foundation which set about restoring it. But it seems, the curse of fire wasn’t
done yet. In December 2019, only a week after the purchase, another fire raged
through the building. This time, though, the cause was believed to be arson.
Not to be deterred, the Foundation aims to
restore the building to its former glory and open it to the public. Let’s hope
Aleister Crowley lets them get on with it although their aims to promote
‘heritage, education, health and wellness’ seem somewhat at odds with his
philosophy.
I wish them well.
Meanwhile, at Canonbury Manor…
It begins with a chilling greeting: "Welcome to The Columbine, Miss Sinclair. You are expected."
The
After-Death of Caroline Rand
Available
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Nik Keevil and Flame Tree Studio
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