Page 42 of Once Upon A Haunted Castle
Heather nodded. “Yes,” she said. “You call it Whitecliff? I read that Whitecliff was another name for it.”
The old man wriggled his bushy eyebrows. “’Tis the name,” he said simply. “Findlater is the old Norse name for it. Whitecliff is the English translation.”
Heather knew that. “I’ve read what I could about it,” she said. “So is it haunted?”
There was that question again. The old man’s gaze remained on her, perhaps something of disgust lingering in the dark depths. Perhaps it was an inappropriate question, something trite given the grand history of the castle. In any case, the old man didn’t answer right away and when he did, it was to a faint shake of the head.
“Some say it ’tis,” he finally said. “Some say it ’tisn’t.”
“Do you know any stories about it?”
The old man looked at her a moment longer before averting his eyes, looking back to his beer. “That American poet wrote a story about it.”
Heather cocked her head curiously. “What American poet?”
The old man took a long drink of his beer, licking his lips before replying. “Poe,” he finally said. “He wrote a story about it.”
“He did?” Heather glanced at Lynn, surprised, before returning her attention to the old man. “What story?”
The old man sipped at his beer as if contemplating the question. His mind seemed to be wandering miles away from the warm little tavern and out among the stones of Findlater, hearing the waves crash on the shore below.
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,” he murmured, “Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore….”
“The Raven?” Heather recognized the stanzas immediately. “That’sabout Findlater Castle?”
The old man didn’t nod. He didn’t even shake his head. He just continued staring into nothingness as if pondering the very foundation of Poe’s tale.
“Poe’s tale speaks of a young man longing for his dead lover, Lenore,” he said after a moment. “Do you know it?”
Heather was hesitant to admit that she really didn’t. “I wish I remembered more of it,” she said. “How do you know that Poe wrote about it?”
The old man looked at her, suddenly not looking nearly as mad or old or bumbling as he had since entering the bar. He actually appeared quite sharp and intense. It was a surprising transformation.
“Because I taught such things,” he said. “I taught literature at the University of Edinburgh for many a year. I know Poe. And that tale is about Findlater Castle.”
Heather suddenly had a great deal of respect for the little old man in the tattered clothing. He could be telling her tall tales but, somehow, she didn’t think so. Something in his expression told her that he was telling the truth. Her burger and her beer were all but forgotten as her entire focus shifted to him.
“That’s amazing,” she said. “Then you must be an expert on the legends around the castle. I mean, living here and all, you must know everything about it. What’s the story behind the woman who wanders the grounds in chains, looking for her long lost love?”
The old man snorted. “Poe took that legend and twisted it,” he said. “He wrote about a man longing for his love, Lenore, but that wasn’t the truth at all. There is tale of a woman who wanders the ground, looking for her lost love.That’sLenore.”
Heather was fascinated. “So the ghost’s name is Lenore?” she said. “And she’s the one looking for her lover?”
“So they say.”
“Then Poe reversed the roles.”
The old man nodded faintly. “No one knows why Lenore is there, but people around these parts say that very bad things happened at Findlater Castle back in the days of old,” he said. “It was last lived in during the Medieval days, you know. Official records say that the Vikings had it during the thirteenth century but local legend says that they had left long before that and left one man behind. Some say this man, this last Viking, was married to a woman named Lenore.”
Heather was enthralled with the unfolding tale. “So what happened there that was so bad?”
The old man shook his head. “No one really knows,” he said. “Some say that Lenore had a lover other than her husband. Some say she went mad with loneliness. Others say that Findlater is simply cursed with the ghosts of angry Vikings. There have been legends of disappearances there as well.”
“Wow,” Heather said, intrigued and disturbed at the same time. “What’s the story behind the disappearances?”
The old man shrugged. “Only that some people have vanished,” he said. “There aren’t many records about that period in time and what we do have is usually only old church records. Local lore is most of the information we have and that gets twisted over time.”
“But people disappeared at Findlater?”
