Strange tales from Scotland’s thin places...

by Thomas MacCalman Morton

The island of Unst is not just the most northerly in the Shetland Isles, and therefore Scotland, but it is also one of the most...I was going to say haunted. But perhaps it’s better to say, as one local historian told me, that it’s a place where the barriers between the past and the present, this life and the afterlife, the physical and the spiritual, are exceptionally thin. Scotland is full of thin places.

Muness_Castle,_Unst

Tom Pennington / Muness Castle, Unst / CC BY-SA 2.0

If Shetland is remote, Unst can seem unearthly. Beyond the beyond. Far to the north; a place where there is little darkness in the summer or light in the winter. It is full of unexcavated tombs, lost churches, burial chambers, and the sites of half-forgotten battles. It was where the vikings first landed on their movement west, where Celtic monks came before their dangerous voyages to Scandinavia could begin.

And stories. Hundreds of stories.

I could tell you about Madge Coutts the witch. The Death bird of Colvadale. The blood soaked sacred earth of Swinna Ness. And perhaps someday I will. But instead, this is something I heard first hand from a man called Steven Spence, a renowned fiddle player. And I can vouch for the terror that can lurk in the winter darkness of Scotland’s northernmost outpost. In the land of the White Wife.

I first encountered the White Wife in liquid form. There is a delicious beer, once brewed in Unst, called White Wife, after the island’s most famous, most often encountered ghost. And Steven Spence, who worked at the Valhalla Brewery, wrote a fiddle tune to celebrate its launch. He has met the White Wife.

One dark January night two decades ago, Steven was driving his van from Baltasound to Uyeasound. It was 9 o’clock in the evening, and he was coming down the Watlee Brae, near the Watlee Burn, where, perhaps not incidentally, a travelling merchant was murdered several hundred years ago.

Framgord Chapel, Sandiwck, Unst

Photo by Frank D. Bardgett CC BY-SA 3.0

Suddenly Steven glimpsed from the corner of his eye what he thought was a shaft of moonlight glittering on the passenger side of his van. And he noticed a terrible, foul smell. But that night there was no moon. And his van was clean as a newly valeted vehicle could be.

He looked around. And sitting in the passenger seat was an old woman. What he noticed, immediately, he told me, was her teeth, which were rotten. That was where the smell was coming from.

He says the sight gave him, as they say in Shetland, a braa gluff, or a terrible fright. He had to steer the van around a bend in the road, so looked ahead for a moment, and when he turned around again...the White Wife had gone.

Steven says that afterwards he was a bit nervous about driving near the Watlee Loch, but he soon got over it, wishing that the White Wife would once again appear to him. He’d like to hear her story, he says. But she has never again made an appearance to Steven. Maybe, he jokes, she didn’t like him.

Several other people have met the wife, always in the same way, appearing as a passenger in the front seat of a car, driven by a single young man, always near the Watlee Bridge. Grotesque, yellow, foul smelling teeth are commonly reported. These sightings continue today, and when I worked for a time in Unst, staying there overnight occasionally, I would often pass that bridge. Someone, as a joke, had painted a stone pillar next to it with a white face. The first time I saw that reflected in my headlights I nearly jumped out of my skin. But I looked at the passenger seat of my car, and there was nobody there. Besides, I am no longer young. Nor am I single.

The White Wife statue, Watlee

cc-by-sa/2.0 - © Mike Pennington

So who was the White Wife? No-one appears to know. But one suggestion that she was somehow looking for her son, sent me back to the older stories about Unst, and the one about that merchant, or pedlar who was murdered and thrown into the burn of Heljabrun. which flows into the Loch of Watlee. Ever since that Loch and the burn itself have been reputed to possess healing powers, due to being seasoned with the dead man’s remains. If you throw white money - silver - or three stones into the water you would be healed if you then drank the water. Heljaburn, after all means the burn of health.

An old woman looking for her son. Could the White Wife be the spirit of that ancient dead pedlar’s mother, eternally checking for any young single man travelling the road he trod, fatally, so long ago?

If you’re single, male and youthful, do you have the courage to come to Shetland, to Unst, and find out for yourself? Oh, and she has a preference for red cars and vans, apparently. Red. the colour of blood.

How did that ancient pedlar die? Murdered, you can imagine that his blood flowed red in the burn of Heljabrun, down into the Loch of Watlee. In Unst, that thinnest of thin places.