Three people knew the secret of Glam’s castle at any given time. The reigning Earl of Strathmore, his male heir upon reaching his 21st birthday, and the estate factor. The heir’s initiation reportedly took the form of a ceremony conducted in private on or around the birthday.
And what was said there or shown was never disclosed. What was disclosed because it was visible was the change that came over young men who had previously treated the whole business as an amusing family legend. They arrived at Glams in good spirits, openly skeptical and even mocking of the mystery, and returned from the Earl’s private quarters, visibly altered, sober where they had been light, evasive where they had been frank and haunted by something they refused to articulate to even their closest friends.
It is very strange, wrote one observer, how it seems to sit differently on different men, some seem frightened and some merely sad, but none of them, none, ever laugh about it again. The 13th Earl, Claude Bose Lion, great-grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, gave the statement that has echoed through every subsequent account of the mystery.
If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret, you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours. The factor Andrew Rolston, who held the third key to the secret, refused absolutely and without a single exception, ever to spend a night inside the castle. And on one occasion during a winter visit, when a snowstorm that came in after dark left the paths completely buried and the roads impassible, Rolston roused the entire household staff and had them dig a path through the drifts by lantern light, a mile of frozen labor, so that he could walk home through the snow to his own house before morning. No explanation was offered to the assembled servants, shivering in the dark. None was requested. After Rolston, they already knew better than to ask. The little girl who grew up playing in those corridors, who tipped buckets of icy water from the medieval ramparts onto arriving guests and called it boiling oil, who nursed
wounded soldiers in the Great Hall during the First World War, and wrote letters home for boys who could no longer hold a pen, became the most publicly warm and apparently uncomplicated figure in the 20th century British royal household. Today we walk through a thousand years of blood, stone, and silence inside the castle that made her.
Glam’s castle stands in the fertile veil of Strathmore in Angus, Scotland. Its silhouette a striking forest of towers, turrets, crowstep gables, and spiraling stone stairwells. And the English diarist Daniel Defoe visiting in the early 18th century described it as so crowded with lofty buildings that it looks not like a town but a city.
That theatrical skyline is deceptive in its apparent antiquity because the grandest features of the present structure were built or reshaped in the 17th century. But the land beneath the flagstones has been occupied since prehistoric times, and the structures underneath the baroque exterior conceal walls, crypts, and passages that are genuinely medieval.
At the castle’s core stands a massive construction called the Great Tower, from which all subsequent wings and additions have grown, and it is within this tower’s walls, 16 ft thick in places, that the secret chamber is traditionally held to lie. The site entered recorded history on November 25th, 1034, when King Malcolm II of Scotland died at Glams, then still a royal hunting lodge and hall.
The exact circumstances of his death were disputed even in medieval sources. Some chronicles record that he was murdered by rivals in a conspiracy, others that he died fighting bandits, and some that the cause was simply old age after a long reign. But the most persistent legend says he was murdered in his bed.
his blood seeping so deeply into the floorboards that the stain proved impossible to remove even after the boards themselves were replaced. A room within the present castle is known to this day as King Malcolm’s room, hung with needle work and finished with an embossed leather fireplace surround.
His death and the succession of his grandson Duncan I Duncan’s own subsequent killing by McBth embedded the very soil of glams in the foundations of Scottish dynastic history and the stone chamber inside the castle known as Duncan’s Hall preserves the tradition of McBth’s crime though the historical evidence makes this impossible since no stone castle existed on the site until centuries after both men were dead when Shakespeare wrote his Scottish play around 16006 six and needed a setting that combined Scottish royalty with suffocating claustrophobia. He named McBth Fain of Glams and the associations multiplied across the centuries, giving the castle a literary horror to compound its historical one. The sequence of principal rooms tells the entire history of the building in compressed form. Guided tours begin in the dining room in a wing of 1798.
Move into the vaulted crypt, the oldest surviving interior space built directly into the original tower, where a minor stair descends to the castle well, and the walls are thick enough to contain entire hidden passages. Beyond the crypt lies Duncan’s Hall, its dark stone bare of plaster work and hung with armor, and a wide turnpike stair dating to around 1,600 rises to the drawing room in what was once the medieval great hall, now vaulted with a plaster ceiling and dominated by a monumental fireplace. Above and beyond lie the royal apartments, the family chapel with its elaborate painted ceiling and King Malcolm’s room. each space a layer of the thousand years of occupation that have made Glams what it is. Even Walter Scott, who had a professional interest in Gothic atmospheres, found a night spent at Glams in 1790 genuinely unnerving. “I must own,” he wrote. “As I heard door
after door shut after my conductor had retired, I began to consider myself as too far from the living and somewhat too near to the dead. What most struck Scott was not anything supernatural, but the architecture itself, a building deliberately designed so that no two passages ran parallel, so that rooms did not connect in any predictable sequence, so that a stranger could become disoriented and lost within 10 minutes of being left alone.
It was Scott, too, who first recorded in print the tradition that glams concealed a secret room accessible only to the earl, the factor, and the air. Though in 1790, this was presented as a mere architectural peculiarity, with no suggestion yet that the room had an occupant. The castle proper began to take shape in 1372 when King Robert II of Scotland, grandson of Robert the Bruce, granted the Thanage of Glams to Sir John Lion as part of the settlement surrounding his marriage to the king’s daughter, Princess Johanna Stewart. That marriage, a man outside the highest aristocracy elevated directly into the royal bloodline, established the pattern by which the Lions would define themselves for five centuries. proximity to royal power through judicious alliance. A tower was being raised on the site at least as early as 1376.
But the major construction of the great central tower with its enormously thick protective walls was consolidated through the 1400s under successive lords glams and Patrick first lord glams continued the work after 1445 creating the fortified dungeon whose interior walls absorbed so many secrets. From Sir John Lion’s Royal Grant in 1372, the family rose through the Scottish aristocracy in a largely unbroken line.
Lords Glams from 1445, Ears of Kinghorn from60, and Ears of Strathmore and Kinghorn from 1677 when Charles II confirmed the combined title. The castle was their seat throughout this entire period, though by the late 18th century it had grown so cold, isolated, and institutionally melancholy that successive ears preferred to live elsewhere, dividing their time between Glams and their English properties, and leaving the castle itself in the care of a resident factor.
It was this emptiness that gave Glams its particular Gothic character. A vast, largely unoccupied medieval stronghold, standing alone in the Scottish countryside with long stone corridors, slamming doors, and the kind of absolute silence at night that turns ordinary sounds into something sinister. The most radical transformation came under Patrick Lion, third Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorn, who inherited in 1677 and immediately set about remodeling almost everything visible above ground.
Between 1684 and 1689, he kept a detailed private diary known as the book of record, now held by the National Library of Scotland, in which he documented every aspect of his vision for the rebuilt castle, describing his frustration with the structure he had inherited, much of it in a ruinous condition, and laying out systematically how he intended to transform it room by room, wing by wing.
He added the flanking wings that give the castle its characteristic three-dimensional silhouette, raised the great round stair tower with its corbelled parapet, planted the formal avenue of trees approaching the main gate, and commissioned the interior plaster work and great fireplaces that now define the state apartments.
His book of record also illuminates what the castle felt like even to its owner. He recorded a building of labyrinthine complexity, passages which led nowhere, stairs that terminated in blank walls, and architectural decisions by previous lords that he could not always explain or understand. Some of these passages he had bricked up as part of his improvements.
Others he chose to leave untouched because their purpose was unclear. It is precisely this kind of structural complexity, walls thick enough to contain rooms, passages built for reasons no longer remembered, that gave the monster legend its architectural plausibility when it finally emerged in full Victorian force.
The family that owned glams during the critical 19th century bore a hyphenated name that carried its own extraordinary story because in 1767 John Lion, ninth Earl of Strathmore, married Elellanena Bose, the only child of George Bose, one of the wealthiest coal magnates in England. Mary Ellaner was intellectually gifted, wrote a botanical study and a play, and maintained a circle of literary friends, but her fortune made her a target.
After Lord Strathmore’s death in 1776, a calculating AngloIrish adventurer named Andrew Robinson Stony staged an elaborate fake duel in which he appeared to be dying for her honor, winning her sympathy and ultimately her hand, and within months of the marriage, he had forced her by systematic cruelty to sign away control of her fortune.
Stony beat Mary Ellaner, imprisoned her, destroyed her botanical collections, forced her to dismiss her friends, and repeatedly threatened her life. And when she finally initiated divorce proceedings, he kidnapped her at gunpoint on a London street, held a pistol to her head, and demanded she abandon the case.
She refused. The kidnapping triggered a public chase across Northern England. Stony was captured, and the subsequent trial became a sensation across Europe. But Mary Ellaner died in 1800 without ever fully escaping his shadow. The hyphenated name Bose Lion entered the family through this union.
A name that would eventually grace one of the most beloved queens in British history, carrying with it silently all of this. Janet Douglas was born into one of the most powerful families in Scotland, the Douglases. Widely described by contemporaries as one of the beauties of the age, respected and beloved by the local people around Glams.
She married John Lion, the sixth Lord Glams, and came to Glam’s castle as its mistress. And when Lion died on September 17th, 1528, Janet was immediately accused of having poisoned him. No credible evidence was produced, and the charges were dropped, but they foreshadowed what was coming. The king who now sat on the Scottish throne was James V.
And James V had been effectively imprisoned by his stepfather Archerald Douglas, sixth Earl of Angus from around 1526 to 1528. The young king kept under house arrest while Angus governed in his name. When James escaped Douglas control in 1528, his revenge was systematic, patient, and savage, and every member of the Douglas family became a target.
Nearly a decade later, in 1537, James tried again. Janet was accused of two counts of treason. First, of communicating with her exiled Douglas brothers with intent to harm the kingdom. Second, of attempting to poison the king himself. The second charge was a fabrication, the first almost certainly so, because James wanted Glam’s castle for himself.
It was an enormously valuable estate, and Janet was the instrument through which he could seize it. Unable to produce genuine evidence, he had her family members and household servants tortured one by one until confessions were extracted. The trial was a formality. On July 17th, 1537, Janet Douglas was dragged from Edinburgh Castle, where she had been imprisoned and burned alive on Castle Hill, Edinburgh, a location that between 1479 and 1722 served as the execution ground for as many as 2,000 Scots, the majority of them women, condemned on charges of witchcraft or treason. The burning of a person of Janet’s social rank, a noble woman by birth and by marriage, was deeply shocking even in a Scotland hardened to judicial violence. Her teenage son John, Lord Glams, was forced to watch his mother die from the
walls of Edinburgh Castle, himself imprisoned and under a sentence of death to be carried out on his 21st birthday. He was eventually pardoned and Glam’s Castle was restored to the Lion family after James V’s death in 1542, but too late for his mother. The ghost of Lady Janet, universally described as the Grey Lady, is said to haunt Glams to this day.
Most often seen kneeling in prayer at the altar of the family chapel. A seat in the chapel was traditionally left vacant, reserved by long custom for her alone. The Queen Mother herself reportedly saw the figure of a gray robed woman in the clock tower during her childhood years at the castle. The dark history of glams predates the monster legend by centuries and involves something close to documented fact.
In 1486, the Ogulvie clan found themselves on the losing end of a brutal vendetta with the powerful Lindsay clan. A conflict rooted in competing claims to the office of Bailey of the Regality at Arbro Abbey that had escalated through a series of battles, ambushes, and reprisals across several decades.
And they fled to Glam’s Castle seeking asylum. As many as 16 men arriving at the castle gates, blooded and desperate. The Earl of Strathmore at the time faced a predicament. refuse the ogulvies and risk their anger, but shelter them openly and incur the even greater wroth of the Lindses, who were then among the most powerful magnates in Scotland.
His solution was neither honorable nor merciful. He welcomed the oglevies in, gave every sign of hospitality, led them through the castle’s winding passageways into the deeper reaches of the building, and guided them into a hidden room believed to lie within the thick walls of the crypt level, deep inside the original tower.
Once the last man had entered, the door was locked and sealed from the outside. No food came and no water. The chamber became a tomb, and the castle continued its daily life above and around them. Generations later, a subsequent Lord of Strathmore ordered the room opened, either from curiosity or because the sounds emanating from that part of the wall had become intolerable to the servants.
What he found were the contorted skeletons of the starved clansmen, still lying where they had fallen, gnawed at in their final desperation, their mouths a gape in attitudes of final agony. The door was recealed. Some accounts add the further horror that one skeleton was found propped against the inside of the door.
The marks of fingers still visible in the wood where the dying man had clawed for a release that never came. This chamber, ever after known as the haunted chamber, became the source of reported groans, scraping sounds, and icy presences in the crypt level passages. Experiences reported by servants, guests, and members of the family right through the 19th century.
and its horror was entirely human in origin. The most famous secret of Glam’s Castle and the one that made it the talk of ancient Europe during the Victorian era begins on October 21st, 1821 with a birth. The first child of Thomas Lion Bose, Lord Glams, and his wife Charlotte Grimstead was recorded in Douglas’s periage of Scotland with the turs possible entry.
A son born and died October 21st, 1821. The child’s name was Thomas Lion Ba, Master of Glams, and the official record gave no further detail, no cause of death, and crucially no record of a burial, no gravestone, and no baptismal entry in the parish registers. The midwife present at the birth, whose name was never recorded and who apparently made no formal statement, had reportedly told neighbors in the surrounding villages that the child had been alive and apparently healthy when she left the castle. When the death was announced one or two days later, this account circulated. For a baptized child of an aristocratic family to die without a gravestone was deeply unusual, even in an era of high infant mortality among the upper classes. The theory that crystallized in the second half of the 19th century was stark. Thomas Lion Bows had not died. He
had been born with catastrophic physical deformities so extreme that his family had fabricated his death, secured him in a secret room within the castle’s thick walls, and installed his younger brother as heir to the a workman carrying out repairs at the castle some years after the birth had wandered down an unfamiliar passage, and encountered something at the far end of the corridor, and he was promptly paid off, not dismissed with a month’s notice, but encouraged ed with his passage funded to immigrate immediately to Australia. His departure arranged with a speed that reflected considerable urgency on the part of an anxious Earl. In 1870, the English singer and composer Virginia Gabriel made an extended stay at Glam’s Castle and became one of the principal early sources for accounts of the mystery’s existence. and the stories she later circulated in London Society helped transform local rumor into
national gossip. A correspondent to the journal Notes and Queries wrote in 1908 of having heard the story 60 years earlier, placing the beginning of the wider circulation around the 1840s or 1850s. The story was and is that in the castle of Glams is a secret chamber. In this chamber is confined a monster who is the rightful heir to the title and property, but who is so unpresentable that it is necessary to keep him out of sight and out of possession.
The language was precise, not a ghost, not a legend, but a living person, a rightful heir, someone with a legal claim to theom and its estates hidden away so that another could hold them in his place. Miss M. Gilchrist, writing in 1885, went considerably further, describing the monster as half frog, half man, and insisting he was the rightful Earl of Strathmore, the legitimate heir to the title held by the man who then sat in Parliament.
Victorian papers circulated breathless reports throughout the latter half of the century. And the New York son in 1904 described a doctor staying professionally at the castle, who found his bedroom carpet relayed differently on his return to the room, and lifting a corner, he discovered a trap door, followed a passage beyond it, and encountered a freshly cemented wall still bearing the wet impression of a human fingertip.
He spent the remainder of that night in his room and was gone the following morning, check in hand, carriage to the railway station arranged by his host. No explanation offered and none requested. The writer James Wentworth Day, who spent time at Glams in the 1960s researching the family history directly with members of the Bose Lion family, assembled the most detailed surviving physical description from accounts passed down through household staff.
A monster was born into the family. He was the heir, a creature fearful to behold. It was impossible to allow this deformed caricature of humanity to be seen, even by their friends. His chest, an enormous barrel, hairy as a doormat. His head ran straight into his shoulders, and his arms and legs were toylike.
On moonless nights, a trusted servant was said to walk this figure along the castle battlements in the hours before dawn, a section of the ramparts, still referred to as the Mad Ear’s Walk. The 16th Earl, Claude Bose Lion, told Wentworth Day in the 1960s that the entrance to the chamber where Thomas had lived had been bricked up after his eventual death.
The most explicit statement any member of the family ever made about the physical reality of the room. The 12th Earl was described by the diplomat, Sir Horus Rumbled, as a heedless man of the world with few prejudices and possibly still fewer beliefs. But on his deathbed, he reportedly told his brother that he must now endeavor to prey down the sinister influence he himself had in vain tried to laugh down and which for so many years had darkened the family history.
The explicit framing tried to laugh down confirms that even the skeptics among the earls eventually found the joke impossible to sustain. His son, Claude Bose Lion, the 13th Earl, great-grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, took immediate steps upon inheriting the title to have the family chapel solemnly rededicated, and was frequently observed kneeling alone in prayer there in the evenings long after the household had retired, dressed in full evening clothes, as though the act of prayer was itself a formal obligation, a penance owed. The sight of a man in white tie and tails kneeling alone in a stone chapel at midnight, his family asleep and his servants dismissed, was strange enough to be recorded by multiple witnesses. And not one of them treated it as eccentric. They treated it as the behavior of a man discharging a debt he had not chosen to incur. The society gossip Augustus Hair who
visited glams and recorded the Earl’s demeanor carefully noted that Claude wore an ever sad look and never appeared fully at ease in his own ancestral house. The bishop of Brein, hearing of the Earl’s spiritual distress, approached him privately to offer pastoral support, and Lord Strathmore received him with evident gratitude, but replied that the comfort he needed was beyond the bishop’s power to give.
that in his most unfortunate position no one could ever help him. The Earl’s wife, for her part, was deliberately kept ignorant of the secret, and when she pressed the factor Andrew Rolston for information, she was told the sentence that has survived as perhaps the most chilling in the entire Glam’s archive.
Lady Strathmore, it is fortunate that you do not know it, and can never know it, for if you did, you would not be a happy woman. The most theatrically Victorian episode in the Glam’s mystery took place around 1850 when Charlotte Maria, wife of the 12th Earl, found herself at the castle during one of her husband’s absences and decided in the spirit of a house party turned detective expedition to settle the question of the hidden room once and for all.
She recruited her assembled guests into the search, and their reasoning was methodical. If a room was sealed behind a wall, it still had to exist physically within the building’s envelope. And if the room had an occupant who breathed and moved and needed ventilation, it must have a window. The group fanned out through every story of the castle and opened every single window in every bedroom, every corridor, every stairwell, and every storage room, hanging from each one a towel, a sheet, or a handkerchief, making each window visible from the outside. When the last marker had been hung, they descended to the courtyard and walked the full perimeter of the building, looking up at the results. According to the account preserved by Sir Horus Rumbled, a number of windows, reportedly between 1 and four, depending on the source, had no marker hanging from them, dark, bare, and flush with the stonework as though sealed from within. Before the group could organize
a closer examination, the Earl returned home without warning, found his wife standing in the courtyard with her guests looking up at the walls of his ancestral house, and what followed was not a quiet conversation. Charlotte Maria’s son later recalled that his father bitterly upgraded her, and the marriage did not survive the episode in any meaningful sense.
The countess subsequently removed to Italy where she spent the remainder of her life unhappily and far from glams in circumstances that her descendants attributed directly to the consequences of that afternoon in the courtyard. Whether she had been told the actual nature of the secret as a condition of her silence, or whether the earl’s ferocity was sufficient to deter further inquiry was never recorded, and some accounts offer the darkest explanation of all, that the bare windows were not sealed rooms, but occupied rooms, and that a servant, seeing the sheets being hung, had quietly removed the markers from those particular windows before anyone could step outside to look. Dickenses all the year round observed in 1880. Gay gallants in lace ruffles, bows, bucks, bloods, and dandies have made light of the family mystery, and some have gone so far as to make after dinner promises to tell the whole stupid story in the smoking room at night. This
promise has been made more than once. It has been pledged in burgundy and toet, in lefight and champagne, in steaming toddy, and in cooling lemon squash. But it has never been kept. The image is a precise portrait of Victorian masculine social confidence meeting something it could not defeat. A real secret held by real men about whom it turned out to be impossible to be charming enough.
By the early 20th century, the hysteria around the glam’s mystery had begun to lose its intensity. A New York Times report from 1882 stated with apparent authority that it is now believed that the mystery has been in part solved and that the room contained some person who died a week or two ago at a very advanced age.
If Thomas Lion Bose had indeed survived his alleged death in 1821, he would have been approximately 61 at the time of this report, and the language died at a very advanced age, suggested the reporter either misunderstood the timeline or was repeating a version of events that deliberately obscured the century of the birth.
The New York Tribune in 1904 added another piece of circumstantial evidence. It noted that Glam’s castle had been put up to let at a substantial annual rent, which implied that the necessity of keeping secret and secluded one or more chambers in the castle no longer existed. An aristocratic family does not casually offer paying tenants access to a house that contains a hidden occupant.
The formal knowledge of the secret, whatever its specific content, died out within the Bose Lion family during the early 20th century, and Claude Bose Lion, the 16th Earl, who inherited in 1944 was candid about this when he spoke to Wentworth Day. I know not a thing. It may have died with my father or with my brother, who was killed in the war.
His brother Patrick, who would otherwise have been initiated on his 21st birthday, was killed in the First World War before the ceremony could take place. According to one persistent account, the heir of the 13th Earl had, in any case, refused the initiation right when it was offered, reasoning with a kind of aristocratic legalism that since three people already held the secret between them, his own addition to that number was not technically required, and elected to defer indefinitely. The most skeptical voice in the entire archive belonged to David Lindseay, Earl of Crawford, who visited Glams in 1905, and recorded his impressions with undisguised exasperation. The lions talk freely about ghosts and invent stories to suit the idiosyncrasies of each guest. As to the alleged secret, I soon fathomed the mystery. The secret is that there is no
secret. Crawford was an intelligent and well-traveled man, and his verdict deserves to be taken seriously. But against it stands the testimony of multiple members of the Bows Lion family, who had no apparent motive to invent or sustain affiction. Rose, Lady Granville, the Queen Mother’s own aunt, born at Glams, was unequivocal.
We were never allowed to talk about it when we were children. Our parents forbade us ever to discuss the matter or ask any questions about it. My father and grandfather refused absolutely to discuss it. A family that had invented a mystery for the amusement of guests would not have forbidden their own children to discuss it in private.
And the prohibition maintained across generations points not to theatrical invention, but to genuine and deeply felt concealment. The Monster of Glams is the most famous of the castle’s accumulated legends, but it shares the building with a crowded roster of other presences, each rooted in a distinct strand of the castle’s violent history.
Earl Beardy is the name given to a nobleman identified by some sources as Alexander Lindseay, fourth Earl of Crawford, who one stormy Saturday night in the 15th century grew frustrated when none of his household would play cards with him, the Sabbath being a day on which such games were forbidden in Presbyterian Scotland. He declared that he would play with the devil himself if no one else would oblige.
A stranger duly appeared at the castle gate and accepted the invitation. and the two settled to their game in a lower room of the tower with orders that they were not to be disturbed. By morning the stranger had vanished, and the Earl’s soul had gone with him, condemned to play cards with the devil in that same room until the day of judgment.
And on certain nights, the percussive sounds heard from unoccupied parts of the building, crashing, rolling. The sound of something heavy being moved repeatedly across a stone floor are attributed to their eternal game. Jack the Runner is one of the most disturbing of Glam’s specters. The tradition holds that he was an enslaved black boy kept in the castle’s household who was at some point seized by the Earl and his mounted retinue and used as the quarry in a hunt, replacing the fox with a human being and running him until the hounds brought him down. His ghost has been reported with unusual physical consistency across independent witness accounts. a small figure seated on the stone bench beside the door of what was once the queen’s bedroom, visible as a full-bodied apparition in daylight as well as at night. The tongueless woman is the most viscerally reported of the castle’s ghosts, described as a young woman seen wandering through the
castle’s grounds, pointing at her own face with an expression of desperate urgency, specifically at her mouth, which witnesses describe as grotesqually mutilated. and she has also been observed looking outward from a barred window within the upper reaches of the castle, pressing her face against the glass.
The tradition behind her haunting holds that she was a servant girl who entered into a relationship with the earl and was silenced by having her tongue cut out by castle guards, ensuring she could never speak of what she knew. The consistency of the sightings, the pointing, the face, the barred window suggests at minimum a recurring experience that successive generations of visitors have independently described in the same terms.
And unlike Earl Beardy or Lady Janet, the tongueless woman has no heritage plaque and no scheduled tour stop. The section of Glam’s upper battlements known as the Mad Ear’s Walk is the location most directly associated with the monster legend in living memory. A narrow parapet running along the outside of the central tower’s upper floors where multiple witnesses during the 1860s and 1870s described seeing a large misshapen silhouette after midnight moving slowly in a lurching pattern inconsistent with a servant on an errand. The household’s interpretation was that this was the concealed inhabitant of the hidden room being given his nightly exercise. The walk was not a metaphor, but a literal practice conducted after dark, when no outside observer could see. Elizabeth Angela Margarite Bose Lion was
born on August 4th, 1900, the ninth of 10 children of Claude Bose Lion, later the 14th Earl of Strathmore, and his wife Cecilia Caendish Bentink. When Elizabeth was 4 years old, her grandfather, the 13th Earl, the one who had said that no one who guessed the secret could ever be grateful it was not their own, died.
Her father inherited the castle came with it. Elizabeth and her younger brother David only 18 months apart and inseparable for most of their childhoods. Their mother calling them my two Benjamins after the cherished youngest child of the biblical Jacob. Found in glams a playground of extraordinary scale and variety. From the castle’s high ramparts, the pair would pour buckets of icy water described in their own retelling as boiling oil down onto guests arriving in the courtyard below.
and they reportedly placed footballs beneath the wheels of the family’s motorc car positioned so the vehicle would roll over them with a satisfying explosion when the chauffeur moved off. Elizabeth’s earliest memory was of the fireworks her grandfather set off in celebration of his golden wedding anniversary at Glams in 1903.
She was barely 3 years old held on his knee and it established the emotional key of her relationship with the castle. wonder, warmth, and the grandeur of great age. The family’s year divided naturally between glams in the Scottish summers and the English properties in winter and spring.
And at Glams, she developed her love of the outdoors, of gardens, of the kind of theatrical landscape that Scotland does better than anywhere in the world. The castle’s grounds, formal gardens, woodland walks, the long view down the avenue to the gate house gave a girl of quick intelligence and vivid imagination an environment entirely proportionate to both.
The castle’s ghosts and secrets formed the backdrop to all of this. The household talked in the guarded way of people who have been told not to talk about the monster and the gray lady and Earl Beardy. And Elizabeth grew up knowing there was something in the castle she was not permitted to ask about. When war broke out in August 1914, the Bose Lion family converted the lower floors of Glams into a convolescent hospital for soldiers returning from the Western Front.
The billiard’s room became a ward. The drawing room was given over to recreation and entertainment, and Elizabeth, 14 years old, threw herself into the work with an energy that struck everyone who witnessed it as genuine rather than beautiful. She spent four years as a working member of the nursing household, writing letters for men who could not hold a pen, organizing concerts and theatricals, sitting with the badly injured, and listening to them for as long as they needed.
In a letter written to her governor’s barrel pouond in November 1917, she described the anguish of bidding farewell to a group of 14 soldiers. It really makes me weep and lump in my throat. I can’t bear it ever. One soldier before he left wrote in Elizabeth’s autograph book a prediction. She was to be hung, drawn, and quartered.
Hung in diamonds, drawn in a coach and four, and quartered in the best house in the land. She became the wife of a king and the best house in the land was Buckingham Palace. Elizabeth’s brother Fergus Bose Lion a captain in the eighth battalion blackw watch was killed in action on September 27th 1915 during the battle of the Hoen Zolan redout fought as part of the larger battle of loose in northern France and his body was never recovered.
He was 26 years old. Another brother, Michael, was reported missing in 1917, presumed dead. He was in fact a prisoner of war in Germany, but the family did not know this for some months. On the night of September 16th, 1916, a fire broke out in a room beneath the roof of the castle and threatened to spread through the upper stories, and Elizabeth, then 16, threw herself into organizing the rescue of the castle’s contents, portraits, documents, furniture, objects accumulated over five centuries with the kind of unflapable practical energy that her family would subsequently recognize as one of her defining characteristics. The fire was contained. The castle survived. And the walls that concealed their secrets survived with it. One of the most unsettling dimensions of the glam story is not medieval or
Victorian, but entirely 20th century and involves documented human beings whose existence was officially falsified. Narissa Jane Irene Bose Lion was born on February 18th, 1919 and her younger sister Katherine Juliet Bose Lion on July 4th, 1926. Both daughters of John Bose Lion, the Queen Mother’s older brother.
Both were born with severe developmental disabilities so profound that they never learned to speak and were described in the medical language of their era as having reached the permanent mental age of approximately 6 years old. In 1941, when Narissa was 22 and Catherine, 15, their mother committed both women to the Royal Earwood Hospital in Red Hill Surrey, an institution then designated under the stigmatizing official title of a home for mental defectives.
Neither woman would leave institutional care for the remainder of her life, and neither was ever publicly acknowledged as alive. What transformed the case from private sorrow into public scandal was the entry in Burke’s Puridge, the definitive guide to the British aristocracy. In the 1963 edition, Nerissa was listed as having died in 1940 and Catherine as having died in 1961.
Both dates were false. Narissa was alive and would remain so until January 1986. And Catherine was alive and would remain so until 2014. The truth was exposed in 1987 by The Sun a year after Nerissa’s actual death. And a photographer posing as a relative gained access to the Royal Earswood facility and photographed Catherine, still alive and shuffling through the institution’s corridors, wearing clothes donated by other patients.
The published image shocked the British public. Narissa’s grave, when located, bore not the carved stone monument that would have been appropriate for a woman of her birth, but a cheap plastic marker of the kind used for porpa’s interaments. Hospital staff interviewed after the story broke, recalled that both Narissa and Catherine would curtsy whenever Queen Elizabeth II appeared on the television.
Women who had been erased from official record, declared dead by the aristocratic volumes that documented their own family, living in an institution in Surrey and curtsying to the cousin who officially did not know they existed. The Smithsonian, in its account of the monster of glams, made the connection explicit. The family has dealt with some of its members in ways that outsiders might consider harsh.
The connection to the monster of glams is not metaphorical. It is structural. In both cases, a Bose lion family member born with a disability was removed from public existence. The official record was altered to suggest death, and the family maintained silence across decades.
The monster was allegedly hidden in the 1820s. Narissa and Catherine were hidden in 1941. The century between them did not change the instinct, only the institution used to affect the concealment. Prince Albert, Duke of York, known within the family as Bertie, and to the wider world as the future George V 6th, was the second son of George V, a man plagued by a severe stammer, deep shyness, and a temperament that needed the steadiness and warmth that Elizabeth almost uniquely could provide.
He fell in love with her and proposed for the first time in 1921. She declined, aware of the weight of royal duty and genuinely reluctant to surrender the relative freedom of the life she had, the glam summers, her social independence, the lightness of being someone who was admired but not formally obligated.
He proposed again in 1922 and was again refused. Queen Mary, his mother, made a formal visit to Glams to inspect the young woman her son was so determined to marry and apparently found nothing to object to, which in the context of the time constituted a significant official endorsement.
On the third proposal made in January 1923 in the garden at St. Paul’s Walden Berry, Elizabeth accepted and they were married at Westminster Abbey on April 26th, 1923. The first time a senior prince had married a commoner in the abbey since 1243. The marriage was by consistent account one of the genuinely happy unions in royal history.
A partnership built on complimentary temperaments sustained across extraordinary pressures including abdication, global war, and the unexpected inheritance of the throne itself. At the west door, Elizabeth paused and laid her wedding bouquet on the tomb of the unknown warrior in memory of Fergus, a gesture of private grief expressed in the most public possible setting.
Princess Margaret Rose was born in the blue room of Glam’s Castle at 9:22 in the evening on August 21st, 1930. The first royal baby born in the direct line of succession in Scotland in three centuries. delivered by Cesarian section with the home secretary JR Klines present in the castle as parliamentary convention required.
A custom already widely considered anacronistic by 1930 that had been observed since the 17th century to prevent any substitution of a royal infant. Both Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret spent significant time at Glams during their childhoods, playing in the grounds overlooked by the same ramparts from which their mother had once tipped ice water onto arriving guests.
Glam’s castle remains the private seat of Simon Bose Lion, 19th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorn. No hidden room has ever been officially found, officially confirmed, or officially denied. The long avenue of trees leading to the main gate house planted by Patrick Lion in the 1680s and now mature to an extraordinary scale gives glams its first appearance.
A corridor of trees with a fantasy silhouette at the end of it, towers and turrets resolving out of the Scottish mist, and it is by any measure one of the most dramatically picturesque approaches to any house in Britain. Estate papers record the presence of at least one hidden space adjacent to the charter room at the base of the great tower, but architectural historians believe that additional concealed spaces almost certainly exist within the 16 ft thick medieval walls of the original structure. The castle is open to visitors from March to October. Guided tours lasting approximately 50 minutes pass through the dining room, the crypt, Duncan’s Hall, the drawing room, the royal apartments, and the family chapel, where a seat remains vacant, reserved by long custom for Lady Janet alone. What lingers is the testimony of Rose, Lady Granville, the Queen Mother’s own aunt, who was herself born at Glam’s Castle,
and who asked what she knew of the monster story, looked serious, was silent for a moment, then said, “We were never allowed to talk about it when we were children. Our parents forbade us ever to discuss the matter or ask any questions about it. My father and grandfather refused absolutely to discuss it.
” Rose was not a credulous person or a romantic. She was an Eduwardian aristocrat of the most practically minded generation. And she confirmed with the specificity of a childhood memory that the prohibition was real. That silence, the particular silence of people who have been told not to ask, is the true legacy of glams.
It shaped the queen mother who ran through those corridors and heard those stories and became one of the most publicly warm and privately armored women in British royal history. It shaped every earl who was taken aside on his 21st birthday and told something that turned him in the eyes of those who knew him permanently sad.
It shaped the hidden cousins kept alive for decades in a Surrey institution while the world was told they were dead. And it shaped the castle itself. The most famously haunted house in Europe, standing with perfect composure in the Angus countryside. Beautiful, open, and full of rooms whose walls have never been explained.
