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Staircases to Nowhere & The Lady Glamis
20 Plays2 years ago
This week, it’s spooky staircases in the woods and spookier castles in the Scottish countryside!
First, Lauren explores the unexplained phenomena of “staircases in the woods” - like something out of an MC Escher piece, these mysterious isolated wooden or stone staircases have been found deep in numerous national parks & forests (and now across the world) with no signs of structures attached to them, seemingly leading nowhere…or do they?! Are they gateways to hell or other dimensions?! Are they pulpits for Satanic cult rituals?! What are they for?! Who is walking up them?! Take your own steps to find out...listen if you dare!
Next, Felicia picks up from last week with Part 2 of Glamis Castle aka “The most haunted castle in Scotland.” 300 years before the “Monster of Glamis” Thomas Lyon-Bowes, the Lady Glamis Janet Douglas Lyon was burned as a witch in 1537 at only 39-years-old after she was falsely accused of witchcraft and plotting to poison King James V. She was one of 2,000 Scots (mostly women) burned as a witches at Castlehill between 1479-1722, when Edinburgh was the witch-burning capital of Europe. These witch hunts targeted women, especially those with any kind of power or property and/or who challenged the patriarchy. Find out more about Scotland’s own Salem Witch Trails this week!
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Transcript
Introduction and Spooky Passion
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to the Sinister Sisters podcast. I'm Lauren. I'm Felicia. We're best friends. And we like spooky stuff. Oh, yeah, we do. And this week, a nice July day. It's like we were talking earlier about how it's just so hot. And in New York, it's like 80 something. In Dallas, it's like 100 something. But we've decided that past the 85 degree mark, it's all just bad.
00:00:42
Speaker
It's all bad. I will say there is an understanding in Dallas that's just like, you don't do anything that's not a seed. Like, you go to water parks, you go to pools, or you're inside. There's no like, like New York, I feel like there is like, you will go to the subway and wait on the subway and feel like you're going to die. Oh my God, it's horrible. It's so horrible. And like, I mean,
00:01:08
Speaker
The other issue in New York that I was unpleasantly reminded of this week as it hit the 85, 90 degree marks is that in the summer here, it warms up all the trash smell, all the sewer smell, all the pee that people are peeing all over everything. It's just nasty. Oh my God. And the no central AC. I forgot about that.
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Times are tough out here in New York. It's not easy to live in New York. I do think you deserve props every day. Yeah, thank you. Hey, you did it for many years, so. I did it for many years. What if we started each episode with, like, good for you, Felicia. Good for you. You're still there. And I said, good for you, Law, and you moved across the country for Central AC.
00:01:57
Speaker
I really did. I really did.
Review: The Elvis Movie
00:02:00
Speaker
Just kidding. What are my recommendations this week? I was going to jump in actually and say that I saw Elvis, which is obviously not a horror movie. There are maybe some horrific elements, but it was really fun. I went in really negative. I keep hearing it's good. Yeah. All right. I went in like, I will hate this, and I actually enjoyed it.
00:02:22
Speaker
What is Austin Butler? Austin Butler. Tom Hanks doing like a really ridiculous Eastern European accent of some kind, German I think actually. What is it? But the most crazy is that it's, you know, Baz Luhrmann who did Moulin Rouge and Great Gatsby.
00:02:41
Speaker
So it's wacky and big, like, oh, like very theatrical, very theatrical, lots of like colors and big musical numbers. And I don't know, it's a good time. And I forget that it's like, I don't know, I think I'm kind of like,
00:02:57
Speaker
I always am like, I'm not the biggest Elvis fan, and then you go watch it and you're like, oh, I know every song. Yeah, it's not that interesting. We do. You ain't nothing but a hound dog. Yeah. The most important thing about Elvis is that he briefly dated Elvira. That is important to know, I will say. Was that not in the movie? No, somehow they skipped over that. I wish it was featured.
00:03:25
Speaker
The other thing I was going to say is that I think he did a great job. It was a great performance. Austin Butler does not do it for me. There's one moment at the end. Oh, do you think he does it for you? Everyone I've heard says that he's amazing, so I'm very surprised to hear that.
00:03:39
Speaker
No, he did great. He does not do it for me where I swoon when I see his face. I'm like, oh, fine. Nice job singing. And then we got to the end, and they show this one shot of Elvis's face. And I had a physical like, oh, that's a beautiful man. And I was like, oh my god, am I one of those girls that would have screamed and thrown my underwear at the stage? I hope so.
TV Show Talk: The Bear
00:04:06
Speaker
Maybe. Maybe. You know what didn't we swoon or something?
00:04:09
Speaker
We started watching The Bear on Hulu. Oh, yes. I haven't watched it yet. It's that kid from Shameless that I don't even know his name. And Kickass, right? It's possible. I don't know. Is it that kid? But I was watching, I saw a TikTok talking about how The Bear is very female, the female gaze. I like this kind of sexualized camera view of the main character named Carmi, the Carmine.
00:04:40
Speaker
I feel like it's accurate. I'm watching it with Travis, and it's really good, actually. It's kind of like if you've ever worked in a restaurant, you'll probably pee your pants over the show. But it's this fine dining chef that ends up working at his
00:04:54
Speaker
family's sandwich shop. And it's like probably the most stressful show I've ever seen. It reminds me of the stress level of like uncut gems. But like there's something about the way he's filmed and like how the way like his hands are filmed, cutting vegetables. It's like all like a little like sexies. Oh, yeah, I don't know. You're a hand girl. Now we know.
00:05:35
Speaker
I don't know why I thought it was I think he just kind of looks like him. That's it. It's possible. I don't know
00:05:42
Speaker
Certainly not him. But I will add that to my list. I've been wanting to watch it. I also watched classic Netflix true crime documentary. I think it's called Girl in the Picture. Oh, I just not recommended that. Is it good? Yeah, it's very good. I just keep doing this thing where I put on documentaries like that as background noise. And I'm like, you actually can't do this.
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, or it's like a lot of facts going by and what happened and then like wait, that's her father like just You miss details and then you pretend like it's like Schitt's Creek where you can like halfway listen and you can't Did I tell you I just rewatch all Schitt's Creek? Oh No, I love that though. It's the best
00:06:32
Speaker
What a good use of your time. It's the best, most heartwarming, beautifulness. I laugh, I cry. It's all great. It's all great. Amazing. What else? Oh, wait. I have another one. I watched, and this is also in that YouTube video, so I feel bad just reiterating, but here I am doing it anyway. You Are Not My Mother is a freaking awesome Irish horror film that really scared me.
00:07:01
Speaker
It's basically about this girl whose mother goes missing and comes back. And when she comes back, she is changed in some way. And particularly the performance of the actress who plays the mother
00:07:21
Speaker
is so scary and like the situations that she puts her daughter in. Oh, it's, I don't know. It's really scary. It's really, really good. It's one of my favorite, like super naturally family psychological. I don't know all the, all the words, all the words. It's one of my favorite movies I've seen in a while that I thought was like genuinely quite scary. So I have not heard a word where, yeah. Where do I watch it?
00:07:50
Speaker
I think I rented it on Amazon, I'm pretty sure. Nice. But you saw like a recommendation for you to watch it or how did you come upon it? How did I find that movie? It is a female director and writer. Yeah, it is. Which usually like, I feel very drawn to that always, which also can be seen on my YouTube channel. Like whenever I'm like, oh, a woman wrote and directed this,
00:08:14
Speaker
and it's a horror movie, I feel like I'm just probably going to watch it and I usually are pretty much never disappointed. Yeah, for sure. All right. Amazing. I'm adding it to my list.
Urban Legend: Stairs in the Woods
00:08:27
Speaker
I love it. Okay. Well, I am talking about kind of a weird subject today.
00:08:35
Speaker
I saw it on TikTok, which is just my new go-to for finding topics, I think. Yeah. And all my information. It's terrible. I love my life, what I learned on TikTok. It's so bad. I know. There are some times that I will repeat something that I'm like, wait, you only saw that from one girl's TikTok. She could be making up more and stuff. I read this news article. Oh, wait. Actually, it was a TikTok.
00:09:01
Speaker
I mean, the thing that I was repeating about Roe v. Wade when that was overturned, like the facts that I was spewing, teens on TikTok told me. Teens on TikTok, not even adults. Oh man, okay, one day I will be better. But not today. That's my logo, that's my slogan. One day I will be better. I'll get that tattooed on my arm maybe. Yeah.
00:09:29
Speaker
But I am talking about this crazy phenomenon of these random stairs popping up in the woods that lead to nowhere, very spooky. And they're most often seen at night, and there's normally no structure attached to them, just some stairs in the woods. That does not seem good. No.
00:09:55
Speaker
As we always say, we've talked about this concept before, but this was just helpful for me to think about. So 36% of the US is still covered in forests, which I know sounds low, but also very high to me. I mean, yeah, I think that is high. Wait, how much? 36%.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we're a very populated country. And of course, we all live in all the coasts. But that's that that's a lot of wilderness. It's a lot of wilderness. And as we always know, people go missing frequently in the woods. So this these stairs started to gain attention with a Reddit post in 2019. So this was someone who worked on a search and rescue team tasked with finding missing people, which I just think
00:10:48
Speaker
good for those people. That sounds like the most miserable and horrible job, especially after my recent woods experience. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Because you're like looking for bad news. Yeah. Good news. But I don't know. Most of the time not good. I feel. Yeah. But he said in his post that during rescue missions, you know, it's not unusual to encounter these random stairs that either emerge from the trees. They lead nowhere standing alone.
00:11:16
Speaker
but always very impressive and detailed and miles and miles away from any kind of civilization. So one of the stories that he tells was in one of his first training missions. He came across a set of stairs that was massive. It was 10 feet wide. It was weirdly a carpeted staircase that he says looks like it came from a mansion
00:11:44
Speaker
back in the day. And he said it looked so out of place that it felt like a video game glitch. He looked up and was like, this can't possibly be existing in these woods. So he started to walk towards the stairs, but his trainer, his manager that was with him said that was not a good idea.
00:12:05
Speaker
She told him, as part of this job, you're going to see stairs like this all the time. And it's imperative that you not touch them, don't climb on them. You need to just ignore them. So he took that advice, never touched them, but continued to bring it up with more senior Rangers as he worked with other people. And one of his friends had an almost identical experience in his training.
00:12:33
Speaker
and with his trainer. He saw a set of stairs. His trainer said, don't touch them, don't go up them. But his friend actually did not have the self-control. He did. So a year into being a ranger, this friend was looking for a missing person. He saw a brand new set of stairs. There were no leaves or dirt. That's the other thing that seems like a common part is that these stairs are always very clean, which is weird in the middle of the woods. Like someone's maintaining them.
00:13:03
Speaker
Yes, and I will say from, again, my brief camping experience, things get very dirty all over very fast.
00:13:12
Speaker
but this friend decided to start climbing the stairs. And then when he got to the top step, he began to have this terrible feeling that he had done something horribly wrong. He felt really uneasy, but the longer he stayed at the, so he just like stayed on this top step and he eventually couldn't hear anything. He couldn't see anything or feel anything. So he ran back down the stairs, rejoined the group,
00:13:41
Speaker
And then when the search was over, they didn't find the missing person, sadly. And his friend Superior reprimanded him for going on the stairs. And he was like, well, how did you know that I touched these stairs? But the Superior said, because we didn't find the missing person. The dogs had the scent and lost it. And that's always a sign that someone has touched a set of stairs in the woods. It was just so weird.
00:14:09
Speaker
Very creepy, very creepy. So the Reddit poster, his other story was he actually came in contact with a former trainer for the search and rescue team who is now an EMT. So we're going to call this guy EW because that's what he is on the Reddit post. So EW asked this original ranger if he'd heard of this specific boy's case. The boy's name was Joey. He was 11 years old and went missing while playing near a river.
00:14:40
Speaker
So people assumed he had fallen into the river. But when the scent dogs were brought there, they followed a smell away from the river back towards the forest. And the kind of craziest part of this surge was, you know, I really don't know how any of this works, but search and rescue teams, I guess, have like a grid system, basically like, you know, checking off that they've hit all the different areas kind of thing. And so if you imagine it like a checkerboard,
00:15:08
Speaker
you know, the dogs would smell something in the black square, then go to the red square right next to it, lose the scent, but then go to the next black square and smell the scent again. So it was like this boy would have had to travel, you know, hundreds of yards in the air and like be touching down in these like jumping square to square basically. So very creepy situation, but when
00:15:36
Speaker
EW was searching their part of the grid. They found this concrete stairway in the middle of nowhere. Same kind of thing. He started to head towards the stairway. The other ranger adamantly said he shouldn't go there. The other ranger said we're not supposed to touch them or go up them. We're supposed to ignore them. So EW goes alone and saw that something was curled up on the bottom stair, and it was Joey, and he was dead.
00:16:05
Speaker
very creepy but it had been you know just under five hours since this boy actually went missing so it's very quick and the other weird thing is there was no damage to the boy just had like a little bit of blood around his mouth
00:16:20
Speaker
But normally, the search and rescue teams would have sadly given this dead body over to the police department and not heard anything. But EW had a friend at the sheriff's department, so they called him a few weeks later and said that the coroner had never seen anything like this.
00:16:40
Speaker
they couldn't find the cause of death for the little boy. And that the boy's organs were full of, like each organ was full of these perfectly circular holes. And so.
00:16:53
Speaker
Aliens! It feels like aliens to me! So, EW, like, very quickly stopped being a ranger because he was so unsettled by this and moved over to be an EMT, which I'm like, I'm sure you find equally horrifying. Like, what lines of work? Why would you choose these things? Yeah. But also thank you for choosing these things. But also thank you. Also thank you.
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah. And the same Reddit poster, you know, original one continued to say that once he was out with another ranger, he asked about the stairs and this ranger told him to turn off his radio and then told him several stories. So these are really crazy. So there was one unit that agreed to go to the top of the stairs. So one ranger gets the top,
00:17:40
Speaker
And the ranger reached out to touch a tree branch and his hand was sliced off clean at the wrist. They were very far away from medical attention, so he almost died. But they never found the hand. I hate it. And then during another encounter, this one, you know, seen by this ranger personally,
00:18:05
Speaker
A woman approached the stairs, reached out and touched them. Then she recoiled, turned around and said to the ranger, something is wrong with me. And then she died at the ranger's feet due to a burst blood vessel in the brain. Oh, very scary. So this ranger just said, you know, anytime that the stairs are interfered with, bad things happen. Dogs suddenly lose the scent of a missing person. He mentioned someone being cut in half.
00:18:32
Speaker
uh, with, you know, with nothing that they could see. But, you know, obviously all of these Rangers were kind of talking back and forth on this Reddit post about just like how ridiculous it is that all these trainees are being told like, don't touch the stairs, bad things happen. But no one knows any more information than that. And it's seemingly like no one's like doing, or I'm sure they're, the government is doing research, but like, you know, nothing's being shared. So,
00:18:59
Speaker
Many different people on this post came forward with similar experiences and stories. The reports are all, you know, or not all, but some of these reports are very detailed. And sometimes it's, you know, clearly like it was a structure with stairs and then the structure, you know, is destroyed and the stairs remain. But sometimes it's not the case.
00:19:20
Speaker
And it also is interesting there, you know, as I said, kind of a main theme is that they're always well cleaned and there's no vegetation growing on them, no animal remains or, you know, anything like that. But there is a real range of materials and what the stairs look like. They kind of come in all sort of, you know, sometimes they seem very old. Sometimes they seem like a more modern set of stairs.
00:19:47
Speaker
In some cases there are cemeteries or burial places nearby but it does seem like there's this running theme that there almost is always a set of stairs near where someone disappeared to just think it's very freaky and they're also always several miles away from towns in the center of the woods not normally like on the edge.
00:20:08
Speaker
There's another man that I thought was kind of an interesting story that on the Reddit post talks about working as an infectious disease expert for the US government healthcare agency. And this was back in 1940s right around the Roswell accident. And right around like there had been several mutilated animals that have been found.
00:20:30
Speaker
And during that six months of research in the area, there were many staircases that were spotted and then seemed to move at night, which I think is so scary. But where they had been previously, that area appeared to be burned. So I don't know. There's a lot of crazy stories on this Reddit post. I highly recommend reading it if you're into kind of like
00:20:54
Speaker
creepypasta urban legend stuff. It is crazy to see the pictures of the different stairs. And I think, you know, there's a, there's obviously a lot of different theories. I think the idea of aliens is, is pretty interesting. There are also people that think they're like portals to other dimensions and that's why like they're, you know, stairs to another dimension or some people even say like hell.
00:21:19
Speaker
But I love the idea somebody said maybe this is why like we see Bigfoot or we see other you know kind of like the Fresno Nightcrawlers is like maybe they slip in and out through like this
00:21:31
Speaker
staircase portal in the woods, but that's why they're not always present. So I like that idea a lot too. I like the dimension thing a lot. I mean that even if it's not true, like I would love to see that in like a TV show, but like going up those stairs and then like falling and it's like you're in another place and then like other stuff can come through. Like that sounds freaking awesome. Yeah. And it feels like, I don't know. I'm like more and more every day. I feel like we're all getting
00:21:57
Speaker
more research or evidence into the different dimensions or different realities. So I don't know. I think it's all really interesting, but you can read if this is interesting to you. You can read more about it on the Reddit post. It's, you know, I'm a search and rescue officer for the U.S. Forest Service. I have some stories to tell. So there's a ton in there. And then I also clearly got a lot of my information from Max Powers on TikTok. And his handle is Pariskeytalk.
00:22:26
Speaker
Paraski talk. I'm not sure. But he has a lot of weird stuff. He talks about like the Avril Lavigne conspiracy theory and all kinds of stuff too. So highly recommend checking out his stuff. That's awesome. That's amazing. And I seen like those images before. I'm not sure if in a Tiktok or elsewhere, but it is it's it's very spooky. It's just like something that has such a clear purpose in our world to be taken out of
00:22:55
Speaker
like a house and put in nature is just like something's wrong. Yes, something is not right. And like leading to nowhere. I don't know. Yeah.
00:23:18
Speaker
All right, so I guess now we can move into part two of my Glams Castle episode situation.
Historical Hauntings: Janet Douglas and the Gray Lady
00:23:28
Speaker
Last week, if you didn't hear, I talked a little bit about Glams Castle and its monster of Glams.
00:23:36
Speaker
And it's funny because even once again, even though it's pronounced Glams, it looks like Glamis, but saying monster of Glams, Glams Castle, it really makes me think of like a drag race or like a drag queen like owning a castle. Do you know what I mean? Like that's what it feels like it should be. Unfortunately, I totally agree. It is not. So today I'm going to talk about
00:24:04
Speaker
A couple of different elements that are gonna lead us to a story about Janet Douglas, Lady Glams, who is also now known at the castle as the Gray Lady who haunts the chapel at the castle and other parts as well. So the first thing I wanna mention is that Scotland has a really dark history with witch trials.
00:24:33
Speaker
like way worse than the American witch trials. Wow. And a lot of history of burning innocent people at the stake. Damn. They think that it's around 4000 women and men were accused in early modern Scotland
00:24:54
Speaker
and were tried and many were killed. They're so sad. Yes, so that's bad. And there's also in Scotland just a lot of folklore around magic, magical creatures, fairies, all this stuff. And that's very embedded in their history and culture. And there is this thing that I found mentioned around Janet Douglas.
00:25:24
Speaker
but only from like one or two sources. So it's hard to say, but this idea of something that's called the second site. And in Scottish tradition, this is a sort of like being a medium in some ways, but there are a few versions of it. It's something that someone is born with. They can either see the future or they can also like see magic
00:25:53
Speaker
in other things, like in other people. So a lot of these people that claim to have second sight were used to point out who was witches and doing dark magic, which seems a little like, what's the word? Not counterintuitive, but like, okay, it's like you're using someone that says they have powers to find other people's powers so that you can burn them at stake. I don't know.
00:26:20
Speaker
Um, she was a little strange, but so I, I have seen a particularly one very well narrated, uh, YouTube video about Janet Douglas being born with this second sight and actually having a history as she was a child of pointing out.
00:26:39
Speaker
witches that were then burned at the stake. But this is not in most of the articles I read, so I don't know if that's just like an embellishment of her, of her life. But to talk a little bit about her, so Janet Douglas, a Scottish noblewoman, and she was eventually, and this is kind of the end of her story, and then we'll go back, she was accused of witchcraft by
00:27:07
Speaker
King James V of Scotland and she was eventually executed and she was burned at the stake, if you will, during his reign. And her history, this is just her adult years because this is really mostly what I could find.
00:27:25
Speaker
She was born in 1498, and she was the daughter of George Douglas, master of Angus, which once again, glams is in Angus, Scotland. So her father, George Douglas, and Elizabeth German.
00:27:45
Speaker
And she first married John Leon, who was the sixth – this is like Scottish and English history. It's like all these different like noble people's names are like confusing to me. But it's a lot. So the sixth lord glams and he eventually died and she was accused of poisoning him. She was accused of being a witch and of poisoning him.
00:28:18
Speaker
seen as innocent from that, so that didn't end her fate. Got it. But yeah, so she had four children, John, Liam, named for his father, who was then the seventh Lord, Glams, George, Margaret, and Elizabeth. And we don't hear much about most of the children except for John, who was the eldest, and the heir to, you know, whatever.
00:28:41
Speaker
but apparently that she was like.
00:28:46
Speaker
Glams Castle, if you will. But the Douglas family had kind of a rough history with James the Fifth of Scotland, which kind of started all this drama around Janet, which ultimately led to her death. So James the Fifth of Scotland, he
00:29:10
Speaker
He was born in 1513 and actually died in 1542. He died pretty young. He was one of those kings that was crowned when he was a baby. So he was crowned at like 17 months. And so his stepfather ended up ruling for him for a certain amount of time until he came of age.
00:29:34
Speaker
And so he didn't technically start ruling until 1528. And it says when he finally escaped the custody of his stepfather, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus.
00:29:51
Speaker
So there was definitely some like kind of difficulty getting his throne and he had this lifelong, though short life, lifelong hatred of the Douglas family. And he ended up exiling Angus, Earl of Angus, and confiscated the land of the Douglases. So Janet,
00:30:16
Speaker
So hopefully, hopefully I'm telling all this right. This is a lot of history stuff. Jana ended up kind of escaping when she got married. So she wasn't really like that close to where he lived, I guess. So like she wasn't like in his direct view for a while. But as he got older, he was described as like a very vindictive king. And all of everything he did, like all of his policies were mostly about getting wealth and fear
00:30:45
Speaker
And like a paranoia of someone taking his throne because he had such a hard time getting it, I guess. Yeah, so that's that's a lot of red flags there. So and this will kind of link some of your brains and maybe your brain, Lauren, into like where we are in history right now, that his only surviving child was Mary, Queen of Scots.
00:31:08
Speaker
Uh, got it. Yeah. Yeah. Which my first introduction to Barry's Queen of Scots was one of those like historical fiction books in my elementary library that had like all those like, I don't know. Was it a romantic one? No. It wasn't romantic. It was just like, I don't know. It was like an embellishment of her life, I guess. Got it. But, but I always thought she was really, really cool.
00:31:31
Speaker
Yes, definitely. But this story is not about her, so let's go back. So back to Janet, she eventually did see the wrath of King James V, and he basically said, you are conspiring to kill me.
00:31:49
Speaker
be a poison just like how you killed your first husband and she was like what no that's crazy and he was like wanna bet and so what he did is that he took her uh her son john and
00:32:05
Speaker
a bunch of their servants and people that worked at the castle brought them to where he lived and put them in the dungeons. He then took over Glam's castle for his own. Wow. Rude. So rude. Yeah. They couldn't find any evidence that said that Janet had done any of this. What he did is just ended up torturing
00:32:36
Speaker
all of the people that had worked for her, like all of her servants and everything, to get the response that he wanted, which was that, yes, she's been communicating with her brother far off. Yes, they've been planning to poison you so they can take over, just like your step-daddy drama. I mean, you can get people to admit to anything under torture. It seems like it. It seems like it. Yeah.
00:33:03
Speaker
So she was eventually, she was held, she was held in the dungeons for like, I think like even a couple of years before she was actually killed. But then she was eventually convicted as a witch and sentenced to death. Yeah, it's not great. So in terms of her haunting, people say that at Glam's Castle, there's a chapel
00:33:34
Speaker
down somewhere, it's very big once again, somewhere in there there's a chapel and that she, now known as kind of the gray lady of the castle, is seen kind of wandering around and she is seen sitting in a certain chair in that parish and it's so
00:33:57
Speaker
ingrained in this castle, that that is like kind of her room, that they actually save a seat for her and no one, no one is allowed to sit in that seat except for her. Oh, wow. I love those kinds of stories. I know, right? That's nice. Oh, just a quote that I had put down here from James V. As he said, no Douglas shall find refuge in Scotland.
00:34:26
Speaker
as long as I was king." And thankfully, yeah, that's very rude. So thankfully, he did end up dying in 1542. And that was only, let's see, five years after Janet Douglas had been murdered.
00:34:47
Speaker
And so what they and he had not gotten to executing her son, john. So he died before he actually got to convict john. So john
00:34:59
Speaker
ended up going on to live at Glamis Glamis. This is the whole episode of me saying Glamis Glamis. I mean, it should not be spelled that way. It's really it would be nice if it wasn't. And so he did live until 1558. And yeah, people just died so young.
00:35:21
Speaker
It's true. It's true. Oh, they must have died of something terrible. And it's like, oh, just, you know, this old age circumstances. It's just that old age at 35. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, so that's kind of the story of Janet Douglas and the gray lady. And they always hold a seat for her, which is nice.
00:35:43
Speaker
It's like a classy ghost. Yeah, she seems very classy. Oh, and there is, I wish I had written it down, but I didn't. But some of her court testimony is written down. And in her testimony, she basically says that
00:36:00
Speaker
I'm innocent, but it actually doesn't matter if I'm innocent or not, because this is what he wants. So he's basically gonna kill me either way. She was just like very calm and like, right? She's like, I mean, I'll tell you the truth, but ultimately it won't matter to you. And I was like, damn, that's true. And so to kind of finish off this
00:36:22
Speaker
story just a little bit. The big Scottish witch trials didn't start until a little bit after her death. So it's not that this like sparked it or anything like that necessarily, but maybe. So she had died in 1537 and then in 1597 there was a nationwide
00:36:51
Speaker
based on the epidemic of witch trials. And that's just from March to October of 1597, over 400 people were put on trial for witchcraft. And then there was, I mean, they have five national witch hunts in Scottish history. So there's that one. There's the witch hunt of 1590 to 91, 1628 to 1631, 1649 to 50. And then the last one was
00:37:20
Speaker
1661 to 62. So it's just, it was just crazy town over there for. And so, I mean, so many and for so long. Yeah. For basically, for basically a solid like 70 years, there was just constant witch hunts, which if we learned anything from the American witch hunts is mostly just a ploy to kill people that are bothering you in some way or in your way financially. Um, that was just a bummer, but, uh, yeah.
00:37:49
Speaker
That's the story of the Grey Lady. I love it. I liked the double feature of this creepy Scottish castle.
00:37:58
Speaker
Yeah, right. And obviously, there are pictures probably already up from last week and for this week. But it definitely looks like one of those places and it might have been I haven't looked into this, that would have been on like the scariest places on earth or something where like, I would want to spend a night there because I know something spooky would happen. I believe that with both of those stories. That sounds so creepy. Yeah, yeah.
00:38:23
Speaker
Amazing. Well, thank you guys for listening again, and we hope you have some sweet, sweet nightmares. Bye!