Episode 51: Within the Walls

This is the story of the one.

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When Duke William II of Normandy crossed the English Channel in late September of 1066, He brought something with him.

It was a tool that he planned to use in his quest to take the throne from Harold Godwinson, a man who William saw as a thief and a liar, and pretender to a throne that was meant for him alone.

This thing that William brought to England was something that we all take for granted today.

The castle.

Yes, it's an invention that was already ancient by the time William landed on the shores of Sussex, but he brought a new style and approach to an old art.

Before he did anything in England, before the battles and long marches across the countryside, he ordered his soldiers to build a castle.

He built it right there in Pevensey, near Hastings, where he would later defeat Harold in battle.

His builders simply found a tall hill, built a wooden tower on top of it, and then surrounded that tower with a tall fence.

No, it wouldn't stand the test of time, but that wasn't the goal.

He simply needed a central place from which to make raids, to be a symbol of the Norman presence, and to put a figurative stake in the ground.

After the conquest, William's nobility replaced those wooden towers with stone, and stone, as you know, can last a very long time.

In fact, some of those original castles, now a thousand years old, are still standing today.

But their presence and the presence of the ones that followed them are built to serve a greater purpose.

Each was a physical representation of the king's power.

They were majestic and grand and impenetrable.

Yes, they were tools of horrible oppression, but they were also the armor plating that protected the new and fragile Norman rule of England.

But every tool can be misused.

And within those stone walls, all of that power and oppression was brought to bear on the innocent and guilty alike.

Blood was spilled, lives were ended, and mysteries were born.

And in some castles, the echoes of those horrible deeds are still with us today.

I'm Erin Mankey, and this is Lore.

The term castle comes to us from the Latin word castrum.

It simply means a fortified place.

The first European castles, as we might imagine them today, were built in the 9th and 10th centuries, but these were fairly unsophisticated compared to what William brought with him when he invaded England.

His castles did more than just provide enormous walls to hide behind.

When the first London fortress was constructed in 1066, it was made of wood like all his other early builds, and it followed that new design.

Roughly a decade later, the timber was replaced with a more permanent stone structure.

When it was completed, the central building that we now call the White Tower became the center of the English universe.

Back then, it was the royal residence, a symbol of the king's power and a military stronghold.

Since then, it's been home to the royal mint, a zoo for exotic animals, and even served as a prison all the way until 1952.

And that's a whole lot of purpose to cram inside just 12 square acres.

Today, the castle is home to the Crown Jewels, a fantastic museum and extensive tours that attract millions of people each year.

If the tower is known for one thing over all the others, it's the imprisonment of those who became caught up in the sharp gears of the political machine.

Sir Walter Riley, Lady Jane Grey, Guy Fawkes, Anne Boleyn, even Queen Elizabeth I

were all held there for a time.

Some walked out with their lives intact.

Others didn't fare so well.

When Edward IV died in 1483, his brother Richard became Lord Protector until Edward's boys, 9 and 12 years old at the time, were old enough to take over.

Instead, Richard had both of them declared illegitimate, and a short time later, they vanished from palace life.

It wasn't until 1674, almost two centuries later, that a wooden chest was found buried in the ground outside the White Tower.

Inside, workmen found a collection of bones that made up two small human skeletons, one slightly larger than the other.

The most common residents of the Tower of London, by far, are the yeoman warders, the ceremonial guardians of the castle.

Today, they function primarily as tour guides, and each warder lives with their family in an apartment within the walls.

It was in one of these apartments during World War II that a warder and his wife were pulled from sleep by the sounds of their daughter screaming for help.

The young girl was crying and trembling when they found her.

When they asked her what was wrong, she told her parents that she'd seen something in her bedroom that had frightened her.

So frightening that she refused to go back inside.

When they pressed her on it, she told them that she'd woken up to discover that there were strange children in her room.

Two boys, in fact.

They just sat quietly on the edge of her bed.

Each, according to her, was dressed in old-fashioned clothing.

Far to the north, though, Scotland has its own fair share of troubled fortresses, and sitting at the center of them all is Edinburgh Castle.

But where the Tower of London was constructed almost exclusively within a small two-century window, Edinburgh Castle is more of a living, breathing creature.

While St.

Margaret's Chapel is the only remaining part of the original 12th-century structure, other parts have been added throughout the centuries, giving it sort of a sprawling, organic quality.

But of course, Where there's life, there's also death.

Like most castles, Edinburgh served as a prison for criminals and political enemies of the crown.

In one tale, a prisoner managed to escape his cell and stow away inside a wheelbarrow full of manure with the hope of being carted out through the gate of the castle.

Instead, the entire load was dumped off the west port side, where he plummeted to his death below.

Visitors to the ledge have often described the overwhelming scent of dung and the odd sensation of being pushed by unseen hands.

The tunnels and dungeons of the the castle's lower level have played host to countless stories of unexplainable experiences.

Heavy breathing, sounds of knocking or hammering, and painful moans have all been heard in the dark subterranean portions of the building.

And these events, some say, are connected to the tale of Lady Janet Douglas.

In 1528, Lady Douglas was accused of witchcraft and conspiracy by King James V.

Her servants and family were each captured and imprisoned.

Then, each of them, one by one, was tortured in order to produce forced confessions against her.

She herself was rumored to be kept isolated in the dark for so long that she actually went blind.

And all the while, carpenters in leather aprons wandered the lanes above as they built the wooden platform upon which she would soon be burned alive.

In 2001, a British psychologist named Dr.

Richard Wiseman wanted to get to the bottom of stories like these.

He managed to find and and screen over 200 participants for an unorthodox experiment.

The screenings were designed to weed out anyone who might have knowledge of the stories told about Edinburgh Castle and its haunted past.

Once Dr.

Wiseman and his team had verified all of the volunteers, they set to work.

Wiseman and his assistants proceeded to take small groups of volunteers on tours through various parts of the castle.

Now, admittedly, there were elements of these experiments that weren't the most ethical.

In fact, some volunteers were actually shut up alone inside certain rooms.

Dr.

Wiseman said it was their chance to make personal observations without anyone around, but no matter how safe it might have been, I can't see how locking a person in a castle dungeon could be anything other than traumatic.

One woman reported that her time alone inside one of these castle vaults was filled with odd experiences.

She reported heavy breathing that seemed to move closer and closer to her the longer she was in the room.

She also said she saw flashes of light in the darkness.

It goes without saying, she exited the vault completely and utterly terrified.

Others heard voices and caught glimpses of shadowy figures.

One entire group of volunteers unanimously claimed to see the ghostly figure of a man move slowly across the end of a tunnel.

They said he was dressed in old-fashioned clothing and wore something unusual over his torso.

It was a leather carpenter's apron.

There is a common idea about castles that all those thick stone walls and floors make great hiding places for horrible secrets.

After all, few castles were as orderly and perfectly structured as most modern homes.

Whether it's a hidden dungeon or the bricked-up body of a victim, the strong walls of a castle can act like a prison, holding in centuries of suffering, tragedy, and death.

If the stories are to be believed, there's one castle in particular that holds a secret that's darker than most.

Darker because rather than playing host to some ghostly vision or spiritual inhabitant, This one is said to have been home to a flesh-and-blood monster.

It's been the subject of speculation for nearly two centuries and has intrigued the minds of locals and luminaries alike.

And the name of the castle?

Glams.

Glams Castle was built in the village of the same name on the supposed site of the murder of King Malcolm II in the 11th century.

By the late 1300s, the castle had been granted to the Lion family.

Sir John Lyon, you see, was married to the king's daughter, which apparently came with perks.

And if Monty Python has taught us anything, those perks probably involved huge tracts of

Today, the castle is featured on the back of the Scottish £10 note, and it's famous for being the setting of Shakespeare's Macbeth, although the historical Macbeth predates the castle by centuries.

But it's also the setting of a legendary tale about a 15th century Earl who loved to play cards.

According to the story, when the Earl's house guests refused to join him for an illicit game on the Sabbath, he erupted in anger.

He made a threat about being willing to play with the devil himself as long as he got to play cards.

And that's when a stranger showed up at the castle door.

This stranger, who turned out to be the devil, of course, proceeded to play cards with the Earl, beat him, and then take his soul.

Historians are unsure which 15th century Earl was the focus of this story.

And of course, there's no documentable evidence of anyone having their soul taken away in a card game.

So, take it all with a grain of salt.

But I mentioned dark secrets, didn't I?

Sorry, let's get back to that.

You see, beginning sometime in the 1840s, rumors began to spread about a family secret.

The Lion family, they said, was hiding something horrible.

So horrible that only the Earl himself knew what it was.

But there were whispers, details that hinted at what the secret might be.

We can probably thank Sir Walter Scott, the famous novelist, poet, and playwright, for making the secret public.

In 1830, he published an account of a visit he made to Glam's back in 1790, and in it he made note of a secret room.

He knew little else, of course, but he couldn't help mentioning the words secret room, and the public ate it up.

Whatever and wherever this room is, the access to it was either hidden very carefully or had just been removed entirely.

Think Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I suppose.

Just without the giant snake.

A room that no one but a select few ever get to see or even know about, and the knowledge of which is passed down from one generation to the next.

Now, this isn't an impossibility.

Some of the walls of the castle are up to 16 feet thick, which makes it easy to see how a small room could be tucked away in there.

There are even records of small chambers being built within the walls.

One such room is recorded near the charter room, located at the base of the main castle tower.

In a lot of ways, one of the main reasons for a castle's construction was privacy and safety, so hidden rooms, even if they weren't an early trend, were certainly a common occurrence.

As to what lay hidden inside the secret chamber of glams, no one except the Earl himself knew any of the details.

But of course, that didn't stop others from trying to find it, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident.

One day in 1850, The Earl and his wife played host to a number of guests for a large celebration.

One morning, the men went off hunting and left their wives and daughters behind.

Bored, the Earl's wife suggested a game.

Let's find the secret room.

Hundreds of white rags were brought out and everyone was tasked with the job of tying one rag in each window that they could find.

Up and down the castle, these women ran about finding windows and placing rags in them.

And then, when they were sure they'd finished the job, They headed outside.

As a group, they walked around the perimeter of the castle, looking at every window and noting the rags that hung in them.

Finally, as the story goes, the women found it.

A window on the tower could clearly be seen without a white rag hanging from it.

The party ran back inside to check their work.

Surely, someone missed a window.

But try as they might, after examining the tower a second time, they couldn't find the mistake.

The window was in a room they couldn't reach.

Naturally, people wanted to know what was hidden inside the walls of the castle.

Sir Walter Scott had made the rumor popular, and stories like that of the white rag mystery only fanned the flames.

And it didn't help that the earls, from the 11th Earl all the way down to the 15th, were famously elusive about it all.

In 1903, Charles Bose Lyon, who was the 13th Earl at the time, said this about the secret, 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.

Five years later, an article about the secret appeared in a historical journal called Notes and Queries.

The author claimed to know more, revealed to him in the 1840s.

According to him, the secret room held, and I quote, 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.

Just what sort of monster are we talking about here?

Well, that's the question, isn't it?

Dubbed the Monster of Glams, a couple of rough descriptions have survived through the years.

One from the 19th century claimed the monster resembled a human toad.

It was said to leave the secret room at night and wander the battlements, an area still referred to today as the Mad Earl's Walk.

Another description gives us more detail.

In the 1960s, British writer James Wentworth Day was staying at the castle as a guest of the 16th Earl when he was told the story as it had been passed down to him.

What he told Wentworth Day is the most detailed description we have on record.

The story confirms earlier rumors.

A monster was born into the family, the Earl told him.

He was the heir and a creature to behold.

It was impossible to allow this deformed caricature of humanity to be seen, even by their friends.

The Earl went on to describe the deformity that this rumored heir suffered from.

His chest was an enormous barrel, he told the writer, and hairy as a doormat.

His head ran straight into his shoulders, and his arms and legs were toy-like.

However warped and twisted his body, though, the child had been reared into manhood.

A physically deformed heir to the title, hidden away to save face.

If this was really true, it at least made sense why each surviving earl was entrusted with keeping it all a secret.

Their legitimacy to the title and castle were at stake, as was, at least in their minds, the honor of their family name.

It also makes you question who the real monster of Glams was.

the deformed child?

Or the father who was so ashamed of him that he locked him away from the world.

So, as you can imagine, anyone who got too close to this secret ended up in some form of trouble.

When the 12th Earl found out that his wife and her friends had searched the castle for signs of this hidden room, it's said that he divorced her and sent her away.

She never spoke again of her experience and died many years later in Italy.

Fifteen years later, in 1865, a workman was searching for something in the castle when he stumbled upon a door he'd never seen before.

Maybe he was new to the castle, or maybe he'd just never fully explored it.

Whatever the reason, here he was, staring at a mysterious door.

So he did what any of us would have done in his place.

He pushed it open.

Behind it stretched a long, dark hallway.

He summoned up some courage and stepped through, taking a few steps down the corridor.

There was a shape at the end of the hall that he wanted to get a closer look at.

Before he could figure out what it was, though, the shape moved and the workman, frightened for his life, bolted back down the passageway and out into the open.

And then he reported everything to his boss.

The next day, the workman was told in very strong language that he should move to Australia, of all places.

He was handed paperwork with the details of his emigration, all paid for and arranged by the Earl himself.

He was never seen in the castle again.

Another story is told of a young doctor who visited the castle for professional reasons.

His visit required spending multiple nights, so at the end of the first day, he was led to the blue room and left to himself.

He settled in, unpacked, and was getting ready to turn in for the night when he spotted a portion of the carpet that looked, well, odd, so he lifted it up off the floor and peeked beneath it.

What he found, according to the story, was the wooden square of a trapdoor set into the stone floor.

Curious, and clearly a lot more brave than I would ever claim to be, the doctor forced the trapdoor open and then lowered himself down through the opening.

Below, he found a passageway.

After following it for a few paces, it came to an end at a blank cement wall.

The doctor claimed that this wall looked solid but was in fact still wet, as if the cement hadn't fully dried before he discovered it.

He even claimed to have pressed his finger into the surface and watched it give way.

If the cement was there to cover an opening, then he couldn't help but wonder, what was behind it?

He climbed back up into his room and went to bed with a good many questions on his mind.

When he awoke the next morning though, he found an envelope on the floor near the entrance.

Someone had slipped it under his door during the night, so he picked it up and tore it open.

Inside, he found two things.

payment for his services and a note announcing that a carriage was ready to take him to the train station.

He was required to leave immediately.

There's irony in the idea of a haunted castle.

These buildings, by nature and design, are meant to be places of safety and refuge, a literal fortified home, if even on a grand scale.

They were built to last centuries and to keep the people inside them safe from any outside threat imaginable.

But instead, many of these stone fortresses have become home to more than just nobility.

They have collected tragedy, intrigue, oppression, even murder.

And as a result, the undeniable echoes of dark history walk their halls to this very day.

Now, rather than worrying about about outsiders breaking in, there's a new, more frightening threat.

A threat within the walls.

Surely, though, these stories can't be true.

Yes, it's widely accepted that Edward IV's sons were imprisoned and killed, and quite possibly by their very own uncle.

The discovery of those skeletons seems to support that legend.

But without similar proof, most other stories will never be anything more than speculation and whispers.

Evidence is always required to give truth a voice.

All that said, some historians think they have an answer to the Glam's mystery, and they trace it back to the 11th Earl, Thomas Lyon Bowes.

You see, in 1821, his son and daughter-in-law recorded the birth of their first son, also named Thomas.

But the records show that little Thomas died the very same day.

The young couple went on to have another son the following year.

They named him, like his older brother, Thomas.

Now, maybe it was a desire to carry on that family name.

Maybe it was a way of honoring their loss.

I don't think we'll ever fully know.

But from that day on, according to some, there were two boys named Thomas in the castle.

Not one.

One lived in the light, and the other was a captive, hidden away in the shadows.

60 years later, on April 1st of 1882, a number of British newspapers ran a sensational story.

It claimed that the Glam secret had finally been solved, that a person kept in a secret room had passed away.

This person, according to the article, had been old and the body had been carried out for burial.

Sadly, nothing more was added to the description.

It's interesting to note that all of the stories the 1850 exploration with white rags, the workman, the doctor, all of it, took place in the 61 years between 1821 and 1882.

Outside those dates, there are simply no stories of the Glam's monster.

That, in itself, is more than compelling.

One last tale.

I don't have a precise date on it, but it was published in the 1880 edition of All the Year Round, so at the very least, we know it took place prior to that.

A story goes that a woman known throughout London society as an artistic celebrity had once visited the castle for the very first time.

She was given a luxurious room to stay in overnight and found it to be very modern and comfortable for such an ancient place.

The morning after her first night of sleep, she came down for breakfast and joined her hosts at the table.

The Earl's wife politely asked how she'd slept, and this was her answer.

Very well, thanks, the woman said.

Up until 4 o'clock in the morning, that is.

Your Scottish carpenters seem to come to work very early.

I suppose they put up their scaffolding quickly, though, for they are quiet now.

The hosts fell completely silent.

After a moment, the Earl reminded her of the bonds of friendship and asked her never to speak of it again.

According to him, there were no carpenters working in the castle.

And there hadn't been for months.

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This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marcette Crockett.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com/slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

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And as always, thanks for listening.

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