The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Exorcist called to former inn
Earth energy expert David Cowan told in yesterday’s Craigie of spooky goings-on in a Crieff shop in the 1990s.
He recalled how City Prices owner John Randalls and staff were unnerved during late shifts by a door seemingly opening and closing of its own volition and spray cans and clothing flying off shelves.
He goes on today: “Using my divining rods I discovered a five-inch wide beam of energy entering via the window and curving around to this area, then into the wall.
“John told me, much to my surprise, that there had been a door there, now covered,
while there was also a spiral of ‘black’ energy where the cans and clothes were disturbed.
“A few weeks later, psychic investigator Archie Lawrie took his medium Francesca into the shop. As always, she had no idea where she was going, and was simply driven from her home in Edinburgh to the shop and asked what she could psychically ‘see’.
“She walked around the shop and stopped just inside the centre of the window, just where I found the beam of energy, and said, ‘There is a little old man coming through the window, turning to the left, opening a door and going up a flight of stairs’.
“I realised that she was tuning in to the same energy with her mind as I was with my divining rod, so late one night I picked up
that wave of energy and followed it round to the ancient burial ground behind the shop.
“There, it spiralled into one of the many graves, almost as if, perhaps a few centuries later, the old man’s spirit perpetually followed the route he had taken in life.
“According to the medium this was because he was the premises’ caretaker when it was an inn and he’d step through the archway – now the shop’s front window – to close a gate at about 10pm, hence the uncomfortable feeling at that time, before opening a door and walking upstairs.
“Francesca also told John that something had ‘fallen’ off the shelf on its own a day or two ago and smashed – a salt cellar, on to the carpeted floor, which he had forgotten
about – and that ‘a very close friend had just been diagnosed with a heart problem’.
“Apparently his friend was at the doctor’s surgery at the time and John only found out about it when he met him a few hours later.”
David adds: “Another factor in this strange story is that the Kincardine burn runs below this shop. Underground streams, like geological fissures, emit their own unique spirals of energy to the surface and appear to cause paranormal phenomena of various kinds, as well as forms of ill health.
“A friend who specialises in removing such unwanted relics of our shady past did just that, but I have since heard that the innkeeper’s ‘shade’ has moved on to some other premises in town!”