Nightmarish Tales And Their Inspiration

Literature’s most famous ghosts and ghouls made in Scotland

WHILE there’s no denying the beauty of Scotland’s glorious landscape by day. At moonlight our dramatic castles, ghostly coastlines and haunting cobbled streets can take on an altogether more nightmarish form.

To celebrate Hallowe’en, we look back at three of the greatest and most ghastly horror stories of all time, which were all inspired by Bonnie Scotland… The origins for the superstitious novel – which is filled with crucifixes and death – is said to have stemmed from the rather macabre stories that Stoker’s own mother told him when he was a poorly, bedridden child.

Charlotte Thornley would entertain the young boy with tales from her own childhood, focusing on a deadly bout of cholera which hit her home town of Sligo when she was just 14, wiping out hundreds of her neighbours. The details of this grizzly historic event stayed with Stoker beyond childhood, fuelling his vivid imagination and providing him the impetus to craft the Gothic horror classic. While the setting of the book is usually associated with Transylvania and the Yorkshire town of Whitby which is mentioned in the opening chapters of the novel, many people believe that Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula’s beastly crumbling castle, can actually be found in the northeast of Scotland.

Stoker is known to have loved our country, regularly taking holidays in the small Aberdeenshire village of Cruden Bay.