Pittensorn Cottage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSZi1AudpXk
Strange tale of Pittensorn Cottage.
After a series of inexplicable incidents in a Crieff cottage within yards of a cemetery, the young woman renting the building called in geopathic stress consultant David Cowan this week, to be told she housed a poltergeist. Mr Cowan, the former “Herald” printer who has spent more than a decade studying low level natural energies which are yet to receive the fullest respect from the scientific world, is trying to piece together the jigsaw of events which have beset Miss Mhairi Schot of Pittensorn Cottage, Pittenzie Road.
The pieces are real enough, such as the triangle of glass which, she told us, flew out of a kitchen window pane at her, and the silver crucifix which cracked in her hand at the weekend. “My sister Jackie had given it to me,” Mhairi said on Tuesday evening as our reporter met with her, her sister and Mr Cowan inside the quaint little coattage she has rented since November. “She was always superstitious and that, and I made fun of her for years but now I’m not so sure.” She produced a tiny crucifix, one of a pair of earrings once worn by her elder sister. The top had sheared off. “It happened as I was showing it to my friends in the Meadow Inn. They went cold with me as it just broke for no reason.”
The incidents are many and started after the 24-year-old Muthill woman had settled into her cottage. The place had been exceptionally difficult to heat, even though it had been well occupied before with no complaints. Little things slightly out of the ordinary had occurred which she dismissed, but when on 31st March a picture on her front room wall “unhooked itself, floated into the middle of the room and crashed to the ground in front of four of us,” she had different feelings altogether. As did her sister and friends.
When planning a damp course for the building, she found three old pictures under the floorboards. Two she burned, the other she kept. The enigmatic abstract disturbed her – it certainly disturbed David Cowan who said: “Whoever painted it should be in a mental asylum.” In fact, Mr Cowan’s reaction had a certain irony, considering the intolderance he has often had to put up with over the years regarding his own genuine, painstaking research into standing stones, ley lines, crop circles and, yes, even poltergeists. The picture was a print of a 1922 work by “Klee.” In fact, Paul Klee was a famous Swiss artist (he died in 1940), who taught at the Bauhaus for many years, and whose renowned work was characterised by his love of calligraphic line and… fantasy.
But our reporter got nowhere at all with questions about fantasies. The sisters and their friends had witnessed too much, they said, and their concern about what was actually happening around Mhairi – perhaps through her – was real enough.
Foul smelling slime had seeped from her open fireplace (it had been in use for months), and low thudding noises “like someone moving around” had come from the unoccupied first floor. Or was it unoccupied? Mr Cowan, whose interest in the case has clearly eased Mhairi’s mind to a significant extent – for a while she refused to live in the place and only now is finding the courage to return to “see how things are as the place feels better now” – said he had no doubt at all the house had “a presence.” “There is a spiral of energy right in the middle of the front room which attracts certain objects – the things which have come loose and either floated or flown have all moved towards that spot. And the incidents increased when Mhairi put her bed in the centre of the spiral without realising it.”
He is concerned for her since, as he has written in his own publications, the as yet unexplained energy, thought to be a geomagnetic disturbance from subterranean sources, “passes through the geological strata, encountering minerals and water, subsequently becoming distorted and harmful to anyone living above.” He has investigated cases of illness throughout Scotland over the years and is convinced that his studies – and others by a growing band of curious amateurs and professional people – are beginning to shed some vital light on something which is crying out for exhaustive, and organised examination. Until governments show him some commitment it is down to him to walk the hills and collect as many accounts as he can: “If anyone in Crieff has stories like this I would be very grateful if they contacted me. Crop spiral storeis round here are particularly relevant. All these things are inter-related and we need all the facts we can gather.”
As for Mhairi, she needs her friends – as we were speaking with her outside the cottage on Tuesday, one passed and was gently cajoled into “staying the night” in Pittenzie Road this week. “I’m determined to find out exactly what’s going on,” she said. “Because it’s not just when I’m in the cottage now. Other things happen, even when I’m at work (Haggart’s store) or at home in Lintibert Road. Little things, like hairdryers going on and off for no reason. Mr Cowan thinks it’s all to do with an energy source working through me and I want to know just what’s happening.”
For those who feel they may have a contribution to make, Mr Cowan is at 48a East Hight Street.
Strathearn Herald, 28th April 1990.