As we pass Bridgend on the line, we obtain perhaps the best view to be had from the Railway of the village of Longside, teh three churches appearing to the eye in the leading positions. On the same side of the line as Bridgend – at the distance perhaps of six or eight hundred yards, the first house we come to is Boodie Brae, so named from its having had the reputation of being “haunted.” The house is now occupied by Mr J. Smith, mason, with a croft attached; but if formerly was the farmhouse of Braehead, which farm is now attached to Bridgend.
It was during the tenancy of James Wyllie, in the year 1824, that the strange things happened in the house. Wyllie complained of hearing strange noises, and feeling strange sensations, in his house atnight. The noises were loud and sharp. Sometimes “something,” he averred, would attack him in bed and nearly smother him; and on one occasion he insisted that the “very staff had been taken from his hand” by an unseen agent.
An aged residenter in the parish was informed by Wyllie that one night he had beheld an apparition. The strange visitor, he said, rose from out the hearthstone. It was very tall, and arrayed (of course) in the orthodox white. It approached the bed, and was like to smother him, when he gave a loud cry, which caused its immediate disappearance beneath the hearthstone (in the most obliging manner).
To such an extent did the noises continue, that Wyllie’s nerves were so shaken that he grew ill, and took to his bed in consequence. The “ghost” stories got noised about in the parish, and were almost everywhere implicitly believed – old folks shaking their heads and speaking in whispers on the subject; – to such an extent did superstition hold sway even at the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Some braver than their neighbours would watch for nights in the “Boodie house,” – ministers, doctors, and all sorts of folks attended, in order, if possible, to exorcise the wicked and noisy spirits of Braehead; but all to no purpose. They heard strange an unaccountable noises (which one of those present characterises as like that noise which could be produced by a smart crack on a table with a cane); but nothing could be seen.
At last Wyllie’s patience and nerves were fairly worn out, and he left the house, which remained for some time vacant – the ghosts disappearing meanwhile; and since then they have not been heard of. The cause of the noises was never properly ascertained; but they are supposed to have arisen from the bending and cracking of the green wood (with which Wyllie had repaired his house) as it got dry; and this explanation is an extremely likely one. At any rate, as none of the many who watched and heard the noises ever beheld an apparition, the one mentioned by Wyllie as appearing to him may be set down as the effect of disordered nerves, and the taking of his staff out of his hand as purely imaginary.
Peterhead Sentinel and General Advertiser for Buchan District, 4th July 1862.
(also in ‘Guide to the Formartine and Buchan Railway: with notes, local and antiquarian, of the various places of interest along the route’, 1862, which does not actually mention the following at all:)
The “Guide to the Formartine and Buchan Railway” tells us that “some person or persons, who had been in league with Satan, and did not love their neighbours as themselves, raised a great disturbance in the house of Braehead by means of devilry or black art and could not lay it again. For the space of six months it continued to annoy poor Wyllie and all who went to visit and condole with him.”
An eye-witness who spent a night in this house of ghosts accompanied by four other men and “a woman devoid of fear” tells how they sat quietly round the fire while Mr Wyllie went to his bed to try to get some sleep. About midnight strange unearthly sounds were heard within and around the house and as the evil spirit had been in the custom of specially tormenting Wylie in his bed by denuding him of the blankets, the woman who went with us stationed herself at the beside, declaring that she would fain see the power that would stir the man in his bed while she held the blankets.
She had little more than stationed herself at her post when [?] the house came capering a pail of water and emptied itself around her, while up rose the blankets as of their own accord and tumbled out on the floor. Chairs and tables danced everywhere through the house. The crockery danced on the [?], the [?] of a chopper gave me an ugly chop on the cheek and two of my friends [the rest is illegible] and the othe fought a [?] that came from beneath the kitchen table.
New visitors came almost every night but nothing could be done to stop the [rest illegible].
Aberdeen Press and Journal, 1st February 1964.