Glasgow’s ‘Haunted House’.
Girl Inmate’s Strange Story: “Sunday Post” Man’s Visit.
That a house he owned in Queen’s Park, Glasgow, was regarded as haunted was the reason given by Mr Samuel Guest, when he asked the Valuation Appeal Court for a substantial reduction in assessment. The appeal was dismissed.
A remarkable story of mysterious stone-throwing was told a “Sunday Post” representative who visited the house at 59 Dixon Avenue.
Although I have visited Glasgow’s “haunted house,” and have peered into every nook and cranny in it, I did not lay the “ghost.” Perhaps there were too many people about at the time. As I was in the house groups of people came up to the door, peeped curiously at the house, and, having satisfied their curiosity in the matter, walked away discussing the possibility of a nocturnal visitor. From the street the house looks strangely grim and silent. The basement windows were smashed in, and had been boarded up with cardboard, a small window above the door was broken, and windows of a front room were also smashed.
I knocked at the locked door. For a minute or so there was no reply. Then there was a faint rumbling noise from within the house. But it wasn’t the ghost coming downstairs to see who had knocked. It was Miss Elsie Boyd, who has occupied a room in the house for a year.
Although the house is eerie to live in, Miss Boyd is not at all alarmed. She said, however, that, sitting in her room at night, she was often startled to see a stone whizz through a window and smash a plate or ornament. The stone-throwers have never been seen, and the matter has, at various times, been reported to the police. I saw in one of the back rooms a pile of stones, some of them more than three inches long, which had been thrown through the windows. The entire back windows of the house were shattered, as if a machine-gun had been at work.
“Often I have run out to see who was throwing the stones,” said Miss Boyd, “but nobody can ever be seen. Sometimes the stone-throwing happens through the night. Time and time again Mr Guest has put in glass, but it is always broken. He has been forced to leave the windows as they are. The house may not be haunted. At any rate, it is being wrecked, and it seems nothing can be done to stop the stone-throwing. The idea that the house is haunted no doubt arose because, many years ago, a man is supposed to have committed suicide in the house.”
And as I left groups of people continued to look up at the mystery house with the shattered windows.
Sunday Post, 16th October 1932.