Ghouls are in the Ayr

“Are you sure you want the children to sleep… alone in their own room?”

The lord of the manor was staring at me with unblinking eyes, caged like an owl’s behind glasses of a thick black frame. Outside, night was bleeding into oblivion, the last of Ayr’s long shadowy shapes.

“Yes, if that’s okay with you,” I replied, with my mask muffling to gag.

“The rooms are far apart.” Another stare. “Some parents are more concerned about…”

“Oh, they are well behaved, shouldn’t jump on the beds or anything.”

An uncomfortable pause occupied the space between us like a specter. “That’s not what I meant.”

We followed him up the stairs. The portraits’ faces on the walls looked away as though to hide their secrets and thick carpeting robbed the air of sound. He gestured to one dark hallway and said, “Your room is at the end. I will lead the children to theirs.”

Through a small, unmarked door, the children squeezed their bodies now doubly sized with backpacks. The lord of the manor turned suddenly to speak once more, and they jerked to a stop, bumping together like wee little boats at port in a storm. “Listen carefully, children. I want you to know where to go;” his adam’s apple sank and rose like a bobber with a fish on the line, “if there is a fire.”

I chuckled nervously. “Not that you are planning one, right?”

“Follow me,” was his reply. Through twisting stairs and more hidden doors, we obeyed. The wicked heads of gargoyles and dogs held their prey in stony red mouths and looked away. “Will you be joining us for dinner?”

An invitation you can’t refuse.

Later that evening, we entered the dining room, dark, candlelit, punctured by cold fireplaces. The whole of it was submerged under a tall ceiling rimmed with paintings of rough, faceless clansmen in their tartans, standing guard.

Before long, our host appeared. Arms crossed, legs astride, he asked, “Would you like to hear a story?”

We gulped.

And this is how we first heard the tale of Tam O’Shanter by Robert Burns. You won’t belong in Scotland before you hear talk of Rabbie, their beloved poet. Within days of arriving, we’d listened to a recitation of his poem, Address to a Haggis; listened to a playlist of his poems like O, My Love’s Like a Red, Red Rose set to music; and could sing his version of Ye Jacobites By Name while marching through the highlands–or at least repeat the chorus incessantly.

But the most transportive Burns experience was in Alloway of Ayr, Robert Burns’ birthplace, with this wonderful (and perhaps a bit spooky) host of the Savoy Park Hotel. Britain practically invented our concepts of creepiness–cemeteries where the gravestones are faded and fallen, sunken hollows where the mists cling, ancient oak trees with branches that hang low to grab, and houses with rickets in their timbers to make them tilt impossibly.

Tam O’Shanter by Rabbie Burns

Burns’ poem tells the tale of a jovial Tam O’Shanter making his way home on his horse, Maggie, after too many pints of ale. On the way, he crosses the graveyard at Alloway Church and sees a party inside. It’s a dance for all the dead:

Coffins stood round like open presses,
That shaw’d the dead in their last dresses;
And by some devilish cantraip sleight
Each in its cauld hand held a light,
By which heroic Tam was able
To note upon the haly table
A murderer’s banes in gibbet airns;
Two span-lang, wee, unchristen’d bairns;

Tam watches, “amaz’d and curious,” as the dancers whirl around, wilder and wilder. The spirit catches him, and as the dress–the sark–of one dead lassie named Nannie creeps revealingly up her bony thighs, he shouts out, “Weel done, Cutty-sark!”

And in an instant all was dark:
And scarcely had he Maggie rallied,
When out the hellish legion sallied.

As bees buzz out wi’ angry fyke,
When plundering herds assail their byke;
As open pussie’s mortal foes,
When, pop! she starts before their nose;
As eager runs the market-crowd,
When “Catch the thief!” resounds aloud;
So Maggie runs, the witches follow,
Wi’ mony an eldritch skriech and hollo.

They make a mad chase of Tam on his steadfast steed. Nannie leads the charge and is close enough to reach out for Maggie’s tail when they come upon the bridge over the river Doon. (Musical theater fans, this is the ‘Brig-o-doon’). It turns out, witches are not able to cross water, so Tam and Maggie just make it to safety, though not without cost:

The carlin caught her by the rump,
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.

On this Hallow’s eve, find yourself a recording of Burns’ spooky tale (you wouldn’t want to hear my attempts at a Scottish accent) and give it a listen in the dark; keep the claymore nearby. It may just be a new Halloween tradition for the Santillo family; we were so utterly transported to the atmosphere of autumn by his words and his hometown. Alloway of Ayr was a delightful way to bid a fond farewell to Scotland–bones of a castle on a cliff by the sea, a kind couple collecting seaweed for their garden, the Burns memorial garden with its fantasyland topiary, the Kirk Alloway (still there) and Brig o’ Doon (also still there). We recommend it to all explorers in the UK. And to the lord of Savoy Park Hotel in Ayr, Scotland, who was most kind, may we meet again!