(Editor’s note: Stan wrote the following as a result of conversations/correspondence with two long-term guests staying at Cluny 2010/11.)

During the coach party days, i.e. the summer of ‘76, when I was the Night Porter, the two guys in Maintenance started covering for me on Sat. and Sun. nights, to give me a break. After one such weekend, they filled me in on an intriguing story.

On the Sat. night, while Edward, an American, was starting to make his late-evening round, he went into the corridor behind the Kitchen, from the Reception end, intending to start mopping it, when he felt a huge presence behind him, following him. Although he didn’t feel a particularly terrorising impact from the encounter, he was still shaken enough by the experience that he quickly ducked into the Kitchen, and decided not to spend any more time in that corridor that evening. :-) The next day he told his replacement for Sunday night – Ralph, an Englishman – about his experience. I don’t recall that Ralph also chose not to do that part of the NP chore on his night; but what he did do was to consult a middle-aged American couple, here as Foundation guests, and with a reputation for being sensitives, about the matter. On the Sunday evening, the two Maintenance guys and the two sensitives got together to have a meditation, with the male partner of the couple leading it, to try to make contact with the presence, if any.

The man’s sense from the meditation was that there was indeed a presence, and it felt to him like that of an ancient Viking, who had been killed in this area (there is indeed a history of Vikings pillaging along the coast, e.g. right up from the Findhorn Bay at Burghead), and hadn’t ‘gotten’ that he was dead, and was just hanging around, and was simply curious as to what was going on in Cluny. They pooled their meditative energy, and the man tried to make contact with the ghost, and invoked that it understand that it was no longer alive on this level, and to ‘turn around and head for the light’, where someone would meet him and help him further on his way (which was a technique that he had used before in making contact with ghosts).

I can’t say that on the Monday evening, on my rounds, I felt anything other than a momentary queasiness when I entered that corridor; and neither of the guys reported anything thereafter. So I think the only thing left about that ‘encounter’ is the story.

But it brings up the subject; and, to my awareness, two other stories. The first was from some time later; I forget which year, but it was after I had returned to Cluny from My Year in Manhattan. The Cluny Focaliser at the time, Eric, a Dutchman, told me why I happened to see a ladder against the building over by the Ballroom area exit, propped up next to a room on the 30s landing. That morning he didn’t see his then-girlfriend at breakfast, and went to her room on that landing to check on her. He knocked on her door, and then started to poke his head in, but couldn’t open the door. He called her; and she replied, in a wee small voice. Asking her if she was alright, he also asked her to open the door. He heard her say, from somewhere inside the room – presumably the bed: “I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because the wardrobe is there, and I can’t move it.”

So – as one would – he went and got a ladder, and climbed up to her window, and went in, and she told him her story. The evening before, just as she had gone to bed, she suddenly felt something pulling the blanket down towards the foot of the bed. She pulled back;’ it’ pulled back – whereupon she leapt up, threw open the door to the room, and moved the wardrobe over against it, slamming it shut with that weight; then leaping back into the bed, and hiding curled up beneath the covers, finally falling asleep at some point. In the morning, she went to the door to go to the loo, but couldn’t budge the wardrobe out of the way. Which figures from such sorts of stories: the mother who lifts a car off from her trapped child, etc.

The other ghost story of Cluny, that I know of, has to do with a room at the other end of the building (Room 20, to be precise) where more than one person over the years (mainly many years ago) has felt and reported that they have sensed the presence in it of a woman in a nightgown. One such story has added the detail of it being a woman who committed suicide in that room way back in the hotel days. But all of that is merely conjecture.

Anyway, the stories have been passed on over the years; especially around the fire in the Lounge of a winter’s evening, when it’s just the Cluny Family in the building, and we sometimes have such ‘cosy’ evenings. Perhaps after having played Hide & Seek during the day. And nobody yet having found my hiding place….. (I tell a lie. One guy did find me, once; but he was sworn to secrecy. Who is/was that? Ah. Now that’s a true secret.)