The Carnwath correspondent of the Hamilton Advertiser seems to have had an unusual interest in all things uncanny and supernatural. The weekly column of village news reported the usual mix of events, gossip, and petty crimes, but often wove in local legends, tales of strange occurrences, and other matters ghostly. There were often reports of shadowy figures appearing in graveyards, unexplained lights in the sky, and other mysteries that occurred in Carnwath after-dark. It seems that readers enjoyed these spooky tales written in a wonderful florid style, as the unnamed correspondence continued to share these spine-chillers for many years.
One example is an account published in the Hamilton Advertiser on Saturday 28th August 1869 as part of a series entitled “The Ghosts of Carnwath”. It describes a sad apparition and a haunted ash tree near Lampits Farm, a little to the east of Carstairs Junction.
“There long stood a solitary, melancholy-looking ash tree in a field on the Lampits Farm, in the vicinity of Cockysyetts, which was cut down to make way for the Queen’s branch of the Caledonian Railway, and which was still more melancholy, in my imagination, from its dismal associations; for here, on one of the branches of this dowie-looking tree, a poor heart-broken girl of Cockysyetts closed her earthly sorrows and her earthly pilgrimage”
“No mavis or blackbird was ever seen to nestle in it scanty foliage, no merry note of music was ever heard from its dull half-blasted branches; the raven might croak and the pyot chatter there by day, and the owl scream by night, but no other merriment, dear tree, was thine. Ghosts love the darkness and the shade, and the ghost of poor Jessie was often seen gliding at midnight among the shadows of the fearsome neuk.”
Today, few trees grow on the flat windswept carseland around Lampits. There remains, however, a solitary ancient ash tree that commands a view across the flat fields towards the Caledonian Railway. Many of its upper branches have been lost to past storms, and disease ravages others, however new growth continues to sprout from a gnarled and weathered old trunk. With scanty foliage and half-blasted branches it has an uncanny resemblance to the melancholy old ash tree described in the newspaper article over 150 years ago.
Ash trees can live for up to three hundred years, therefore it’s possible that the surviving tree could have witnessed Jessie’s melancholy end, early in the 19th century. It might even have sprung from a seed of the haunted ash.
Robin Chesters, 22nd October 2024
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