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THE DAILY RECORD Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland 9 March 1963 (page 10)
SHE'LL MOVE INTO A HOUSE OF SECRETS
Mother Ignores Ghost Warning
Boleskine House, on the side of Loch Ness
Mrs. Molly Loraine is taking her three children to live in a house of secrets . . . and ghosts.
People still talk in whispers of the evil that lurked there . . . [illegible] will not go over the threshold.
A former tenant shot himself and two others are said to have gone mad because of what they saw and heard.
‘PRETTY PLACE’
Is Mrs. Loraine worried? Not a bit.
She says: “Everyone told us hair-raising tales. It made me all the keener. It is such a pretty place.”
Mrs. Loraine is moving into lonely Boleskine House on the east side of Loch Ness—the side most tourists never reach.
It was the home of black magician Aleister Crowley, described as “The Wickedest Man in the World” and known as “Beast 999 [sic].”
CARAVAN HOME
I visited slender, brown-eyed Mrs. Loraine in the caravan behind the house, in which she is living while extensive alterations are being made.
Two of her sons, Damocles, 9, and Tarquin, 3, romped noisily as she told me.:
“I do not think ghosts have a chance here—I have not seen or heard a thing.
“Damocles goes to school in the village and we gave a party for the children. They were all playing and twisting in the haunted part of the house.
“I am sure any ghost would have been scared away.”
Mrs. Loraine, a former air hostess and actress, has two sons with her. One-year-old Tristan will join them later.
RELICS
Boleskine has been transformed into an easy-to-run single-storey house.
Two upstairs wings have been demolished and, in a trunk, Mrs. Loraine found relics of “Beast 999.”
She said: “There were brilliant robes of the kind magicians wear and an altar cloth.
“The children have been ‘playing Crowley’ and they must have left the robes lying out. All I am left with is a tattered altar cloth.”
The [illegible] of the shooting tragedy has been made part of a large [illegible] with an orange carpet [illegible] indoor fountain.
HIS ROOM
Mrs. Loraine’s bedroom was Crowley’s own room.
She [illegible]: “His mumbo-jumbo [illegible] connected with circles.
[illegible] she plans to have her room is [illegible].
Mrs. Loraine’s Great Dane refused to go into the house . . . and was run over recently.
She says: “I do not see anything sinister in this.”
The house is not so lonely now.
A pig-fattening station is being built 100 yards away and Mrs. Loraine is organizing local housewives in a plan to knit fashion garments for sale.
She is also connected with a film company which plans to do location work nearby.
Mrs. Molly Loraine with two of her children, three-year-old Tarquin and nine-year-old Damocles. They are sitting on the steps of the room used by Aleister Crowley for practicing his black magic.
TORCHLIGHT
I saw Boleskine House at night, by torchlight.
My heart pounded when I heard footsteps as I looked round Aleister Crowley’s room.
Then I heard a scream . . . from the healthy lungs of the nine-year-old Damocles.
Only brace ghosts would compete with three children, gallons of new pain, 4000 pigs, 70 knitters and a film unit.
This was ‘Beast 999’
Aleister Crowley is said to have been driven to a life of evil and blasphemy by his narrowly religious mother.
It is she who first called him “The Beast” and it seems to have been as a reaction that he first started praying to the Devil.
As a young man he was a brilliant writer and scholar, but the evil in his mind led him to write vicious and pornographic satire and blasphemy.
One of his books, he claimed, was dictated to him through the influence of the Devil. He died in England in 1947.
Sacrifices
He chose his Boleskine House for its loneliness. There he used to carry out black magic rituals as “Beast 999.”
It was believed that he made human sacrifices but it is more generally thought that cats and chickens were used.
Some of the villagers in Foyers still remember seeing him dressed in garish magician’s robes. |
