Boleskine House

Boleskine House (boll-ESS-kin; Scottish Gaelic: Taigh Both Fhleisginn) is a manor on the south-east side of Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands.

Boleskine House is 21 miles (34 km) south of Inverness, on the opposite side of Loch Ness from the Meall Fuar-mhonaidh, and halfway between the villages of Foyers and Inverfarigaig.

The current house was constructed in the 1760s by Colonel Archibald Fraser as a hunting lodge. The original hunting lodge was expanded continuously by the Fraser family until c.1830. All the rooms were situated on one floor, with 4 bedrooms, a kitchen, lounge, drawing room, and a library.

Allegedly the house was built on the site of a 10th-century Scottish kirk. According to legend, the kirk caught fire during congregation, killing all inside. The house was built on a hillside above a graveyard, which had acquired a reputation for unusual activities. There is even a tunnel linking the house to the graveyard. Furthermore, according to previous owners, the house has "bad vibes". Apparently the executed head of Colonel Fraser can be heard rolling around on the floor. This fueled local legend even before Crowley moved into the house.

Aleister Crowley purchased Boleskine House from the Fraser family in 1899. The House at that time was known as the Manor of Boleskine and Abertarff after the name of the local parish. Crowley believed the location was ideal to sequester himself to perform a series of operations known as the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, taken from a grimoire called The Book of Abramelin. According to Crowley, in his book The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, in order to perform the operations "the first essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a 'lodge' where the spirits may congregate." The purpose of this ritual is to invoke one's Guardian Angel. It requires at least 6 months of preparation, celibacy and abstinence from alcohol. However, it also includes the summoning of the 12 Kings and Dukes of Hell, to bind them and remove their negative influences from the magician's life. Whilst Crowley was in the process of performing the lengthy ritual, he was called to Paris by the leader of the Golden Dawn. According to legend, he never banished the demons he had summoned, leading to strange happenings occurring in and around Boleskine House.

Crowley became infamous for stories of conducting black magic and various other rituals while residing at the house; one of his pseudonyms was "Lord Boleskine". His lodge keeper, Hugh Gillies, suffered a number of personal tragedies, including the loss of two children. Crowley later claimed that his experiments with black magic had simply got out of hand. Crowley described the house as a "long low building. I set apart the south-western half for my work. The largest room has a bow window and here I made my door and constructed the terrace and lodge. Inside the room I set up my oratory proper. This was a wooden structure, lined in part with the big mirrors which I brought from London."

He left the property in 1913. Crowley sold Boleskine to the trustees of the M.M.M. on 5 May 1914. The M.M.M. paid Crowley £500 and assumed £900 in debts and bills on the property. Boleskine was later sold by the O.T.O. on 12 July 1918.

Boleskine was then registered in the ownership of Dorothy C. Priestly (née Brook), and plans were introduced in 1926 to make significant alterations and extensions to Boleskine House. However, these plans never came to fruition.

Boleskine House passed through a series of owners after Priestly, being purchased by Foyers Hotels, Ltd. in 1944, then to David Shirley Crighton Simpson in 1946 who, a year later, sold the property to John Robert Ranken Fullerton of Noblethorpe, Barnsley, Yorkshire.

Boleskine House next came into ownership of Mary Verite Grant (otherwise known as Mary Lorraine) in 1960. It is alleged that whilst at an art exhibition in Inverness, Mary Lorraine met Molly Lorraine (unrelated), the latter who was fascinated by Boleskine’s mysterious lore and wanted to buy the property. When she met Mary who shared her surname, it was too strange to call it a coincidence and she convinced her husband Dennis Henry Lorraine to purchase the property in 1963.

The Lorraines were looking for property in the Scottish Highlands with the intent to use the land as a pig-rearing operation. However, in reality, Lorraine, who was by now a career conman was establishing a small pig-feeding farm at Boleskine as a ruse for the ongoing Cadco scandal further south in Glenrothes. By the time the law had caught up to Lorraine, he had sold Boleskine House and fled to the United States. It was sold to Halbert Kerr, who ran Boleskine as a guesthouse from 1967 to 1971.

Led Zeppelin guitarist, producer and collector of Crowley memorabilia Jimmy Page was the next owner of Boleskine House in 1971. Page sought to remodel the house with a Crowley-like theme. Despite this, Page spent little time at the house itself, instead asking trusted friends of his to occupy and watch over the house. Those who watched over the property for Page include Eric Hill, Barriston Colby and Malcolm Dent.

Page sold Boleskine to Ronald and Annette MacGillivray in 1992. The MacGillivray’s sharing kin with Frasers, Ronald sought to reestablish Boleskine as a Fraser estate once more. Some may share memories of gatherings in the gardens of Boleskine while traditional bagpipes played for merry parties. Upon Ronald’s passing, Mrs. MacGillivray sold Boleskine in 2002 to Teunis Griffioen and Gertruida Johanna Bakker who occupied the house as a holiday home away from their native Netherlands. It was in 2015 that the house suffered a devastating fire, rendering it uninhabitable.

In April 2019 Boleskine House was put on the market. It was purchased in the following July and The Boleskine House Foundation SCIO was established shortly after.