I had been invited, and was sitting at tea with a very dear old lady friend of mine not long ago. It may seem strange, but tea is, I consider, an extra and an unnecessary meal. It does not appeal to me in the least, and only spoils one’s dinner and digestion. The reason I went to tea was because in her note to me the lady mentioned that she had read my book of ghost tales, and that she was interested in ghosts in general and St Andrews ghosts in particular, and that she knew lots of such stories in the days of her girlhood in St Andrews, now about 85 years ago. That is why I went to eat cakes with sugar, hot buttered toast, and drink tea as black as senna or a black draught. She had also informed me in the note that she could tell me a lot about the Haunted Tower and the Beautiful White Lady.

It took some time to get her to that point. She would talk about Archbishop Sharpe and his haunted house in the Pends Road, of the ghost seen by Archbishop Ross, of my friend the Veiled Nun, of the Cathedral and Mr John Knox, of Hungus, King of the Picts, of Constantine, Thomas Plater, and various others. She told me a long tale of the Rainham Ghost in Norfolk, known as “The Brown Lady of Rainham,” whom her father and Captain Marryat both saw, and so on.

At last we got near the subject I wished information on.

“In my young days,” she said, “St Andrews was quite a wee bit place with grass-grown streets, red-tiled houses, outside stairs, queer narrow wynds, not over clean, only a few lights at night—here and there, an old bowet or oil lamp hanging at street corners. Every one believed in Sharpe’s Phantom[63] Coach in those good old days.”

“Did you ever see it?” I queried.

“No,” she said, “but I have heard it rumble past, and I know those who have seen it, and many other things too.”

“But tell me about the White Lady, please,” I said.

“I will. Few people in those days cared to pass that haunted tower after nightfall. If they did they ran past it and also the Castle. Those new-fangled incandescent gas lamps have spoiled it all now. The White Lady was one of the Maries, one of the maids of honour to poor martyred Mary of Scotland, they said then. She was madly in love with the French poet and minstrel, ‘Castelar,’ and he was hopelessly in love, like many others, with Marie’s lovely mistress, ‘the Queen of Scots.’”

“Was she supposed to be the girl seen in the built-up haunted tower?” I asked.

“That I really can’t say,” she said. “There was a story often told in the old days that a beautiful embalmed girl in white lay in that tower, and it was there and near the Castle that she used to appear to the people. You know poor Castelar, the handsome minstrel, said and did some stupid things, and was beheaded at the Castle, and was probably buried near there. Get me from that shelf Whyte Melville’s novel, ‘The Queen’s Maries.’”

I did as she bade me.

“Well, you will see there that the night before Castelar was to be beheaded kind Queen Mary sent one of her Maries, the one who loved Castelar, at her own special request to the Castle with her ring to offer him a pardon if he left this country for ever. This Marie did see Castelar, showed him the Queen’s ring, and pleaded with him to comply, but he refused—he preferred death to banishment from his beloved Queen’s Court, and the fair messenger left him obstinate in his dungeon. This faithful Marie paced up and down all that night before the Castle; then at dawn came the sound of a gun or culverin, a wreath of smoke floated out to sea, and Castelar was gone. Whyte Melville says she did not start, s............