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The Eggman—Including The Monster Of Glamis Castle

Glamis

The most interesting thing about the Glamis Mystery is that it becomes MORE SOLID the closer one approaches to the Bowes-Lyon/Strathmore family.

The wife of the Eighth Lord Strathmore discussed what she knew of the Mystery with her female friends and several of them included these details in their published autobiographies and memoirs.

Thus the following stories seem one hundred percent authentic and accurate:

Before the Eighth Lord Stratmore was initiated into the Secret he and his wife had many times laughed and joked about it and he promised to give her all the juicy details.

So when he returned from being initiated she asked him to tell her what had been revealed to him.

"If you truly love me," he answered "you will never, ever mention this subject to me again. All I can tell you about the Secret is that if you knew what the Secret is, you would immediately fall to your knees and thank God that it was my Secret and not yours."

Some time later Lady Strathmore asked Mr. Ralson, the Glamis factor (a distsant family cousin and the other possessor of the Secret), to reveal to her what her husband would not.

"If your Ladyship knew the Secret," Mr. Ralston answered, "I assure you that you would be a MOST unhappy woman."
 
Re: Glamis

OldTimeRadio said:
The most interesting thing about the Glamis Mystery is that it becomes MORE SOLID the closer one approaches to the Bowes-Lyon/Strathmore family.

The wife of the Eighth Lord Strathmore discussed what she knew of the Mystery with her female friends and several of them included these details in their published autobiographies and memoirs.

Thus the following stories seem one hundred percent authentic and accurate:

Have you got sources for those?
 
Re: Glamis

Mighty_Emperor said:
"Have you got sources for those?"

It's been a couple of decades since I did my Glamis research, but I believe the stories can be found in LIFE'S LITTLE DAY, by Mrs. A. M. W. Stirling, published in both Britain and the US circa 1925. This is one of those old-style British autobiographies with hot and cold running ghosts (and other paranormal phenomena) on nearly every page. Back when I wrote frequently for FATE in the 1970s I got more than a half-dozen articles and fillers out of this treasure chest.

If memory serves, there's also a nice account in LORD HALIFAX' GHOST BOOK.
 
One suggestion I came across about 30 years ago, was that there were TWO malformed births in the family.

The first was in the late 1600's early 1700's, the second was in the 19th Century, Hence the supposed long livity of the deformed &/or mad heir.

The effect on the family, it was suggested, was to to make them believe that they carried some sort of hereditary defect, that jumped a generation or two!!!!!
 
here's the painting everyone's been looking for:
http://www.electricscotland.com/history ... thmore.jpg

Most of the more reliable seeming sources point to the man on the left as having an unusually deformed breast plate, though I must say I can't really see it myself.

Some other sources point to the small child in green as looking deformed. He does look a bit weird, but then so do a lot of children in paintings from that era.

I've always wondered that if this 'monster' was a deep enough embarassment to his family to be locked away, why would he be included in a family portrait?
 
I don't know that you could tell if anyone was deformed from that painting it's not very good is it? I looks as if he's one of those artist with a limited repetoire of poses that he just adapts for different clients.
 
It's a good find, but that's not the picture I remember. I only saw it in black and white in this book, which might have been one of those Peter Haining efforts. I hope this isn't going to be another Thunderbird...
 
This story is probably just a case of a severely disabled child being born into the Royal family at a time when this would have been something people were ashamed of. I don't think there is any big mystery or esoteric secret about this, and because the child was hidden away and shrouded in secrecy a mythology began to build up which obscured the truth. Its quite a sad story if you look at it that way. :cry:
 
If it's any help, the figure was wearing a metal breastplate, which, if it fitted his chest, meant he was deformed. Otherwise he was normal looking for the period. That picture looks similar, but the one I'm thinking of was better rendered and probably later in date.
 
Well, I'm stumped then!
The one I posted is the one I've seenreproduced in various generic 'unexplained' books, but it makes sense that if there were reports of a painting with a deformed breast-plated figure in it, the authors could have chosen this one merely to bulk up the chapter.

Still, if such a painting exists, why include a dark secret in a family portrait?
 
That painting has the look about it of being done by more than one painter. Often, background and/or bodies would be painted by an apprentice, and the faces would be painted in by the 'real' artist. Either way, whether done by one painter or many, he didn't have a real command of rendering the human body. All the limbs look sort of stuck on, like Color-Forms, rather than being attached to each other like a human body.
 
Glamis Mystery Mystery Novel

THE GYRTH CHALICE, an excellent mystery novel by Margart Allingham, is based on the Glamis secret chamber mystery.
 
Yes, I believe (apologies if this has been mentioned previously on this thread) that many people have blamed the misfortunes of Glamis on a 'cursed chalice'. When Sir John Lyon inherited Glamis from King Robert II he brought with him to the castle the family 'luck' - a chalice until then kept in the family home at Forteviot. Tradition held that if the chalice were ever removed a curse would fall on the family.

What puzzles me is, after centuries of hauntings and bad luck and 'horrors', hasn't it occured to anyone to put it back?
 
Slightly off topic but apparently the Queen Mum was known as "the local bike" in her youth...Gawd bless you Ma'am.
 
Sthenno:

I read that as "Sir John Lydon". I couldn't really image Johnny Rotten accepting the award but I was beginning to have my doubts...
 
powelly67 said:
Slightly off topic but apparently the Queen Mum was known as "the local bike" in her youth...Gawd bless you Ma'am.

:shock: That's you right off the Honours List!

Actually I heard from someone who had a relative who worked at Glamis that our beloved Queen Mum was one of the most foul mouthed people she'd ever encountered.

So no OBE for me
 
Maybe we've got to the bottom of why the Sex Pistols hated the Queen so much...
 
In his excellent A Blast from the Past / Past Imperfect project Mike Dash recently covered the Glamis story, here.

For aficionados of the subject there's probably not much - if anything - new in there. But it's about time this thread got an airing, and besides, it's always worth pointing people in the direction of A Blast from the Past. (The latest article is also definitely worth a read - but then, so are all the others.)
 
Spookdaddy said:
In his excellent A Blast from the Past / Past Imperfect project Mike Dash recently covered the Glamis story, here.

For aficionados of the subject there's probably not much - if anything - new in there. But it's about time this thread got an airing, and besides, it's always worth pointing people in the direction of A Blast from the Past. (The latest article is also definitely worth a read - but then, so are all the others.)

Wonderful article, and I enjoyed the comments as well. They mention The Maze as being a film loosely based on the legend.
 
locussolus said:
...Wonderful article, and I enjoyed the comments as well. They mention The Maze as being a film loosely based on the legend.

Yes, I was actually going to mention that A Blast from the Past / Past Imperfect is one of those instances where the comments really are worth reading.
 
Sthenno said:
. . . When Sir John Lyon inherited Glamis from King Robert II he brought with him to the castle the family 'luck' - a chalice until then kept in the family home at Forteviot. Tradition held that if the chalice were ever removed a curse would fall on the family.

What puzzles me is, after centuries of hauntings and bad luck and 'horrors', hasn't it occured to anyone to put it back?

I know this post is six years old but the lore about Lucks - talismanic objects, often but not always cups, on which the fate of a great house or family is said to depend - seems to arrive in a lump in the nineteenth century. The name Luck, applied to a physical object, appears first to have been used unambiguously by the antiquary Thomas Pennant in connection with the Edenhall Luck. He visited in 1773 but his account did not appear until 1801. Its first appearance in print was therefore in the Gentleman's Magazine for August, 1791 in a famous article usually attributed to Sir William Musgrave.

That article was much copied and rarely questioned throughout the nineteenth century, usually serving as the introduction to a 1722 ballad by Philip, Duke of Wharton. That turns out to be exactly what it claims, a parody of Chevy Chase in the form of a drinking match. There is no explicit mention of the famous glass in Wharton's original version and the mention of the Luck being broken is ambiguous at best in James Ralph's version of 1729. The association of Wharton with the glass is traditional but he never wrote about it and probably never drank from it.

I have never found any reference to a "Luck" before this, though there were warning couplets of the "If . . . Then . . . " kind attributed to Thomas the Rhymer and the notion of a Palladium can be found in many ancient cultures. After Edenhall, it seems every family of note in Scotland and the Borders acquired a supposedly ancient Luck on which its fate could prettily depend.

The reason the Luck of Glamis has not been returned to Forteviot is that it appears to have no physical existence! Though the story is much repeated on the Net, it seems never to be sourced. Now that thousands of Victorian books and documents are online, it seems odd this Luck of Glamis is not recorded anywhere. It seems to be a relatively late addition to the register of Lucks.

I will add it to the List of Lucks on my site. At the moment, it looks as if websites have copied from each other but there must be at least one printed source to have started them off! :?:

edit 26.02.2012: I have added the Glamis/Forteviot Cup of Luck to the list. I see that discussion of the Cup arose as a response to Old Time Radio's mention of Marjory Allingham's mystery The Gyrth Chalice. That dates from 1931 and the lack of any Victorian corroboration suggests that the tale of a Glamis Cup does not much predate that, if it predates it at all!
 
I have discovered the immediate source of the Glamis Cup of Luck story. It is from our old friend The Unexplained part-work!

The material relating to Lucks other than Edenhall has been given a separate page on the site:

An Abundance of Lucks

The relevant section now reads as follows:

Stories about Glamis Castle are legion and widely reprinted. The Lyon family were variously said to have enjoyed or endured the notion that their line was dogged by a terrible secret which could never be disclosed to outsiders. The secret is often whispered to have involved a sealed room and a deformed child kept hidden away from the world, a creature so piteously deformed that he resembled a massive, hairy egg! The misfortunes of the family are sometimes traced back to The Cup of Luck, a chalice that was brought to Glamis Castle from its original home at Forteviot House, despite a legendary warning against it leaving.

The source for this story, which is repeated many times on the web was elusive at first as I could trace no printed version of the legend and no author was named. The tale turns out to be taken from The Horror of Glamis by Frank Smyth, which appeared in Volume V of The Unexplained , a part-work issued by Orbis in the early 1980s. I give the story now as Smyth tells it on page 1191:

"The Lyon family inherited Glamis from King Robert II, who gave it to his son-in-law, Sir John Lyon, in 1372. Until then the Lyon family home had been at Forteviot, where a great chalice, the family 'luck', was kept. Tradition held that if the chalice were removed from Forteviot House a curse would fall upon the family; despite this, Sir John took the cup with him to Glamis. The curse seemed to have a time lapse, for though Sir John was killed in a duel, this did not occur until 1383; nevertheless, the family misfortunes are usually dated from this time.

"The 'poisoned' chalice may well have 150 years later when James V had Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, burned at the stake in Edinburgh on a charge of witchcraft. The castle reverted to the Crown, but after the falsity of the charge was proved, it was restored to her son. The spectre of Lady Glamis - the 'Grey Lady' as she is known - is said to walk the long corridors even today."

Frank Smyth does not supply a reading list of his sources. I would expect to have found some reference to the story in Victorian periodicals at least but they are strangely silent on the Glamis Chalice. What is widely reported is that Marjory Allingham took this story as the basis for her early mystery novel The Gyrth Chalice, which appeared in 1931. In this story, the Gyrth family are in peril of losing their lands if their chalice is lost and a gang of rich collectors are out to obtain it. Is it possible the story of the Glamis/Forteviot Cup of Luck was first dreamed up by Allingham as a supposedly traditional source for her work of admitted fiction? Can anyone trace an earlier reference? :?:

edit: 6:20 pm. I have fixed the link to the new page, which should now work.

I should add the following note from the top of the page:

. . . the question of the tradition of the Lucks seems a subject for renewed investigation. The discovery, by Dr. Glyn Davies, that the Musgrave will of 1677 explicitly refers to The Luck of Edenhall pushes back the date of the talismanic tradition to a period long before the Northern antiquities boom post-Culloden. The fact that roving antiquary Thomas Machell drew the glass in 1666 attests to an interest in it outside the immediate family. Research into family papers might uncover still earlier references to the tradition of Lucks.

At the bottom of the page there is a teasing reference to The Luck of Workington Hall and its traditional connection with Mary, Queen of Scots. If the story of her toast to the Luck of Workington is traced back to Camden in writing, we have a possible source of the local outbreak of Lucks as far back as 1568. The trouble is that it does not appear in his major published works, so far as I can see. :(
 
I'm sure I read somewhere the Queen Mother refused to talk about the "curse" of Glamis, which was regarded in some quarters as the Royals having something to hide about the place. No idea where I could find the source for that, mind you.
 
gncxx said:
I'm sure I read somewhere the Queen Mother refused to talk about the "curse" of Glamis, which was regarded in some quarters as the Royals having something to hide about the place. No idea where I could find the source for that, mind you.

Found this:

According to another story, as a young girl, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (daughter of the 14th Earl, Claude George Bowes-Lyon), once had to move out of the Blue Room because her sleep was being disturbed by rapping's, thumps, and footsteps.
http://www.andras-nagy.com/hiddenforces ... pernatural)_Hidden_Forces_(text-html)/07.htm
 
ramonmercado said:
Found this:

According to another story, as a young girl, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (daughter of the 14th Earl, Claude George Bowes-Lyon), once had to move out of the Blue Room because her sleep was being disturbed by rapping's, thumps, and footsteps.
http://www.andras-nagy.com/hiddenforces ... pernatural)_Hidden_Forces_(text-html)/07.htm

Hmm, maybe there was some truth to it after all! The Eggman was supposed to be very long lived, wasn't he?
 
poor feckin guy, being likened to a flabby egg. then again, matt lucas?
 
With this topic having emerged on “Urban Legends / Folklore”: it is one which, for its sheer creepiness, has long intrigued me. I first heard about the matter in any kind of detail, from a book come upon randomly, decades ago: frustratingly and as often, don’t recall title or author’s name – but figure that it might well have been the work by James Wentworth-Day, referred to in the “Blast from the Past” link from Spookdaddy’s post #112. Said book at any rate, was about the noble families involved, not specifically about the “Glamis Monster / Eggman”: he cropped up basically in passing. General description there, as overall agreed by the thread: egg-shaped body, tiny limbs.

There seems to be in a fair way to a general consensus that subject Thomas Bowes-Lyon, henceforth Tom for short (seems kinder to refer to him thus, than otherwise), at least reputedly, had a something-like-preternaturally long life. The abovementioned book postulated his living from 1821 (overall most-favoured birthdate) to about 1975. From general data, one rather feels, “who knows?” Post #97’s suggestion of two separate instances in the family, of much the same thing – one birth approx. 1700, one in the 19th century – and the two being conflated, hence the supposed “immensely long life” thing – could perhaps be onto something?

The abovementioned poorly-recalled book, told of something referred to in various posts in the thread: Tom being baptised shortly after birth. The book indicated its having been thought at the time, that the best thing to do would be quick strangulation; but however it came about, baptism was done (the officiating clergyman being sworn to secrecy and / or given a strong inducement to go off to a new life in Australia?), after which it was reckoned that euthanasia was no longer on the agenda. (Making practical / theological sense? – humans are very often not much bothered, about things making sense.)

The picture got overall, is that Tom was born – as well as hideously deformed -- greatly impaired mentally. (Accounts, often mentioned in the thread, of dealing with him having to be like dealing with a hostile wild animal.) One wonders whether mental impairment was indeed the case; or whether it might have been a situation of – per the “Blast from the Past” article – “whole in mind, perhaps, but so hideously twisted in body that he could never be allowed to inherit the title”. If he’d been “whole in mind” – one envisages in the 1820s, the family overlooking / not realising this, and writing him off, beyond technically keeping him alive because of the baptism thing – thus his getting no chance ever to learn or develop. With someone so grievously physically handicapped, getting normal communication going would likely have been difficult – but there are ways and means, as per, say, Helen Keller. Given members of his noble family being more forward-looking than was the norm in the 1820s / 30s: if Tom had been born with normal intelligence, perhaps some deal might have been worked out, to give the poor sod a less miserable (maybe horribly long) life, than he in fact endured. Or perhaps overall, he’d have been less unhappy if he had indeed been born an imbecile (apologies for Victorian terminology).

Post #10’s reference to the film “The Maze” – creative writing / filming potential, involving Tom, can be imagined – with him being mentally normal – akin, as per the poster, to The Elephant Man. Literary-creative thoughts come to mind, given bestirring-of-self...
 
The irony of a headless man in a mental hospital is quite a good yolk.

I used to get a stream of bizarre tales from nurses and hospital
workers, a lot of them grimly physical. The coca-cola bottle tale
can be told straight-faced by every camp porter in Christendom and
he will swear it happened in your very town!

More to the immediate point, some of the maddest tales can come
from psychiatric nurses. It's a stressful job, I guess, and like teachers,
policemen and the military, they see things that the rest of society
prefers not to think of.

In the nineteenth century, when hysteria was the catch-all word, the
Salpietre Hospital in Paris was a virtual exhibition of women performing
fakir-like feats.

I am a bit wary of spreading superstitious beliefs about psychiatric patients,
but two stories were told to me as having been witnessed by the teller.

One was a psychotic woman who would suckle an imaginary baby. She
could vocalize its cries along with her own reassurances. Alarmingly, the
baby was seen by members of staff but would disappear as they approached.

The other was a woman who produced an endless supply of paper flowers from
her mouth. Two dustbins full in a day, my informant said. Yet she was kept away
from paper and the flowers were made of a tissue paper that was unlike any
known to be on the premises. Shades of ectoplasm?

Probably such tales fulfil a need for the workers who tell them and serve to
emphasise the gulf between the world they know and the more comfortable
world we think we inhabit. :rolleyes:


James - any idea what hospital the women with the disappearing baby is/was at?
 
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