The castle, for several years before its demolition, was tenanted by only an old female domestic, and a little girl whom she had hired to sleep with her. I have been told by the latter, who, at the time when I knew her, was turned of seventy, that two threshers could have plied their flails within the huge chimney of the kitchen; and that in the great hall, an immense dark chamber lined with oak, a party of a hundred men had exercised at the pike. The lower vaults she had never the temerity to explore; they were dark and gousty, she said, and the slits which opened into them were nearly filled up with long rank grass. Some of her stories of the castle associated well with the fantastic character of its architecture, and the ages of violence and superstition which had passed over it. A female domestic who had lived in it before the woman she was acquainted with, and who was foolhardy enough to sleep in it alone, was frightened one night out of her wits, and never again so far recovered them as to be able to tell for what. At times there would echo through the upper apartments a series of noises, as if a very weighty man was pacing the floors; and “Oh,” said my informant, “if you could but have heard the shrieks, and moans, and long whistlings, that used to come sounding in the stormy evenings of winter from the chimneys and the turrets. Often have I listened to them as I lay a-bed, with the clothes drawn over my face.” Her companion was sitting one day in a little chamber at the foot of the great stair, when, hearing a tapping against the steps, she opened the door. The light was imperfect--it was always twilight in the old castle--but she saw, she said, as distinctly as ever she saw any thing, a small white animal resembling a rabbit, rolling from step to step, head over heels, and dissolving, as it bounded over the last step, into a wreath of smoke. On another occasion, a Cromarty shoemaker, when passing along the front of the building in a morning of summer, was horrified by the apparition of a very diminutive, greyheaded, greybearded old man, with a withered meagre face scarcely bigger than one’s fist, that seemed seated at one of the windows. On returning by the same path about half an hour after, just as the sun was rising out of the Firth, he saw the same figure wringing its hands over a little cairn in a neighbouring thicket, but he had not courage enough to go up to it.