At 7:15 p.m. on New Year’s Day, 1990, Banff schoolboy Christopher Christie hot-footed through the darkness as drizzle swept down Red Well Road at Whitehills. He was hurrying to a rendezvous with his chum at Banff links. The street lights of Whitehills glimmered in the background as Christopher crossed a main road then negotiated the narrow, single-track road skirting Boyndie Bay, overlooking the Moray Firth.

Red Well Road takes its name from the stone, beehive-shaped building which encloses a natural spring, believed to date from the time of the Romans. In the 18^th century it was favoured by health-seekers ‘taking the waters.’

Christopher, a 16-year-old pupil at Banff Academy, told me he wasn’t in the least bit worried, as he had walked the same road many times before at night. But nothing had prepared him for the most terrifying experience of his young life.

As the moon struggled through the brooding clouds a figure appeared in the road ahead. Suddenly, an old woman in black materialised in front of the boy, and walked straight through him! He was gripped by an ‘icy chill’, before fleeing back towards Whitehills. If he thought he had shaken off the phantom he was wrong. For the apparition reappeared in front of him and passed through his body a second time.

Christopher darted across the main road, leapt the fence at the public park, so taking a short-cut to is home in Wilson Crescent. But the ghost hounded him, and repeatedly passed through his body. ‘After a few strides she would reappear a couple of steps from me and go into me,’ shuddered Christopher, when I interviewed him in Aberdeen, where he now lives. ‘I was very, very scared. I did not imagine it - I am not highly imaginative.’

Only when the youngster reached the pools of light cast by street lamps at the foot of his street did the ghost give up the chase. The description of the phantom is etched in his memory. The woman was under five feet tall. A dark shadow masked her pale, unsmiling face with sagging cheeks. Her hands were clasped in front of her body.

Christopher’s mother, Margaret Christie, said her son was petrified when he arrived home. His heart was beating like mad. Christopher never again set foot in Red Well Road, even in daytime. Shortly after his ordeal he was asleep in his room when he awoke struggling for breath. He switched on his bedside lamp and saw a ‘dark cloud’ drift towards the curtained window, and vanish. Mrs. Christie, a midwife, said: ‘He came through to my bedroom and said, "Mum, there’s something in my room - I could not breathe." He was scared. Whatever my son met that night followed him home!’

Was the old woman who confronted Christopher the wraith of a long-forgotten guardian of the Red Well? Before the Reformation a crone was responsible for caring for the saint’s wooden image at St. Fumack’s Well at Botriphnie, near Keith, although it was recorded that the effigy was washed away by a flood. After the Reformation the Kirk punished the country folk who worshipped natural springs. It was believed holy wells were also protected by a spirit embodied in a fish, frog or even a fly.

But Whitehills was famed for a character well versed in the ways of magic. A white witch, Lily Grant, was recruited to help both rich and poor alike. The Earl of Fife was driving in his carriage when the horses became restive and stopped in their tracks. No amount of coaxing or whipping made them budge. Witchcraft was suspected, so Lily was paid to break the spell!

When a farmer believed his cow had been bewitched he too enlisted Lily’s help. She even prophesied the beast would speak its tormentor’s name, but it died beforehand. Lily stuck the cow’s heart full of pins and then burned it. It was said the farmer turned down Lily’s offer to make the offending witch dance on the cow’s grave. So perhaps the ghost of Red Well Road is really Lily Grant, the ‘wise woman’ of Whitehills?

A road phantom, every bit as creepy as the spectral woman of Red Well Road, scared the wits out of travellers on the Isle of Lewis until a murder victim was exhumed from his secret grave. The ghost haunted a stretch of the main Stornoway to Harris highway which crosses Arnish Moor, a wasteland of peat moss and lochs, a few miles south of Stornoway.

There was a strong tradition that in the 18^th century a murder was committed at this dreary spot. Two youths attending school in Stornoway went on a bird-nesting expedition. They quarrelled over the spoils, and one killed the other with a blow on the head with a rock. The murderer buried his victim in the peat and fled to Tarbert, Harris, where he joined a ship. Years later his boat docked at Stornoway and he went ashore. He was recognised, convicted and paid the penalty for his crime on Gallows Hill.

The tale was embellished. It was said the man had confessed as he supped at a local hostelry, when he commented on the unusual design of the handles of his knife and fork. He was told, to his mounting horror, they were fashioned from sheep bones dug from a hole in Arnish Moor. He realised the bones had been taken from the spot where he had buried his victim, and that they were not animal remains. The handles of the cutlery oozed blood at his touch. This resurrected an old superstition, ‘Ordeal of Blood’, put about by King James VI, that, if a murderer touched his victim’s corpse, the wound would bleed.

In 1873 a local minister wrote that the stretch of road was avoided after dark because the victim’s ghost haunted the scene of the crime, which he described as ‘the dread of the whole country’. It was assumed the corpse was buried near a grey rock, Creag a’ Bhodiach (Rock of the Old Man), close by a stream.