The Name Carved Into a Castle Window That No Living Person Could Have Left Behind

In the Seton Tower of Fyvie Castle, on the outside of a second-floor windowsill, a name was carved that no human hand could easily have left there. No ledge exists at that height. No scaffold stood there on any recorded occasion. Yet the letters remain to this day: D. LILIAS DRUMMOND. The woman whose name appears had been dead for six weeks when her husband brought his new bride home.

The Lady Who Was Left Behind

Lilias Drummond married Sir Alexander Seton — the first laird to give his name to one of Fyvie’s five great towers — in 1588. By all accounts she was devoted to him. She bore him daughters but no sons, and as the years passed, Seton’s interest turned elsewhere.

By 1601, Lilias was dead. She was just thirty-one years old. The exact cause was never formally recorded, though accounts speak of a woman left without warmth or provision whilst her husband pursued his next marriage. There are those who say she was deliberately starved of both food and affection. For another side of the story, read about how a prickly weed became Scotland’s most beloved symbol.

Six weeks after Lilias died, Seton married Grizel Leslie. He brought her to Fyvie as his new lady of the house.

An Inscription That Cannot Be Explained

On the first night Seton and his new wife slept at Fyvie, witnesses recorded hearing strange sounds — a moaning in the walls, voices speaking names in the dark.

But it is what they found in the morning that has never been satisfactorily explained. On the outer face of the windowsill of the chamber above the main entrance — with no accessible ledge, no foothold, no way for any person to stand or hang — three words had been freshly carved into the stone.

D. LILIAS DRUMMOND.

Her name. Carved, so it appeared, from outside. By something that could reach a place no living person could.

The inscription remains visible at Fyvie Castle to this day. It is not large. It is not theatrical. It is simply there, as it has been for more than four hundred years.

The Three Weeping Stones

Fyvie’s hauntings do not begin or end with Lilias. The castle carries another curse stretching back even further — the legend of the three weeping stones.

According to tradition, three ancient stones were taken from a nearby holy site during the castle’s construction. Thomas the Rhymer, the medieval Scottish prophet, is said to have warned that if all three stones were ever found within the castle walls at the same time, disaster would befall whichever family owned it.

For centuries, only two stones were accounted for. Then, in the early twentieth century, a third was dredged from the estate’s pond. Within days, the son of Lord Leith — the castle’s owner at the time — was killed in the First World War. The stone was returned to the water before the week was out.

The Green Lady of Fyvie

Visitors and staff have long reported another presence in the castle’s corridors: a woman in a pale or greenish dress, glimpsed near the staircase, the portrait gallery, or at the door of the Seton Tower chamber itself.

Some believe she is Lilias. Others say the Green Lady is an even older ghost, one whose identity has been entirely lost. What remains consistent across the accounts is her expression: not threatening, not dramatic — simply profoundly sad. A woman waiting, perhaps, for an acknowledgement that never came.

Scotland has many castles with ghost stories, and some of the most compelling hauntings belong to the grandest fortresses in the land. But Fyvie has something others mostly lack: physical evidence that time has neither eroded nor explained away.

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Why the Legend Endures

The National Trust for Scotland, which now cares for Fyvie, presents it as one of Scotland’s finest examples of Scottish Baronial architecture. Its portrait collection is exceptional, its great hall magnificent. Thousands visit each year for the art and the gardens alone.

And yet they invariably end up in the Seton Tower, looking up at that windowsill. At the three words carved into stone where, by any ordinary reckoning, no one could have carved them.

Fyvie Castle stands alongside Glamis Castle and Stirling Castle as one of the places where Scotland’s past refuses to stay quiet. But nowhere else does a ghost leave behind quite such neat, legible proof.

Lilias Drummond died forgotten by the man she married. Four hundred years on, it appears she found a way to be remembered after all.

Fyvie Castle is open to visitors through the National Trust for Scotland. Whether you go for the art, the architecture, or simply to stand beneath the Seton Tower and look up at those four letters carved where no hand could reach, it is one of those places that quietly changes the way you think about the past. Scotland has always kept its secrets in stone.

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