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The Haunting Of Lennox Castle

Location: Lennox Castle, scotla d

The stories I’ve been telling of this place are like things from a dark haunting dream, The building sits there in the opening of a woodland, crumbling now from fires, but still as eerie as it might ever have been. Both excitement and a chill run through you when you come face to face with this castle that for many years was used as a confinememt for people of mental illness. Through our exploring we crawled some tunnels under the castle that we should have probably stayed out of. Along the path we found some bones and traces that people had been in this very tight space before us. It’s the kiinda thing that probably shouldn’t have given us the chill but we explored further then set back before we got too deep down. The castle was a stunning building, aside from the fact almost all of the floors and towers had collapsed, it was a very interesting trip to say the least.
The ruins were not entirely a shell. There were some intact services rooms and a staircase to nowhere that looked ready to collapse. There were the remains of an entrance hall that hinted at grandeur. There was a rusty remains of a fire stairway running up the side of the central block, over and into thin air where once there was a roof to support it. Someone had made the considerable effort to tie a long rope and hang a tyre from it.
Of course I had a go. Only once I tripled-checked my weight was not going to bring the stairway down on me from a great height.

AFTER 21 years in Lennox Castle, psychiatrists admitted they could find nothing wrong with Marie O’Connor. “I never belonged there, at least I knew that and that’s why I wanted away,” she says. “Your head is all full of broken bottles once you realise that you don’t belong.” Lennox Castle, in Lennoxtown, Dunbartonshire, was less of a mental institution than a warehouse, where those deemed society’s misfits were deposited. Truants, unmarried mothers, wayward teenagers and children with learning difficulties, Down’s syndrome or mental illness all ended up there. They were starved, drugged, ­physically and emotionally abused and robbed of their humanity. Norman Telfer, a pensioner put into the institution when he was 14 because he skipped school. He left 45 years later. He remembers the cold ground under his bare feet from when he ran round the blocks of the hospital as punishment for failing to address a staff member as sir. The laps were punctuated by blows from a baseball bat. He says: “Lennox Castle was a wicked place to stay. I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone.” Conditions were so bad that in 1986, the hospital’s medical director Dr Alasdair Sim broke ranks to say that he had never worked in “a worse pit”. He added: “I am sick to the stomach about the plight of these poor people.” Opened in 1936 to house 1200 people, 1700 were housed there at its peak in the 1970s. They were crammed 32 to a single-sex dormitory, with no right to privacy or individuality. Marie regularly ran away. She was not the only one. Those who did were chased by dogs through the surrounding woods. When returned, they were locked up for six weeks, placed on a mattress on the floor, drugged and forbidden visitors. Punishments included being dressed in a knee-length white ­nightshirt and being forced to scrub the floors with a toothbrush. For misdemeanours, patients would be made to sit in a nightdress at a table in the corridor and eat bread and milk. Not that mealtimes were much better for the rest. Marie says: “The patients would sit with a plate and the staff would throw a pie at them, like it was feeding time at the zoo.” One relative of a patient said he was horrified when he saw bread being thrown at his brother, like they were feeding birds. Marie had been placed in the hospital when she went off the rails, drinking and smoking and staying out. She was diagnosed with a learning difficulty and her parents were assured Lennox Castle was the best place for her. Marie says: “I was no different from thousands of other teenagers. I knew there was nothing wrong with me and if I hadn’t been strong in my mind, I would have gone crazy.” Many were drugged and became institutionalised, making it almost impossible to break free. Psychiatrists eventually admitted Marie had no learning difficulties and she was released but her ordeal wasn’t quite over. Four years later, aged 39, she had a son, Joseph, to a former worker at the hospital. But she had to fight to keep him and social workers visited her up to three times a day until they recognised she was a fit mother. Her life now is a happy one but at 48, she is angry that she left behind her youth in Lennox Castle. Norman was a teenage orphan when social workers placed him in the castle. When he came out, he was six years short of his pension. He remembers patients being treated far worse than prisoners. He says: “The corridor had to be scrubbed until it was shining or they would kick the bucket over and you would start again. “Beds had to be made to perfection or they would tip them up and make you start again.” The men and women were given £5 a week in pocket money, which would be docked if they stepped out of line. The patients had to work, some in the laundry or, as in Norman’s case, a piggery in nearby Kirkintilloch. He got up at 6.30am, polished the floor by his bed and tidied, was fed “wallpaper paste” porridge, got a bus at 8am and returned at 6pm to be handed a scrubber and soap to clean the floors and windows. Sometimes the patients were used as entertainment. Women have talked of having to strip naked while staff laughed at them and men were made to perform sexual acts on each other for the amusement of staff. Ian Doak, 58, was placed in Lennox Castle for seven years because his mother struggled to cope with him in his teenage years. Among his artwork is an animation of plasticine figurines seen gazing out of the castle’s windows. They have eyes but no mouth, a poignant symbol of their powerlessness. Eventually, Lennox Castle became more informal but although patients could leave, many had nowhere to go and no clue how to live without the routines laid out for them. A phased programme was devised in the 1990s to support them in the community. In May 2008 a fire ripped through the castle, requiring 13 Fire Service vehicles to attend in an attempt to get the blaze under control. According to Buildings at Risk the castle is currently owned by a development company based in Northern Ireland and as of 2009 they were in talks with the Local Planning Authority regarding restoration works. At present, the castle sits with it's two front towers demolished, carved through into the main building. Large 3 storey red sandstone mansion built in Norman castle style. The walls are castellated and battlemented, and an imposing porte-cochere frames the northern entrance. 4 storey pavilions stand at each corner and, along with the 5 storey tower, display decorative embattled parapets. A profusion of round-headed windows with dripmoulds and glazing bars adorns the facade. Pitched, slated roofs are concealed behind crenellated parapets. An enclosed courtyard lies to the west side. The interior features some fine plasterwork, timber mouldings, shutters, and other decorative features.

The last few remaining patients were reintegrated back into the local community, or transferred to more modern psychiatric units, before the hospital was abandoned.
Since then, the eerie site has lain empty, and the buildings have rapidly deteriorated. The formerly grand Lennox Castle is now a crumbling shell. The area remains empty, aside from occasional urban explorers looking to catch a glimpse of the former hospital.

Although several plans have been put forward to restore the castle and build new housing on the grounds, none have been successful so far.

In 2007, Celtic Football Club built a new training facility on the grounds of Lennox Castle. It’s likely that many of the players and staff come and go without having any idea about what went on at the former hospital, less than half a mile away from their state of the art training ground.