Classic Scottish Murder Stories by Molly Whittington-Egan

Author:Molly Whittington-Egan [Whittington-Egan, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, True Crime, Non-Fiction, Scotland
ISBN: 9781906476403
Google: lMDLFqTkd7oC
Amazon: B00796E0KE
Goodreads: 23106723
Publisher: Not Avail
Published: 2007-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

I could not make out if this was a plain memorial merely commemorating the event or an actual tombstone. If the former, then the implication was that relatives had claimed her body. I was a little concerned about the date – Died 19th November – because, by reference to my reckoning calendar, I saw that the 19th was a Tuesday but the inference from the available account was that death had occurred on the Monday night, even if the body had not been found until the Tuesday.

In his discussion, Alisdair Marshall went on to say that the world of the occult was in ferment and ‘psychic murder’ was mooted. A leading figure, Dion Fortune, pointed out that the body had been badly scratched (but was this so?) and that the aforesaid Mrs Mathers had been linked to known cases of ‘astral attacks’, the victims of which always bore scratch marks. Marshall had previously noted that a ‘current of will’ was supposed to make an offender against the Golden Dawn’s oaths of silence, secrecy and loyalty fall dead or paralysed, as if blasted by lightning.

By now, without making any great claims for originality, I was beginning to see Norah Farnario’s mental state as the key to the mystery. I could not help wondering if she had a history of mental illness as suggested by the flight to the island, strange behaviour, and withdrawal from society. On the other hand you might say that she was a typical, archetypal hippy, festooned in beads, drawn to nature, although really from a sophisticated metropolitan background. Even so, as she became increasingly incoherent she could have been entering into an acute attack of paranoid schizophrenia, perhaps not her first such illness.

I think we must accept, however, that a person accustomed to rituals and spells designed to raise up spirits might reduce herself to a state of terror not associated with the disordered thinking, delusions and hallucinations of actual madness. There is a whole literature attached to the connection between psychic beliefs and insanity. In the 1870s, Dr Forbes Winslow caused consternation by claiming that 10,000 lunatics were held in American asylums as a direct result of their dabblings in psychic matters. This figure was found to be entirely false, and the doctor spent the rest of his life eating his hat!

Turning now to Richard Wilson’s Scotland’s Unsolved Mysteries of the Twentieth Century (Robert Hale, 1989) I was impressed and delighted to find that he had managed to interview Calum Cameron, then in his seventies, the son of the crofters with whom Norah had boarded, and still living, apparently in the same cottage with its four dormer windows looking out over a sandy inlet. He was twelve years old at the time, a good age for the preservation of memories. As is quite usual when there has been a mysterious death in remote surroundings – how much more so on a holy island – the local inhabitants resist our need for myth-making and pooh-pooh our suggestions that there must be more to it.

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