The Palace of Holyroodhouse stands at the foot of Edinburgh's Royal Mile, the official Scottish residence of the monarch and one of the most historically significant buildings in Britain. Its corridors have witnessed some of the most dramatic episodes in Scottish history — and, according to centuries of testimony, those corridors are not entirely empty after dark.
The palace's most famous ghost is "Bald Agnes" — the spirit of Agnes Sampson, a woman accused of witchcraft and executed in 1591 during the North Berwick witch trials. Sampson, a midwife and healer from the village of Keith, was accused of conspiring with the Devil to raise storms against the ship carrying King James VI and his new bride, Anne of Denmark. She was interrogated at Holyroodhouse by James himself, tortured with a "witch's bridle" — an iron device forced into the mouth — and had her head shaved and examined for the "Devil's mark." After confessing under duress to over fifty charges of witchcraft, she was strangled and burned at the stake on Castle Hill.
Her ghost, described as a bald woman in a grey shift, has been reported in the palace's older chambers and the area around the historic apartments. Staff have described sudden temperature drops in rooms connected to the 16th-century wing, and a pervasive feeling of sorrow in certain chambers. The palace is also said to be haunted by the ghost of David Rizzio, Mary Queen of Scots' Italian secretary, who was dragged from the queen's supper chamber and stabbed fifty-six times by her jealous husband Lord Darnley and his co-conspirators in 1566. Bloodstains on the floor of the supper room are pointed out to visitors, though their authenticity is debated.