Dark Castle

The Dark Castle is a spooky story about a man who buys an eerie painting of a Scottish castle with one solitary light in the window. This is supposedly a true story.

There was a man who enjoyed collecting antiques. On weekends, he would often drive to a small town nearby and search the side streets for a new antique shop. In one dingy little store, his eye was caught by a strange old framed picture. He picked it up and dusted it off. It was a painting of an dark castle that stood on a barren, windswept hill.

Although the scene was gloomy and melancholy, something about it fascinated him. As he gazed at the painting, it gave him an eerie unsettling feeling. Then, he noticed something strange. The entire castle was in bathed darkness except for one small light in the window high up in the tall, stone tower. The man wondered why anyone would paint an ancient castle with a light in only one window.

Intrigued by the strange painting, he asked the shop keeper if he could tell him anything about it. All the old man knew was that it was a painting of a Scottish castle.

The man bought the old painting and took it home with him. That evening, he hung it over the fireplace in his home. There was no signiture and no date on the picture, but when he was dusting it off, he found a small Latin inscription printed at the corner of the frame.

He wrote it down and immediately called a friend of his who understood Latin. When he found out what the inscription meant in English, he was puzzled.

The phrase was: “Every Century, it shall be dark.”

This inscription made little sense to him and, after a while, he just forgot about it. The painting hung in the man’s home for many months. Whenever he held a party and invited friends over for dinner, he showed them the mysterious painting. It made a good conversation piece. Everyone who saw it was tempted to speculate about why only one small window in the castle’s tower was lighted.

One evening, the man was showing the painting to some of his guests when he noticed something that shocked him. Staring at the painting in disbelief, he realized that the window in the tower was dark. He examined it closely, but the black paint on the window was as old and as cracked as the paint on the rest of the picture. There was no sign that it had ever been touched. It made his skin crawl.

After his guests had left, the man went to bed, still puzzled by the strange alteration to the mysterious painting. However, when he woke up the next morning and took a look at the painting, he saw that the window in the tower was lighted again. A chill ran down his spine.

Then, he remembered the Latin inscription… “Every Century, it shall be dark.”

He made a note of the date and began to do some serious research into the history of every Scottish castle and the legends associated with them. Eventually, he discovered the following strange tale.

The dark castle had belonged to an evil character who had two sons. He hated his eldest son and kept him locked up in the dark and dreary tower while his younger son lived in comfort and enjoyed all the wealth and pleasures he could give him. After years of suffering, the imprisoned elder son had died in the little room high in the tower.

The date of his death was exactly five hundred years before the night when the painted window had gone dark.

(Note: This is apparently a true ghost story. If anyone recognizes the story or knows the name of the castle, please let me know so i can do more research on it. Thanks.)