Burke, "from the period of its desertion by its luckless master,
Bulgaden Hall gradually sank into ruin; and to mark its site nought
remains but the foundation walls and a solitary stone, bearing the
family arms."

A strange incident, of which, it is said, no satisfactory explanation
has ever yet been forthcoming, happened during the wedding banquet of
Alexander III. at Jedburgh Castle, a weird and gruesome episode which
Edgar Poe expanded into his "Masque of the Red Death." The story goes
that in the midst of the festivities, a mysterious figure glided
amongst the astonished guests--tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head
to foot in the habiliments of the grave, the mask which concealed the
visage resembling the countenance of a stiffened corpse.

"Who dares," demands the royal host, "to insult us with this
blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him, that we may know whom
we have to hang at sunrise from the battlements."

But when the awe-struck revellers took courage and grasped the figure,
"they gasped in unutterable horror on finding the grave cerements and
corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness,
untenanted by any tangible form, vanishing as suddenly as it had
appeared." All sorts of theories have been suggested to account for
this mysterious figure, but no satisfactory solution has been
forthcoming, an incident of which, it may be remembered, Heywood has
given a graphic picture:

In the mid-revels, the first ominous night
Of their espousals, when the room shone bright
With lighted tapers--the king and queen leading