The candleflame flickered as young Kinnaird slammed his cards upon the oak table. “I’ll not stop for Sunday’s sake,” he snarled at his trembling guests. The grandfather clock chimed midnight, and the wind outside began to howl with unnatural fury.
His guests had fled hours ago, warning him of the witches he’d condemned that very morning—three local women whose only crime was knowing herbs and healing. But Kinnaird cared nothing for their curses or God’s commandments. The cards were hot in his hands, and fortune favored the bold.
“I’d play with the Devil himself!” he boasted to the empty room.
Thunder cracked like the world splitting open. The door burst inward, admitting a figure in a gentleman’s coat whose eyes burned like coals.
“Then let us play,” the stranger said, his voice like grinding stone.
They played through the night as sand began to whisper against the windows. Kinnaird, mesmerized by his mysterious opponent’s impossible luck, failed to notice the golden grains seeping beneath the door, pooling around his boots. The wind grew savage, screaming across the Moray coast with the fury of the damned.
“Your estate against your soul,” the Devil smiled, revealing teeth like yellowed bone.
Kinnaird nodded, drunk on hubris and wine. Outside, the great dunes had awakened. They rose like enormous waves, marram grass torn away by his own greed for thatch. Sand flooded the fertile fields, swallowed the cottages, buried the chapel where he should have been praying.
When dawn broke, only silence remained. The Kinnaird Estate had vanished beneath a sea of sand, and with it, the young lord who had played cards with darkness itself.
Years passed, and the sands shifted like restless spirits. Local fishermen spoke in hushed tones of strange sights—the top of a dovecot emerging from a dune, ghostly white in the moonlight. Children dared each other to approach the great mound called The Armoury, where Rob the Smith’s forge lay buried. They whispered that his hammer still rang out on windless nights, forging elf bolts for the Devil’s own army.
Old MacLeod, the bravest soul in the parish, once discovered a chimney jutting from the sand like a stone finger pointing toward heaven. His grandson, young Jamie, cupped his hands and shouted down into the darkness: “Hello! Anyone there?”
The reply that echoed up chilled their blood—a voice like autumn leaves, speaking words in the old tongue that made Jamie’s hair stand on end. They fled across the dunes, the boy’s terrified sobs carried away by the wind that never seemed to rest at Culbin.
But it was the trees that truly haunted the locals. As the sands continued their eternal dance, the crown of the laird’s orchard would sometimes appear—ancient apple trees that had felt no sun for decades. Yet impossibly, they bloomed. White blossoms unfurled in the salt air, and fruit grew heavy on ghostly branches. Those brave enough to taste the ethereal apples said they were sweeter than any earthly variety, but left a bitter aftertaste that lingered for days.
The parish minister declared it witchcraft, but the old women knew better. It was the land itself, cursed by innocent blood and the Devil’s bargain, forever caught between the world of the living and the realm of the damned.
On storm-lashed nights, when the wind howls across the Moray coast and the sand rises like the spirits of the dead, travellers still report seeing a faint glow emanating from beneath the dunes. Some claim it’s the light of phantom candles, illuminating an eternal card game between the damned laird and his infernal opponent. Others swear they’ve heard the shuffle of spectral cards and the Devil’s laughter echoing across the wasteland that was once Scotland’s most fertile farmland.
The curse of Culbin remains unbroken, a testament to the price of hubris and the wages of sin—where the sands remember, and the dead still play their endless game.
- Original tales adapted by Nick Kimber