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The Seaforth Doom

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Some called him the Warlock of The Glen, and others the Brahan Seer. His real name was Kenneth MacKenzie. He lived in Scotland in the 17^th Century. The seer, who looked into the future through a hole in a white stone, is said to have foreseen the bloody battle of Culloden and the cutting of the Caledonian Canal, the narrow, loch-linking waterway that runs across Scotland from Loch Linnhe to the Moray Firth at Inverness. But what MacKenzie is most famous for is the Doom of the Seaforth’s.

The story of the Doom begins in 1660, when the Earl of Seaforth travelled from Brahan Castle, his home, to Paris, leaving behind his wife, Isabella, a woman reputedly as ugly as she was violent and uncouth. Time passed. The day of the Earl’s scheduled return to Brahan came and went, and still he remained in Paris. Slowly it dawned on Isabella that he might have found more pleasant company in Paris than she had been providing at Brahan Castle.

Day by day the certainty that the Earl was deceiving her grew stronger and so did her jealousy. One night, when the big hall at Brahan was crowded with guests, she summoned the seer and asked if he could see her husband through the viewing stone. MacKenzie put the stone to his eye - and was overcome with laughter. What was he laughing at, Isabella demanded. He refused to tell her. Her fury mounting, Isabella insisted, and at last the Brahan Seer told her that he saw the earl with one girl on his knee and another stroking his hair.

Isabella’s rage at the news was uncontrollable, and she ordered the servants to seize the sage. Some accounts say she had hi hanged their in Brahan Castle, and others that she had him charged before the authorities with practising witchcraft and that as a result he was burned to death in a barrel of tar.

In either case, all sources agree that before he died in 1663 MacKenzie pronounced the famous Doom of the Seaforth’s, as follows:

I see into the future and I read the doom of the race

of my oppressor. The long-descended line of Seaforth

will, ere many generations have passed, end in

extinction and sorrow. I see a chief, the last of his

house, both deaf and dumb. He will be the father of

four fair sons, al of whom he will follow to the

tomb. He will live careworn and die mourning,

knowing that the honours of his line are to be

extinguished for ever, and that no futures chief of the

MacKenzie's shall bear rule at Brahan or in Kintail.

After lamenting over the last and most promising of

his sons, he himself shall sink into the grave, and the

remnant of his possessions shall be inherited by a

white-coifed lassie from the East, and she is to kill

her sister. And as a sign by which it may be known

that these things are coming to pass, there shall be

four great lairds in the days of the last deaf and

dumb Seaforth - Gairloch, Chisholm, Grant and

Raasay - of whom one shall be buck-toothed,

another hare-lipped, another half-witted, and the

fourth a stammerer. Chiefs distinguished by these

personal marks shall be allies and neighbours of

the last Seaforth; and when he looks around him and

sees them, he may know that his sons are doomed to

death, that his broad lands shall pass away to the

stranger, and that his race shall come to an end.

For the next 135 years the fortunes of the Seaforth family waxed and waned. In the revolution of 1688 they supported James II, the Roman Catholic king who fled to France, and in 1715 they supported his son James, the Old Pretender. For their pains they were stripped of their lands and title. By the mid-18^th Century the political loyalties of the Seaforth’s brought them back into royal favour, and by 1783, when Francis Humberston MacKenzie inherited the estates, their lands and forfeited title had been restored.

By this time the Doom of the Seaforth’s was little more than a vague memory. The new lord had fur sons and six daughters, and though scarlet fever had left him deaf and dumb in his childhood, there seemed little chance that the Seaforth line was coming to an end. As for his neighbours, it could be no more than a sinister coincidence that MacKenzie of Gairloch should be buck-toothed, that Chisholm of Chisholm should have a harelip, that Grant of Grant should be a half-wit, and Macleod of Raasay an incurable stammerer.

Then one of Seaforth’s sons died, then another, and then still another. The fourth boy was by now in poor health, and his father sent him to England for medical treatment. Despite this, the fourth and last son died. As the warlock had said the deaf and dumb lord outlived all his sons, and when he died in 1815 the Seaforth tile lapsed. The first part f the prophecy had been fulfilled precisely.

Seaforth’s estates were inherited by his daughter Mary Elizabeth Frederica. She had married Sir Samuel Hood, an Admiral who, after serving with Nelson in the battle of the Nile, had become Commander in chief of the East Indies, a position that took him and Mary to India. Sir Samuel died shortly before Seaforth at Madras. Mary came home wearing the traditional white cap: as the doom said they would, the Seaforth lands passed into ‘a white-coifed lassie from the East.’

In fact, the Seaforth estate was now much diminished by mismanagement, extravagance and government fines, and Mary found herself having to sell still more of the estate, which was now indeed ‘passing away to the stranger.’

The last bit of the doom came to pass a few years later, as Mary and her sister Caroline, were riding a buggy through some woods, when the ponies bolted and threw Caroline, killing her. Mary was cut and bruised, but the ‘lassie from the East’ had killed her sister, just as Kenneth MacKenzie had foretold.

Sources: Mysteries of The Unexplained