Mr. Black was on holiday in Scotland and he was staying at Fernie Castle Hotel which used to be just Fernie Castle when it was built 600 years ago. He went to bed after a good meal, and he was falling asleep when he heard someone knocking at the door. He got up, turned on the light and went to the door, but there was no one there. He decided it had been a dream or just imagination. Some minutes later he heard the knock again. He opened the door again, but there was no one there. Mr.Black wasn’t frightened but he was worried a little because he was staying by himself in a very old castle where he hadn’t been before. So he locked the door and went to bed but he left the light on, and nothing else happened that night.
When Mr. Black went down to breakfast he didn’t say anything about the knock he had heard. And all the other guests in the dining-room looked quite normal and nobody looked like the person who could knock at the door in the middle of the night. So he forgot about it.
The next night there was no knocking at the door but in the middle of the night Mr. Black woke up because he heard some noises and he saw a woman standing in the middle of the room. He got a bit frightened. Of course, everybody would. The woman was wearing a green dress with a high neck and she was looking at Mr. Black. When he turned on the light, she disappeared. And this time Mr. Black was really very worried and he couldn’t sleep that night.
The next morning Mr. Black told the owner of the hotel that he had seen a woman in his room the night before and the owner said: “Was she wearing a green dress?” And Mr. Black said: “Yes. Was she one of the staff?” And the owner said: “No, but many people have seen this woman, though I haven’t seen her myself. People say that she is supposed to be the wife of a man who ran away with her to get married, and her father didn’t want her to marry that man, so they hid in a small room of the West Tower of Fernie Castle. But her father’s men found the room where they were hiding and there was a terrible fighting. And somehow while she was trying to run away, she fell out of the window and fell on the stone courtyard below and died. Now her ghost walks about the castle and appears in people’s bedrooms with a sad expression, never says anything and sometimes knocks at doors. And that’s probably what you saw last night. Or you had too much champagne the night before.”
The text is about …
Mr. Black’s fears
the owners of the hotel
strange knocks at the door
the ghost of Fernie Castle