MY last column of the year starts, uncharacteristically, with an apology. Last week I sarcastically noted that ``benevolent police'' had cancelled certain dances planned in Tarbert over Christmas and new year. I have been asked to point out that it was, in fact, the terms of the local Public Entertainments Licence that precluded these jolly events on the nights proposed. There are ways of making special arrangements, and I am told there would have been no problem, but the necessary forms were not completed and returned in due time by the organisers.

Anyway, our two local officers insist they had nothing to do with it. Policing out here is a thankless task and some, specially on the deoch, come out with nasty tales of Billy and Gordon. I know one story, though, greatly to their credit - when they quite certainly saved a young life - but I am sworn to secrecy.

Well: it is the last column of the year, and at a time of Solstice and of the night the mind naturally turns to darkness, lore, and story. And since I started this with the police, I thought I would share with you a tale of crime and killing of Mac an-t-Sronaich, the great bogeyman of Lewis and Harris, a man whose very name still chills Hebridean blood.

Mac an-t-Sronaich, was a real person, and was nothing less than a serial killer. He came from Garve, in Ross-shire, and was, I think, Robert Stronach: of his surname I am certain, but I cannot recall where I read he was Robert. Between 1831 and 1838 he lived in the Outer Isles, an outlaw, wandering the wild and barren terrain between Lewis and Harris. He robbed houses, he mugged travellers for their belongings, and he killed. He killed for fun.

He drowned a little herd-boy in a pool on the Lewis moors. He attacked a man near Bowglass, on the Lewis-Harris border, as he returned from Stornoway with a firkin of whisky for a wedding. This fellow twice and three times bested Stronach and let him go: but the beast returned, and on the fourth attempt stabbed the intending bridegroom under the chin. So he died.

When I first stayed in Harris, it was in a little haunted house on the shores of Loch Seaforth, and I often wonder if it was the shade of Mac an-t-Sronaich or one of his many wretched victims, whose last agonies still lingered in the place.

Haunted the house certainly was. No, I don't mean by ghosts, in the sense of wandering souls of the undead. But I believe that great trauma, horrid death, or incident, can mark a place: that, by some natural process yet unexplained, emotional energy seeps into an environment and lingers there for a long time after. And then of course there is the occult aspect: seance-holding, devil-worship and so on. I was the latest in a long and colourful succession of occupants in that house and at least one previous group, a bunch of hippies who fed their children cat-food, may have been given to dark practices.

What I am certain of is that there were noises, sensations, and phenomena for which I could find no natural explanation. The dog used to bark, loudly and savagely, for no reason, standing in the hall and baying at something I could not see.

The most terrifying experience I had was around new year 1994. I awoke late one night, bathed in sweat, quite certain there was something in the room. It was a presence of draining, negative, and malevolent evil, very close to me. I lay for an age unable to speak or move, and then as the presence receded managed to get the bedside light on, and lay awake for a long time, trembling.

On the 'phone a night or two later, I was telling a friend in Edinburgh of this episode, and said humourously, ``Well, maybe it was Mac an-t-Sronaich himself,'' and at that point I yelped, swore, and spun round to stare at the door, certain that something was behind me.

The voice on the receiver, hanging in mid-air, was jabbering. I grabbed it.

``What happened?'' he shouted, ``what happened? I just had this really weird feeling, like an electric shock......''

The sense of oppression, as the months went by, grew steadily worse. It never happened if there was a group of people in the house, but if you were alone you were aware of it. Sometimes there was muttering, either within or just beyond the walls, agonisingly inaudible. It became harder and harder to sleep. I spent most of that spring and summer in Edinburgh.

In August 1995, just before the cottage was formally sold, my father spent some days there on his own. He rang one night declaring he would never again stay there by himself. Something dreadful had happened to him, but he refused to go into detail, and over a year later now claims he cannot remember the incident.

I was never so glad to get out of anywhere in my life.

In August I visited the jolly couple who now live there, and seem blissfully happy. It was funny seeing the house again, the same and different, all the unfinished odd-jobs done, the warming touches of a woman. I sipped tea and said, cautiously, ``It's haunted, you know.''

They calmly agreed, and told a tale or two. They had heard snoring. They had also heard, quite often, the crying of an infant. And a visitor had felt a dreadful oppressing sensation in bed one night. But it did not bother them, they insisted: they were quite used to ghosts where they came from. Besides, the problem had suddenly ended. The minister had been in recently, and happened to put up a prayer, and since that day they had not seen nor heard a thing.

Mac an-t-Sronaich, an outlaw in the hills, might have waged terror for many years. But he came too close to Stornoway one day, and was arrested, tried, and condemned. He was one of the last to be hanged on the summit Gallows Hill, in the present policies of Lews Castle. There he expressed regret for two killings: the honourable youth he had murdered at Bowglass, and the little herd-boy. ``The look the child gave me from the deep pool,'' he said, ``I would rather than anything that he were on my knee.'' And, in the bitterness of defeat,

Seachd bliadhna ghleidh thu tearuint' mi

A mhointich, riabhaich, Leodhais:

Agus fhad's a ghleidh mis' thus

Ghleidh thusa mis'.

Seven years you kept me safe

O brindled moors of Lewis

And as long as I kept by you

You preserved me.