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Boleskine House () is a manor on the south-east side of Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. It is notable for having been the home of author and occultist Aleister Crowley, and Led Zeppelin guitarist and producer Jimmy Page. It suffered significant fire damage in December 2015 and again in July 2019. The house's restoration and construction work began in December 2019. The Boleskine House Foundation SCIO took over ownership of one part of the estate in 2019 in order to manage restoration efforts on the house, and it is expected to open to the public again in 2026.
The area has a history of strange happenings long before Aleister Crowley moved in. The parish of Boleskine was formed in the 13th Century. A Kirk and Cemetery were built in the parish around this time. A succession of Ministers ran Boleskine Parish and would travel the area on horseback or on foot in all weather conditions. Minister Thomas Houston (1648–1705) was said to have had the task of hastily laying animated corpses back in their graves after a devious local wizard had raised the dead in Boleskine graveyard.
Boleskine House was built on the site of the kirk, which, according to legend, caught fire during congregation and killed everyone inside. The house was constructed in the 1760s by Colonel Archibald Fraser as a hunting lodge. Colonel Archibald Fraser apparently chose the site specifically to irritate Simon Fraser of Lovat in retribution for his support of the Hanoverian side during the Jacobite rising of 1745 as Lord Lovat's land surrounded the site of Boleskine.
The original hunting lodge was expanded continuously by the Fraser family until c. 1830. All the rooms were situated on one floor, with 4 bedrooms, a kitchen, servant's "attic bedroom" (above kitchen), lounge, drawing room, and a library. There is even a tunnel linking the house to the graveyard.
According to Crowley, in his book The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, in order to perform the operations "the first essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a 'lodge' where the spirits may congregate."
The purpose of this ritual is to invoke one's Guardian Angel.
It requires at least 6 months of preparation, celibacy and abstinence from alcohol. However, it also includes the summoning of the 12 Kings and Dukes of Hell, to bind them and remove their negative influences from the magician's life. Whilst Crowley was in the process of performing the lengthy ritual, he was called to Paris by the leader of the Golden Dawn. According to legend, he never banished the demons he had summoned, leading to strange happenings occurring in and around Boleskine House.
Crowley became infamous for stories of conducting black magic and various other rituals while residing at the house; one of his pseudonyms was "Lord Boleskine". His lodge keeper, Hugh Gillies, suffered a number of personal tragedies, including the loss of two children. Crowley later claimed that his experiments with black magic had simply got out of hand.
Crowley described the house as a "long low building. I set apart the south-western half for my work. The largest room has a bow window and here I made my door and constructed the terrace and lodge. Inside the room I set up my oratory proper. This was a wooden structure, lined in part with the big mirrors which I brought from London."
He left the property in 1913, moving to a modest cottage in Dennyloanhead near Falkirk.
After this a newly married couple moved into the house. The wife was blind, and after a month the man walked out, leaving the woman wandering around unable to see. In 1969 Kenneth Anger, an experimental filmmaker with an interest in the occult, learned that the house was on the market and rented it for a few months. When Jimmy Page heard about this, he bought the house in 1970.
When asked why he was chosen, Dent explained "Jimmy Page caught me at a time in my life when I wasn't doing a great deal and asked me to come up and run the place. I never did establish why he fixed on me." When Dent moved into the house "it was a wreck ... It had been more or less abandoned. There'd been at least one fire there, parts of the building were missing and it had been badly patched up. The grounds, which at one time had been very nicely laid out were gone to hell".
Although Dent was a sceptic of the paranormal he soon started to experience strange occurrences. After a few weeks, he heard strange rumblings from the hallway which stopped when he investigated, but resumed after he closed the bedroom door. After researching the house he discovered the rumbling in the hall was supposedly the head of Lord Lovat, even though he was executed in London. Dent explains "above Boleskine there's a place called Errogie which is supposed to be the geographical centre of the Highlands. Boleskine was then the nearest consecrated ground to Errogie and it's thought his soul, or part of it, ended here."
Dent also experienced the "most terrifying night of my life" at Boleskine. He awoke one night to hear what sounded like a wild animal snorting and banging outside his bedroom door. It went on for some time and it was not until morning that Dent dared open the door, and there was nothing there. Dent added "whatever was there was pure evil." Another friend who stayed at Boleskine awoke one night claiming she had been attacked by "some kind of devil". Other occurrences, such as chairs switching places, doors slamming open and closed for no reason and carpets and rugs rolling up inexplicably, failed to deter Dent from staying. Dent met his wife at Boleskine and raised his family there.
Although Jimmy Page never spent a great length of time there, he did everything he could to return the house to how it would have looked during Crowley's ownership. For example, he commissioned an artist, Charles Pace, to paint some Crowley-esque murals on the walls. These were based on the murals in Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Sicily discovered by Kenneth Anger in 1955.
Ronald MacGillivray died in 2002. He was said to hate any reference to the house's dark past when it was home to Crowley.
When asked whether she had experienced any mysterious occurrences at Boleskine House, his wife states that she experienced "absolutely none. I am a non-believer and didn't listen to all that rubbish. We had a great time there."
In 2009, a plot on the former estate was put on the market for £176,000 with plans to build a three-bedroom log house. The sale also included of foreshore on Loch Ness.
The owner's business partner and daughter had gone shopping and returned to find the house ablaze. The fire was thought to have started in the kitchen, however nobody was believed to be in the house at the time of the fire and there were no casualties.
A further fire was started on 31 July 2019 in two buildings on the estate at the same time in a suspected arson. The police are currently appealing to the public for any information on those involved. The fire destroyed the remainder of what was left inside Boleskine House, and in December 2019, work was done to clear the fire-damaged material and prepare the building for a new roof.
Starting from 2020, members of the public can visit Boleskine House through pre-arranged visits between renovation works.
In 2023 the Boleskine House Foundation has announced plans to open the house to the public permanently in 2025. Throughout the restoration work traditional building techniques and materials are used in order to preserve its historic integrity. The final cost of the Boleskine House's restoration is expected to be between £1.2 million and £1.5 million.
Even before restoration work has been fully completed, in 2024 Boleskine House has already earned Tripadvisor Travelers’ Choice Award for two consecutive years. In September 2024 the Boleskine house is closed for the last phase of restoration, which will be completed in December of 2025. This phase mainly focuses on redesigning the interior, to re-imagine the Jacobean era, Georgian era and Victorian era periods with a traditional drawing room, dining room and library. In charge of the design is Boleskine House Foundation's in-house volunteer design team and Inverness based conservation accredited LDN architects. While local firm Simpson Builders are responsible for overseeing the project. The project is supported by a award of £250,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Boleskine House is a Category B listed building, as are the adjacent stables and gate lodge.
Jimmy Page’s fantasy sequence in the 1976 Led Zeppelin concert film The Song Remains the Same was shot on the Boleskine House property.
In Neil Spring's 2019 novel The Burning House, the house plays a major role.
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