
Aleister Crowley: The Other Loch Ness Monster
Boleskine House sits on the south-east shore of Loch Ness, and in 1899 Aleister Crowley bought it as a base for a six-month magical operation drawn from The Book of the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage. This film follows what happened there: the oratory Crowley built behind mirrors shipped from London, the demons he claimed to summon, and the string of local misfortunes he later linked to the rituals, including a housemaid who fled, a workman who went mad, and a butcher who bled to death after Crowley wrote demon names on his bill. Interviews with Kenneth Anger, novelist Colin Wilson, Neil Oram, and figures from the OTO weigh how much of this is real occult history and how much is Crowley's own myth-making, with narration read by Robert Powell. Originally made for BBC Scotland as a short regional piece, the documentary treats Boleskine less as a haunted house story than as a case study in how Crowley built his reputation as, in his own words, the wickedest man in the world.