He added: "We were also to place a mortar launcher across the M8 motorway pointing towards Glasgow Airport.

I had to walk in his footsteps and his title - and it was a task that kept me awake for the first six angst filled months. Sheriff Thomas Millar told him he must serve the four months once he has finished the six-year term.

Tartan terror: Why Scotland is so obsessed with the supernatural

And there was this Gordon Airs - not as tall as I imagined - in his dapper, blue pinstripe suit, the news editor hanging on his every word as he briefed him on the next day’s splash story. Neil Beardmore, prosecuting, said Busby jnr claimed that six devices had been sent through the post. Four of them were intended for Salmond, Rumbles, an SNP office in Glasgow and Glasgow City Council. Mr Beardmore said at the time of the phone calls Busby was in the Imperial Bar in Paisley, on his own, and drinking a pint of lager.

Inside was a note reading: "Just because you can't see us doesn't mean we're not there... next one's a bomb."His father, Adam Busby senior, a former solider with the Argylls, founded the tiny cell of so called "freedom fighters" known as the Scottish National Liberation Army (SNLA) in the 1980s to resist "mass English migration". Journalism is the richer for the contribution of Gordon Airs. And we’re all the poorer for his passing. In 1994, he took early retirement, and the entire Record staff gathered on the editorial floor for the traditional banging out. He walked away with the cheers ringing in his ears. Dubbed "tartan terrorists", the SNLA is one of a number of fringe organisations seeking independence for Scotland.

The SNLA are believed to have been behind letter bombs sent to Margaret Thatcher and the Princess of Wales. Mr Rumbles, a former major in the Army, was told by the News of the World about the potential danger and immediately rang his assistant. Hauntology has been hovering around like a spectre on the fringes of academia since 1993 when the French philosopher Jacques Derrida first coined the term – but it’s now breaking through and becoming popularised as a way of understanding the modern world. There looks to be a real problem with SNP vetting, even at this early stage of the council elections.”

At Livingston Sheriff Court, Busby was found guilty of assault and given an extra six months in jail. He was then moved to Shotts, where he carried out the new assault. But why is Hallowe’en so important? Why do we want to confront fear? What is it about the supernatural that obsesses us so much? In 1993 Andrew McIntosh was jailed for 12 years for conspiring to coerce the government into setting up a separate government in Scotland. The High Court in Aberdeen heard McIntosh had masterminded a campaign of disruption and fear which included placing bombs outside oil industry offices and sending letter bombs to the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. McIntosh served six years and was released in 1999. He died in 2004 after being arrested on firearms charges. [3] Festivals like Hallowe’en allow us to confront these ideas which are almost too big for the human mind to grasp. Hallowe’en – or All Souls as the early Christian church refashioned the pagan festival Samhain – is the time when the dead can enter the world of the living, when the boundary between our world and their world breaks down. At its very root such rituals are an honouring of the countless generations which have gone before us –after all, if they hadn’t struggled and lived we wouldn’t be here. Hallowe’en, and these other festivals of death, allows us to remember them.

Withnationalistviews increasingly becoming more mainstream, the RBs do not needmedia attention to win people over to their cause. Instead, Kris described a rapidly-spreading grassroots political movement, feeding off resentment of the political establishment rather than being withered by media scorn."If there's another election referendum it would be time for a hard campaign," Kris warned. "No more just parading." In recent years the group has made hoax bomb calls and death threats, some directed at the Royal Family.

War was one outlet, but ritual became the primary, everyday way of controlling fear. Praying to the unseen, unknowable gods who governed our lives, appeasing them and making offerings to them, was the first route to calming our innate terror. “Please God, don’t let this happen” are words which every person has spoken at one time or another from the dawn of humankind until today. Coverley notes that we’ve been here before. This obsession with the past and the supernatural seems to come in waves which hit when times get tough and weird, like right now in the 21st century.