Death, deformity and the 'half-man, half-frog' spectre who haunts Glamis Castle to this day...The tragic family history of the Queen Mother revealed

They're one of the most distinguished families in the land with an ancestry stretching back more than 700 years. 

The late Queen Mother was one of their number. 

They own 14,500 acres of Scottish highlands and have occupied the same castle since 1372. 

They're rich, powerful – and, most importantly, have provided through their bloodline our present King. But you wouldn't want to be one of them!

For there seems to be a curse on the family of the Earls of Strathmore - a curse which stretches back 200 years and more which the family doesn't seem to be able to shake off.

Even today, the current earl, a kinsman of King Charles, cannot escape the family jinx – he's served jail time for sexual assault, and is currently off the road, having been banned for drink-driving.

His woes are nothing in comparison with those of his ancestors, however.

The generation surrounding Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, for example, suffered terrible tragedies.

Her eldest sister Lady Violet died from diptheria aged 11. 

Her brother Alexander died aged 24, hit in the head by a cricket ball. 

Her next brother was killed in World War 1 aged 26. Another brother, Jock, died in his early 40s from an abscess on the lung.

Her nephew John, Master of Glamis, was killed aged 31 in World War 2. Her niece Lady Cecilia Bowes-Lyon died aged 35 in unexplained circumstances in Switzerland.

And yet the Queen Mum went on to live a carefree and largely untroubled life, arguably the most successful of all British queen consorts, dying in 2002 at the age of 101.

She escaped the curse of the Strathmores. Many did not.

According to the family records Thomas Lyon-Bowes (the family later reversed their surname), who was destined to become the 12th earl, was born and died on the same day – 18 October 1821.

But legend has it he did not die, instead ending his days locked up in a secret chamber in Glamis Castle, the family seat once famously home to Macbeth.

'If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,' said Claude, the 13th earl and father of the Queen Mother, chillingly, 'you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.'

For Thomas, so it's said, was born deformed - 'half man, half frog' according to locals - and had to be put away. 

His ghost is said to haunt the castle to this day, while the secret chamber where he was incarcerated was bricked up and to all intents and purposes has disappeared.

In more recent times the Bowes-Lyons found themselves again at the centre of a scandal involving the falsifying of family records. Two of the Queen Mother's nieces, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, born in 1919 and 1926 respectively, were listed in the 1963 Burke's Peerage as being dead.

Both were very much alive, locked away in a Surrey mental hospital where they'd been for the past twenty years. 

According to staff who spoke out when the secret was uncovered, neither had ever learned to talk. Nor had they had a single visit from any family member, not even birthday cards, and when Nerissa died in 1986 only hospital staff attended the funeral. Her grave was marked only by a plastic identifying tag.

This created a public scandal since the Queen Mother was at the time the royal patron of Mencap, the charity devoted to the mentally handicapped. 

But family members rallied round, declaring Nerissa and Katherine had been well looked-after and had, indeed, been visited on many occasions by their relations.

No member of the nursing staff was ever able to confirm these assertions.

In 1959 another of the Queen Mother's nieces, Lady Nancy Blair, was found dead in her Marylebone flat at the age of 40. Her husband John had, according to Hugo Vickers in his highly-recommended Queen Mum biography, 'blown his brains out' in Ireland a couple of years earlier.

And still the tragic stories piled on. In the 1960s her nephew Tim Bowes-Lyon held the Strathmore earldom, but during his tenure at Glamis Castle Elizabeth was advised to stay away because, according to Mr Vickers, 'he was a hopless alcoholic, later suffering from epilepsy'.

 'He spent much of his time in and out of nursing homes, marrying Mary Brennan, one of his nursing team.'

The couple had a daughter who died of pneumonia less than a month after her birth and, depressed, Countess Mary took an overdose of barbiturates, following her child to the grave at the age of 45. 

Her husband became a recluse, rarely emerging from Glamis Castle and dying at the age of 54.

The Strathmore family motto is, 'In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust'.

Which somehow makes the family history seem all the more tragic.