'Witchcraft-Style Ritual': Prince Harry Reportedly Credits Bizarre King Charles Superstition for Meghan's First Pregnancy

Prince Harry has revealed that a 'witchcraft-style ritual' involving seals off the Scottish coast, inspired by King Charles, became a private superstition that he and Meghan Markle later linked to her first pregnancy with Archie while they were living at Kensington Palace in 2018.

The unusual story is tucked inside Harry's 2023 memoir 'Spare,' which traces the months after his May 2018 wedding to the former 'Suits' actress. The newlyweds, then still firmly inside the royal fold, were staying with Charles at the Castle of Mey in northern Scotland that summer, determined, as Harry puts it, to start a family without delay.

'Witchcraft-Style Ritual' and King Charles' Selkie Folklore

The news came after Harry described how a piece of Highland folklore, casually shared by his father, took on outsized meaning for him and Meghan. According to 'Spare,' Charles told the couple local legends about selkies, mythical 'Scottish mermaids' said to take the form of seals and cruise along the shoreline outside the castle.

'Scottish mermaids,' Harry recalled his father saying. Charles reportedly told them that the seals often swam within a stone's throw of where they were sitting and passed on a piece of advice that sounded only half serious. 'So, when you see a seal,' he said, 'you never can tell... Sing to it. They often sing back.'

At first, Harry admits he wrote the whole thing off as a fairytale. Yet when he and Meghan later spotted seals near the coast, the couple decided to test the superstition rather than let it remain a quaint anecdote from Pa. It is the kind of detail that, in most royal memoirs, would have been cut on page one. Harry left it in, and it is not hard to see why.

A source familiar with the royal family's Scottish traditions told OK! that what began as 'an amusing piece of folklore quickly became something Harry and Meghan treated as a personal good-luck ritual.' The insider added that the pair were 'eager to begin a family and were willing to embrace the romance and symbolism of the story, even if they knew it was little more than a superstition.'

In 'Spare,' Harry is upfront about that urgency. 'We didn't want to wait. We both wanted to start a family straightaway,' he wrote, adding that becoming parents had 'always been our main priority.' So when the seals appeared, the selkie story morphed into something more than seaside nonsense.

How the Selkie Superstition Became Tied to Meghan's Pregnancy

According to Harry's account, the seals allegedly only responded after Meghan joined in the singing, which seems to be the moment he stopped treating the story as pure fantasy. The way he tells it, the animals vocalised back, enough to make the couple lean into the weirdness.

Harry then pushed the superstition further. 'A seal opera,' he wrote of the scene. Calling it a 'silly superstition, maybe,' he admitted he did not care and 'counted it a good omen.' In what sounds like a fairly mad decision in retrospect, he stripped off, jumped into the freezing water and swam towards the seals.

The romance of the moment did not last long once reality intruded. Harry recalled that Charles' Australian chef was horrified when he found out what the prince had done and branded it 'a supremely bad idea.' The chef, Harry wrote, compared it unfavourably to 'diving heedlessly into the darkest water of the Okavango' and warned that this part of the Scottish coast was 'teeming with killer whales.' Singing to seals, the chef said, was effectively 'like calling them to their blood-soaked deaths.'

An insider quoted by OK! said the entire episode soon became one of those family stories that Harry and Meghan 'laughed about afterward,' but stressed that the duke attached 'real emotional significance' to it. 'In his mind, the timing made it impossible to ignore,' the source claimed.

Shortly after they returned to Nottingham Cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace, the couple took a pregnancy test. It was positive. Meghan was expecting their first child, later revealed to be Archie, now seven. Harry wrote that his first thought was simple and superstitious. 'I thought: "Thank you, selkies."'

Another royal insider told OK! that Harry saw the 'witchcraft-style ritual' as reflecting a rare, hopeful chapter in his life with Meghan, long before the breakdown of their relationship with the rest of the royal family. 'Harry has always been sentimental, and after hearing Charles' stories about the selkies, he wanted to believe there was something magical about the experience. When Meghan became pregnant shortly afterward, it only reinforced that feeling,' the source said.

The notion that a royal prince credited ancient folklore and a bit of improvised seal singing for his wife's first pregnancy may sound like the stuff of late-night pub chat rather than palace history. But Harry clearly wanted the moment recorded, alongside far weightier arguments in 'Spare' about the monarchy and his own mental health. It sits there in the book as a reminder that, beneath the constitutional drama, this is also a man who jumped naked into killer-whale country because his dad told him to serenade a seal.

Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor was born in London on 6 May 2019. Harry and Meghan later welcomed a daughter, Lilibet, on 4 June 2021 in California, by which point their royal story had veered into far darker territory. Whether the selkies received any further thanks has not, as yet, made it into print.

IBTimes UK could not independently verify the anonymous source quotations reported by OK!, so take everything lightly.