Irish Mysteries

Who Stole the Irish Crown Jewels?

2020-10-28T12:09:00.002+00:00

The theft of the Irish Crown Jewels has never been solved.

Original poster from the Dublin Metropolitan Police reporting the Irish Crown Jewels as stolen.

Dublin Police(Life time: 1907), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It was supposed to be the central moment of King Edward VII's impending visit to Ireland; at a ceremony in Dublin Castle in July, 1907 he would use the insignia of the Order of St Patrick--otherwise known as the Irish Crown Jewels--to invest a Knight into the order.

But it was not to be. Days before the monarch set out on his Irish visit, the Jewels would vanish from a sealed safe in the castle, in what has been interpreted since as either incompetent stewardship, a daring heist, or a bold republican attempt to embarrass the British administration in Ireland.

Many theories have arisen in the century and more since the theft, but the question of who stole the Irish Crown Jewels has never been answered and they remain missing.

The Jewels

The Order of St Patrick was established in the late 1700's, and it was conceived as an Irish companion organisation to the other two chivalric orders in the United Kingdom at the time--England's Order of the Garter and the Scottish Order of the Thistle.

The Jewels were crafted by Rundell, Bridge and Company and were presented to the Order in 1831. Consisting of a star and a badge of emeralds, rubies and diamonds from Brazil, the insignia were to be worn on all formal occasions by the Irish Lord Lieutenant--or Viceroy--and when new Knight Companions were appointed to the Order.

The Jewels were kept in Dublin Castle, and by 1905 they were under the supervision of the Ulster King of Arms, along with several ceremonial "collars" belonging to deceased Knight Companions.

In July 1907, the Ulster King of Arms was one Sir Arthur Vicars.

The Theft

Vicars had been in the role since 1893, but there were three other individuals who served under him in various--mostly honorary roles--who also had access to the Irish Crown Jewels. These were Francis Bennett Goldney, Pierce Gun Mahony, and Francis Shackleton.

Francis Shackleton was the brother of the famous Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, and was a housemate of Vicars at the time of the theft. Mahony was Vicars's nephew.

The Jewels were kept in the Bedford Tower in Dublin Castle, but the safe in which they were stored had been moved while renovations were being made. When they were finished, it became clear that the workers had not been made aware that the safe was to be moved back in, as the entrance to the room was no longer big enough for the box to pass through. The decision was made to leave the safe in the Library of Ulster's Office.

There were seven keys to this room, which were held by Vicars--as the Office holder--and various members of his staff including Goldney, Mahony and Shackleton. There were only two keys to the safe, however, and these were both in Vicars's possession.

Ulster King of Arms Sir Arthur Vicars.
Credit: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

On Wednesday, July 3rd 1907, a cleaner informed Vicars that the Library door was opened. Vicars was said to have replied casually, with only passing interest in what was clearly a serious breach of security. On Saturday, July 6th the same cleaner reported the same incident, and received the same reply. Later that day, Vicars gave a messenger a Knight's collar to put in the safe along with the Jewels--another highly unusual development--but when the messenger opened the safe, the Irish Crown Jewels were missing.

The Dublin Metropolitan Police inspected the safe and found it had not been forced open, concluding that it therefore must have been opened with a key.

The Jewels, however, were not in the possession of Vicars or his associates and could not be located.

The Investigation

In January of 1908 a commission was established by the office of the Lord Lieutenant to investigate the disappearance and to decide whether Arthur Vicars had been negligent in his duties.

Vicars's half-brother Pierce Mahony--also the father of Pierce Gun Mahony, one of the other men with access to the Jewels--had pushed for the viceregal commission in order to clear Vicars of any wrongdoing. Oddly, Vicars himself refused to give evidence, as did his office clerk and his office typist.

All of the other men who were under suspicion gave their testimony to the commission, including Mahony (junior), Goldney and Shackleton.

Goldney and Shackleton successfully established that they were not in Ireland at all between June 11th and July 6th. Mahony had been present at Dublin Castle in the period immediately leading up to the disappearance of the Jewels, but despite repeated probing into the level of access he had to keys, his testimony shed little light on what might have happened.

Goldney's testimony, on the other hand, proved interesting. It had already been established by the commission that Vicars was quite fond of showing the Irish Crown Jewels to anybody who expressed even a passing interest in them, and in the course of their inquiries the commission learned from Goldney that on one occasion he had entered a room where Vicars was showing the insignia to some 'strange gentlemen'.

Upon further investigation it turned out that these gentlemen were connected to Vicars through Shackleton. "Frank" Shackleton had been in some financial trouble, it emerged, and had managed to persuade his housemate Vicars to guarantee two bills for him. When it became clear that Vicars could not in fact afford to cover these bills either, it became necessary to consult some moneylenders that Shackleton knew. Goldney implied that it these lenders who had been present in the room with Vicars that day.

'A Man of Very Bad Character'

Even though Sir Arthur Vicars had the two keys to the safe from which the Jewels were taken, suspicion in the case quickly came to rest on Frank Shackleton. This was largely due to some suggestions from Goldney (as above) and direct accusations by Vicars himself.

Shackleton always denied these charges, and was adamant that he had nothing to do with the theft when he gave his own testimony to the commission. He admitted that he had had money problems, and was also willing to concede that he had turned to Vicars for financial help, but baulked at the notion that he had anything to do with the robbery of the Jewels. Shackleton's testimony was also peppered with various references to high-profile individuals with whom he was socially acquainted, which subsequent readers of the transcripts have identified as brazen "name-dropping".

Francis Shackleton (centre) arriving at the viceregal commission to give his testimony.
Credit: IrishCentral

Pressed on why he had received a letter from Vicars in August, 1907, in which Vicars had written '(n)ow that you know the whereabouts of the Jewels...I hope that you have told Mr Kane everything calculated to facilitate matters', Shackleton claimed that Vicars was referring to a newspaper report that had mistakenly suggested that the Jewels had been found, and reiterated that he had no hand in the theft.

The 'Mr Kane' referred to in the letter was a Chief Inspector of the Dublin Metropolitan Police who had also given evidence to the commission. Kane was passionate in his defence of Shackleton--which was strange, as he offered that defence without providing any evidence to support it. Kane also maintained that the events of July 6th were a clear set-up by Vicars to "reveal" the theft, implying heavily that it was Vicars himself who had orchestrated the crime.

Acknowledging that various sources had identified Shackleton as the main culprit in the theft, the commission nonetheless concluded that he had been a co-operative witness during the investigation and had found no evidence that he had stolen the Jewels. The commission concluded that Vicars had probably been negligent in his duties, and recommended his dismissal. Pierce Mahony--Vicars's half-brother--later released to the press official correspondence which stated that, while he could not be blamed for the theft per se, Vicars was guilty of having introduced to his office a 'man of very bad character'. It is widely assumed that this was a reference to Frank Shackleton.

The Plot Thickens

A year after the commission failed to solve the mystery but succeeded in disgracing Arthur Vicars, a sensational article appeared in the Irish-American newspaper Gaelic American.

The author of the piece was Bulmer Hobson, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and his source was none other than Pierce Mahony.

Angered by the treatment of his half-brother, Mahony claimed that Dublin Castle prior to the theft had been the location of drunken orgies conducted by a ring of secretly homosexual functionaries, and that such wild nights had seen all kind of pranks including the removal of the Irish Crown Jewels for days at a time.

Mahony alleged that Shackleton and a previously unknown individual called Captain Richard Gorges had witnessed the removal of the Jewels and developed a plan to repeat the prank with the aim of keeping the insignia for themselves.

Mahony also held that the authorities knew full well that it was Shackleton and Gorges who had stolen the Irish Crown Jewels, but were discouraged from pursuing the matter out of fear that the pair would "out" several high-profile individuals in response. Mahony suggested that was the real significance of Shackleton's repeated references to men not connected to the case during his testimony, and indicated that the authorities had contented themselves with ordering both Shackleton and Gorges out of the country rather than risk the scandal.

Hobson would later claim to have met Gorges himself, who added that Vicars had been duped into thinking that the theft was just another prank, and that was why his response to the cleaner on Wednesday, July 3rd had been so casual. When it became clear that the jewels would not in fact be returned, Vicars had opened the door on July 6th himself and then later sent his messenger to open the box so that somebody else could report the crime. It was an act of desperation, as Vicars knew he also could not identify Shackleton and Gorges as the thieves; not only was he directly involved in their removal, but it is also quite likely that Vicars--who led an unconventional lifestyle by the standards of the day--was gay.

A vintage Ratner safe, similar to the one used to store the Jewels at Dublin Castle.
Credit: PicClick UK

Gorges also apparently told Hobson that he and Shackleton had got the Jewels to Amsterdam, where they were stripped and sold. Shackleton, who was definitely not in Ireland at the time, had help in the person of Francis Goldney. However, as he was also not in the country at the time of the theft, it is unclear as to who exactly took the Jewels--unless it was Gorges himself.

While plausible, none of this has ever been proven and the Shackleton family vehemently denies Frank's involvement.

Aftermath

But both Frank Shackleton and Richard Gorges did end up in prison--Shackleton for fraud and Gorges for murder. Shackleton changed his name to Frank Mellor upon his release and died in England in 1941; Gorges apparently told everybody that he met in prison about his involvement with the Irish Crown Jewels, but few believed him. He was hit by a train and killed in 1944.

Goldney was shot while hunting in 1914. There were rumours that it was not accidental. Goldney was subsequently revealed to have been a habitual thief and possible kleptomaniac.

The theft of the Irish crown jewels has inspired novels, graphic novels and countless tall tales. Repeated claims of republican involvement surface but generally do not hold up to scrutiny.

Sir Arthur Vicars was shot and killed by the IRA in the south-west of Ireland during the War of Independence. It is not known if he was an innocent victim or fell foul of the IRA by informing British authorities of their activities. His last will and testament was deemed too incendiary to be read in public at the time, and did not see the light of day until 1976. In it, Vicars had written:

'I might have had more to dispose of had it not been for the outrageous way I was treated by the Irish Government over the loss of the Irish Crown Jewels in 1907, backed up by the late King Edward VII whom I had always loyally and faithfully served, when I was made a scapegoat to save other departments responsible and when they shielded the real culprit and thief Francis R Shackleton (brother of the explorer who didn't reach the South Pole). My whole life and work was ruined by this cruel misfortune and by the wicked and blackguardly acts of the Irish Government.'

If Frank Shackleton did not steal the Irish Crown Jewels, he certainly succeeded in creating a lasting grudge.

If the Jewels were found today they would be worth approximately €4 million.

The Murder of Bernadette Connolly

2020-10-05T21:46:00.007+01:00

No answers for loved ones more than 50 years after girl taken and murdered in Sligo

Bernadette Connolly was abducted and murdered in Sligo in 1970. Her killer has never been found.

Credit: Sunday Independent

The afternoon of April 17th, 1970 was a memorable one for many people. It was the day that the Apollo 13 lunar module landed back on earth, with millions glued to TV screens waiting to see if the ill-fated mission would actually make it.

But for one family in Collooney in Sligo, the date will forever be remembered with the most profound sense of loss.

Bernadette Connolly was 10 years old when she left her family home to cycle to a friend's house. She never made it there. She remained missing until early August of that year, when her body was discovered in a bog 24 kilometres away. She had been sexually assaulted and murdered.

Since then, several theories as to who was responsible for the shocking crime have been put forward, but definitive answers continue to elude the Connolly family.

Early Leads

When Bernadette Connolly failed to arrive either at her friend's house or back at home, family and friends immediately went out to search for her. Her abandoned bicycle was discovered about 2 kilometres from her friend's house, and this prompted Gardai to instigate a massive search which encompassed much of Ireland's north-eastern region.

In the course of their investigation, authorities managed to eliminate about 500 locals--as well as known offenders--as suspects.

Leads were scarce, however, until Gardai decided to appeal to the public for information. A number of people reported passing Bernadette on the road, and in time two vehicles were identified as being of interest. One of these was a large black car that was never traced. The other was a green ford escort van.

The Passionist monastery at Cloonamahon in Sligo.

Credit: Broadsheet.ie

This vehicle had been seen near the area where Bernadette's bicycle was found. Whoever was driving the van that day never came forward, but Gardai soon discovered that a green ford escort van was in use at the Passionist monastery in Clonmahoon, close to Collooney. Bernadette--a keen Irish dancer--had even performed for the brothers at the monastery.

It was discovered that the van's whereabouts between the hours of 4.30 and 7.30 PM on Friday, 17th April could not be accounted for. This did little to help the investigation, however, as 22 priests and brothers and three grounds-keeping staff had access to the vehicle.

A priest and a brother at the monastery were identified as people of interest; however, for the moment, the trail had gone cold.

Bernadette Found

With no new information coming to light and the early leads in the case going nowhere, the attention of the Gardai gradually got diverted to other matters.

Of course, they still continued to search for Bernadette, as did her family members and locals from the community. But over the summer of 1970, they had no luck.

A few days after she had disappeared, Gardai were informed that a small patch of bog had been dug up in a bog at Limnagh in County Roscommon. They had sent an officer to check the scene out at the time, but he had nothing to report upon his return.

But in early August a grim discovery was made at that exact spot. Bernadette had evidently been murdered and left in the bog at Limnagh, although exposure to the elements meant that a precise cause of death could not be established. She had been in the makeshift grave for almost four months.

Father Columba

Despite renewed efforts to identify a suspect in the wake of the discovery at Limnagh, Gardai were unable to proceed much further with the case. A fingerprint that had been found on the crossbar of Bernadette's bicycle proved to be that of a neighbour who had lifted it into his car a day or so before her disappearance. No new evidence was forthcoming.

In fact, very little new evidence has come to light in over half a century.

But in that time, there has been renewed speculation about the possible involvement of the priest and brother identified by the Gardai as potential suspects in the early stages of the investigation.

The brother has never been named and is referred to as "Brother X". The priest, however, has been known from the beginning.

Father Columba Kelly.

Credit: Broadsheet.ie

Father Columba Kelly was a student priest in the area at the time of Bernadette's disappearance. He knew the Connolly family well, but even so, his actions after she went missing were odd. Father Columba actually moved into the Connolly family's home, and took it upon himself to look through the mailed messages of support (and perhaps information) coming in to the house. He told the distraught parents of Bernadette that he would pass any useful information that he found along to Gardai. Nothing ever was.

One day, for no apparent reason, Father Columba remarked to the family that he had seen a car drive into the cul-de-sac where the Connollys lived and then drive off very fast. He decided to follow the car, and it led him to the bog, where he then lost sight of the car. This anecdote was related by Columba some weeks before Bernadette's body was found--at almost the exact same location in the bog where the mystery car had led him. Was the young priest trying to lead the family to the location?

They never got to ask him that, because the Connollys claim a few days before Bernadette was found, Father Columba left the house abruptly. He did not give advance notice and did not say goodbye. The church had sent him to Botswana.

Brother X

The other individual that aroused suspicions is known only as Brother X. One of the members of the Passionist monastery, he was reported to have stopped for petrol at a filling station in the general vicinity of Collooney around the same time as Bernadette had gone missing.

The attendant who had served Brother X told Gardai that the cleric was very impatient, beeping the horn and demanding prompt service. The attendant--who is now deceased--also reported that Brother X was driving a green ford escort van.

Brother X denied this account and told Gardai that he had a solid alibi--he had been watching the return of Apollo 13 on the monastery's television that night.

The Apollo 13 landing module.
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

All of the other members of the monastery backed up this account.

A Clerical Cover-Up?

In 2009, the Murphy report into historical clerical abuse in Ireland was published. Outlining years of serious abuse of minors at the hands of clergy members, the report was particularly damning of Gardai. It suggested that, at times, the police force had effectively colluded with the church to cover up serious crimes committed by priests and members of religious orders.

But that might be unfair to individual members of the Gardai involved in this case. It seems that, even in the very early stages of the investigation, certain witnesses might not have been as forthcoming with the authorities as they should have been.

Nobody at Cloonamahon was able to recall Brother X's whereabouts when Gardai first visited the monastery, for instance. Yet less than two weeks later, this had changed, and by now there was no doubt that Brother X had watched the return of Apollo 13 right there at the retreat.

Father Columba's posting to Botswana was not unusual. Newly-ordained priests are routinely sent on missions to countries that seem far-flung. His sudden departure, however, continues to cause suspicion.

The Second Interviews

In the early months of 1999, both Father Columba Kelly and Brother X were interviewed for the second time by journalist Brighid McLaughlin. A friend of the Connolly family, she had interviewed the two back in 1970.

According to McLaughlin, Father Columba grew defensive when she queried where he was on the day of Bernadette's disappearance, before offering an outlandish speculative explanation of the abduction involving IRA gun-runners from Northern Ireland and the security forces sent to intercept them. He then said that he was in Collooney on the day Bernadette's body was discovered, which conflicted with the Connolly family's narrative.

Brother X stated that he was sure that he had not stopped at the petrol station that day, but he was no longer certain where he actually was. He suggested that he may have been digging potatoes in the monastery's garden, and reiterated that he had watched the return on Apollo 13 on the monastery's television.

Neither man could recall having their prints taken by Gardai.

An Open Case

In 2011, it was reported that Gardai were looking into the possible involvement of one Bob Reynolds, a 77-year old inmate in a UK prison who had previously served time for sexually assaulting a young girl in Mayo in 1974.

However, in the end nothing came of the new line of inquiry.

The case is still open but, 50 years on and counting, the chances of Bernadette's killer being brought to justice seem slim.

The memorial to Bernadette that stands close to where she was found in 1970.

Credit: Reallyboyle.com

The Beresford Ghost

2020-09-24T14:30:00.001+01:00

Did a childhood pact lead to a ghostly visit from beyond the grave?

An image of a ghost from 1899, created by double exposure. The Beresford ghost remains one of Ireland's best known cases of spectral visitations.

The National Archives UK

If there is one factor that can be said to have affected the course of Irish history above all others, it would have to be that of religion. The early Christian period on the island saw the establishment of influential monastic towns and settlements, many of which amassed such wealth that they would eventually attract envious interest from marauding Vikings. In the 12th-century, Pope Adrian IV--concerned that the Irish had regressed into a semi-pagan spiritual state--gave his blessing to the proposed conquest of Ireland by Henry II, which duly materialised in the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169. And, of course, the profound divisions caused by the reformation have endured in Ireland long after they ceased to matter in the rest of Europe, mainly because the concerted British effort to supplant the native Irish population with colonists from England, Scotland and Wales was not entirely successful, and created two competing Irish identities: one Gaelic, Catholic and independent, the other fundamentally Anglocentric--Protestant, wary of the native culture it had tried to displace, and fiercely loyal to the crown.

The conflict between these two versions of "Irishness" has played out on a societal level in dramatic ways, most recently in the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the second half of the 20th-century. But the complex interplay between both has also had a profound--and often surprising--effect on individual figures. Theobald Wolfe Tone, Charles Stewart Parnell and Douglas Hyde were all born into the "Ascendancy"--the upper-class, Protestant ruling class of Ireland before independence--and yet all three played pivotal roles in Ireland's eventual break from the United Kingdom. The country's most celebrated poet, WB Yeats, was also of the Ascendancy; as part of the Gaelic Revival literary movement, however, he helped to mythologise an ancient, Gaelic past which did much to inspire the Republican revolutionaries in Ireland in the early 20th-century. He was helped in this by friends and fellow intellectuals such as John Millington Synge and Constance Markievicz--both born into similar circumstances.

Arguably, the significance of the theological distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism had begun to lessen by the time that all of these individuals lived and died, but at the time that their ancestors were cementing their power and influence in the country--in the case of the Ascendancy, through the granting of lands and titles previously held by the Gaelic aristocracy--theological differences were of grave importance. The 1600's in particular proved to be a particularly active period for religious conflicts, with the Thirty Years War raging in Europe, and the Cromwellian invasion and the later Jacobite wars laying waste to Ireland. And as these wars were fought, individuals and society in general continued to grapple with the implications of the reformation, and Protestant thinkers in particular developed ideas which would eventually blend with the some of the ideas associated with the looming Enlightenment.

One such notion that began to gain traction at the time was Deism, the belief that knowledge of God can be obtained through the exercise of reason alone. Deists contended that God was the architect of the universe, but was relatively indifferent to it, and that all ideas regarding divine revelation were misguided. The philosophy proved popular among early Protestants, largely because it dismissed phenomena such as miracles and saintly intervention--typically associated with Catholicism--as supernaturalism. One adherent to Deism was Hugh (Hugo) Hamilton, a Scots-Irish Protestant who commanded a brigade of British soldiers in the Swedish army during the Thirty Years War before assuming the lordship of Glenawly in County Fermanagh in 1660. A peer of Hamilton's, Sir Richard Power, also held Deist views; in 1673, Power became the 1st Earl of Tyrone, a title previously held by the chief of the Ulster O'Neill clan.

Protestant reformer John Calvin. Early Protestant thinkers rejected the more mystical traditions of Roman Catholicism, choosing instead to focus on Reason.

Calvin Bryant, Florida, John Calvin 1509 to 1564, CC BY-SA 4.0

Both men decided to raise their children as Deists, and Hamilton's daughter Nichola and Power's son John grew up as close friends. Nichola Hamilton and John Power were both born in or around 1666, and were inseparable during adolescence. Both also had inquiring minds--especially concerning religious matters. They had good reason to; being born into a class that had, within a generation or two, forcibly uprooted and replaced the ancient Gaelic aristocracy of Ireland on religious grounds--even as the underclass that served them remained committed to the old faith--they were well-placed to witness the upheaval and destruction that religious conflict can wreak on society. As they grew into maturity together they started to have doubts about religion in general, however, and this led the two childhood friends to make a pact: whichever one of the pair died first was, if possible, to appear to the other at the moment of death and reveal to the other the truth about the afterlife.

Whether or not Nichola and John ever became more than just friends is not known, even if it is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility given how close they were, but eventually their lives took separate paths. John Power became the Earl of Tyrone after his father's death; he also married, but his wife died young, leaving him without heirs. He never remarried. Nichola became the Lady Beresford after her marriage to Sir Tristram Beresford, a Baronet and Member of Parliament for the county of Londonderry. The union was a happy one, and the Beresfords had five children together. But Lady Beresford and John Power continued their friendship, and Nichola's childhood companion was a frequent visitor to the Beresfords' home in Coleraine. John Power would meet four of the Beresford children before his death.

One morning in October, 1693, Lady Beresford descended the stairs from her rooms wearing a black ribbon around her wrist. Her curious husband inquired as to the reason, and Lady Beresford calmly informed him that her childhood friend John Power had died during the night. Sir Tristram's reaction to the news is lost to history, but he must surely have wondered how his wife could have known this; any doubts he might have had would have been short-lived, however, as later that morning the Earl's steward arrived at Coleraine with a letter confirming the death of John Power.

Location of the Barony of Coleraine in the county of Derry/Londonderry in what is now Northern Ireland. Nichola Hamilton would have moved here upon her marriage to Sir Tristram Beresford.

Mabuska, Coleraine barony, colour by Irish Mysteries, CC BY-SA 3.0

It was many years before Lady Beresford would relate what exactly had happened on that night, and what she did reveal has come down to us through her children. In 1713, Lady Beresford had already been widowed and remarried to General Richard Gorges of county Meath, with whom she had a further six children. She was celebrating her birthday with her large family when a clergyman arrived with documents. These were intended to clear up an error which might seem trivial--Lady Beresford was not 46 on that birthday, she was actually 47, and the clergyman wanted to clarify the matter for the family. When she heard the news, however, Lady Beresford's demeanour instantly changed. She hastily retired to her bedroom, and the birthday celebrations were brought to a sudden, unexpected end.

Over the coming days and weeks friends and family members pushed Lady Beresford for answers as to her strange behaviour, and gradually the details of that October night back in 1693 came out in what has become known as the case of the "Beresford ghost". Lady Beresford claimed that, on the night of his death, John Power had appeared to her in her chamber and stated that he had died. As proof of this, the apparition drew a curtain on the other side of the room closed with a motion of his hand. To convince her that he was in fact John Power, the apparition also signed his name in the Lady's pocket book. Finally, he grabbed her wrist; the apparition's grip was, according to Beresford, as cold and as heavy as marble.

The ghost also had information about the Lady's future. He informed her that she was pregnant with a son--the last child she would bear for Sir Tristram Beresford. He also told her that she would be widowed and would remarry; Sir Tristram died in 1701. The prediction that was troubling Lady Beresford when she related the tale was that her own death would occur at the age of 47. Some months after the clergyman had interrupted the birthday celebrations in order to reveal the Lady's actual age, this duly occurred; Lady Beresford died in 1713 while giving birth to her youngest daughter, Lucy. She was 47 years old, and not 46 as she had previously believed. Before her burial, the black ribbon that she had worn around her wrist for 20 years in memory of her departed friend John Power was finally removed. According to Beresford family lore, the skin underneath--where the ghost had placed his spectral fingers--was black and withered, the sinews and nerves shrunken.

One other revelation that the Beresford ghost made is peculiarly telling. John Power's spectral form was still mindful of the pact that had been made in childhood between Nichola and John, and Lady Beresford claimed that the ghost had cleared up an important theological matter. The Deism of their parents, apparently, had been misguided; the only true religion was that revealed by Jesus Christ. Whether that meant the Catholic or Protestant faith has never been clear, but it was a significant repudiation of the earlier Irish Protestant generation's impatience with supernaturalism. Could it have been an attempt, subconscious or otherwise, to try to narrow the gap between the newly-created Ascendancy and its overwhelmingly Catholic underclass, many of whom remained steeped in the quasi-mystical traditions and superstitions of the older version of Christianity? It would not amount to a permanent reconciliation, perhaps, but in acknowledging the possibility of spiritual experiences that transcended pure reason, the tale of the Beresford ghost at least allows for the inclusion of the supernatural in the Ascendancy's own self-mythologising. Such a seemingly minor nod to supernaturalism would have gone a long way in easing tensions between the Catholic population and their new Protestant rulers, much further than we can perhaps appreciate today.

A photograph of "Irish peasantry", taken in the 19th-century. The newly Protestant ruling class known as the Ascendancy assumed Ireland's aristocratic titles in the 1600's, and may have found it difficult to reconcile their beliefs with those of the native Irish.

Miscellaneous Items in High Demand, PPOC, Library of Congress / Public domain

But there was one last prediction that the Beresford ghost made that is worth considering. Having told Lady Beresford about her pregnancy, her impending widowhood and her eventual death, the ghost told her that her son would marry his--that is, John Power's--daughter. That was always a confusing point for Lady Beresford and the family members she related the tale to; John Power had died without heirs, and he had no daughter. The title of Earl of Tyrone had passed to John's brother James Power in 1693, and after James's death there were no more male Power children who could assume the title. But James Power had a daughter, Catherine Power, who could pass on the title through matrimony. If Catherine Power was John's "daughter" in the sense that she was his female heir, then the ghost's last prediction also came true: Marcus Beresford, with whom the Lady Beresford was pregnant on the night of the apparition, married Catherine Power in 1717. He was granted the title of Earl of Tyrone.

The Kilteasheen Skeletons

2020-08-06T14:38:00.002+01:00

Strange burials in a small settlement in 7th-century Ireland point to a belief in vampires.

An image of one of the skeletons uncovered at Kilteasheen in Roscommon. The rock placed in the mouth was intentional, and occurred after death.

"Kilteasheen Skeleton" by Chris Read credit poweredbyosteons

When Chris Read, a lecturer in Applied Archaeology at Sligo Institute of Technology, teamed up with some colleagues from St Louis University in the USA to develop a site for excavation in the quiet area of Kilteasheen in County Roscommon, he assumed that he would find lots of skeletons. And he did--137, to be exact, although there are probably up to 3000 still buried at the ecclesiastical site that had been identified by the Royal Irish Academy as worth investigating. The archaeologists were trying to find evidence of a hall house--a type of early medieval Gaelic palace--that had been built in the 13th-century. But the skeletons that they unearthed were a bonus, as they provided invaluable insight into life in this remote part of the Irish midlands during the early middle ages.

The site had been used as a graveyard for centuries, from about the 7th- or 8th-century up to the 1500's, and the burials generally followed consistent, predictable patterns. All, that is, except for two skeletons. These two bodies had been treated violently before being placed in the grave--specifically, large rocks had been forced into their mouths, their limbs had been broken, and both corpses had been folded around a large boulder. One of the rocks had been inserted so forcefully into the mouth of the deceased that the jawbone was dislocated. Another strange aspect of the burials was that the two male corpses had been buried outside the perimeter of the graveyard proper, and had not been laid east-to-west in accordance with Christian burial during the medieval period.

The archaeologists at first assumed that these were Black Death burials and that the rocks were safeguards against contagion, but when carbon dating placed the remains as dating back to between 600 and 800 CE, the team had to look for a different explanation. It seems that the people who buried these two men--one aged between 40 and 60, the other between 20 and 30--were not afraid of a disease that they had; instead, they feared that the men would come back from the grave. What Read and his team had found was significant, because it suggests that the Gaelic Irish living in Kilteasheen in the very early middle ages had some superstitions that until recently had been thought of as relatively modern--they believed in vampires.

Ireland does not have much of a vampire tradition in folklore, even if some Irish writers have made significant contributions to the vampire in literature. Irish Gothic writer Sheridan LeFanu penned Carmilla in the 1800's and introduced the world to the tragic, seductive vampire, and of course Dracula author Bram Stoker hailed from Clontarf in Dublin. But both of these men--and the other writers who helped to create the popular, literary vampire we all know today--looked to the superstitions of eastern Europe as a source of inspiration for their tales. Indeed, the very notion that there had ever been a tradition of belief in vampires in any part of Britain or Ireland would have probably amused both LeFanu and Stoker.

The vampire in popular western culture first appeared as a result of some very strange stories emanating from eastern Europe in the immediate wake of the Renaissance, and their popularity is generally attributed to the spread of ideas and information created by the invention of the printing press. In particular, the Balkan regions of the Hapsburg Empire proved to be a fertile source of lurid, terrifying and seemingly real cases of vampirism. In 1725, Peter Blagojevic died in his home town of Kisilova in modern-day Serbia. After his death, nine further villagers died in mysterious circumstances and locals promptly called on Austrian authorities in the region to investigate the matter. Blagojevic's body was disinterred, and it was noted that decomposition had not occurred and that the corpse's hair and nails had apparently grown. Defying the wishes of the local Austrian official, the villagers wasted no time waiting for permission from the Imperial office in Belgrade, and staked the corpse through the heart. According to eyewitnesses, fresh blood was said to flow from the new wound in Blagojevic's body.

Arnold Paole, a suspected "real" vampire terrorised the village of Medveda in Serbia after his death. The involvement of Austrian officials in the investigation helped to popularise the case in Europe.

Arnold Paole, unknown author, credit Alchetron

A year after the deaths in Kisilova, another small village in Serbia--Medveda--witnessed its own spate of mysterious deaths. The townspeople of Medveda immediately suspected Arnold Paole, an incomer from the Turkish-controlled part of Serbia. Paole had told people in the vicinity that he had been attacked by a vampire in an area known as Gossowa, but had followed tradition and eaten soil from the vampire's grave in order to cure himself. Within a month of Arnold's death in a farm accident late in 1726, four people who claimed that he had returned from the grave to visit him had rapidly sickened and died. Two army medics--known as Glaser and Fluckinger--were dispatched by Austrian authorities to Medveda, and it is from their reports that the details of the case became widespread. As in Kisilova, the locals disinterred the body and it showed no decomposition and hair and nails were judged to have grown. The body and coffin were also smeared with blood. A stake was driven through Paole's heart--upon which the corpse screamed, according to some reports--and his body was dismembered and burned. Despite these measures, a further 12 people died as a result of suspected vampirism in Medveda five years later, a result--at least according to Fluckinger--of the suspects having eaten the meat of sheep which Paole had previously attacked.

Today, it is largely accepted that the characteristics of the disinterred corpses in both Kisilova and Medveda were not mysterious at all, but are in fact the observable effects of decomposition under certain circumstances. An example is the apparent growth of hair and nails--a feature noted in both cases. What the villagers and the Austrian officials interpreted as growth was in fact a result of the contraction of the flesh around the head and hands of the bodies, making it look like the hair and nails had grown. All the other signs of vampirism on the bodies of both Blagojevic and Paole are also now understood to be normal parts of the process of decomposition, even including the presence of seemingly fresh blood.

Other aspects of the tales of Blagojevic and Paole are less easily explained, but probably arise from the intersection between superstition and epidemiology. Sceptics of the vampire stories have been quick to point out that localised outbreaks of the plague were widespread for much of the last millennium, and the deaths of the villagers in both Kisilova and Medveda were most likely caused by such epidemics. As for the sightings of the two men after their deaths, one thing that can be said is that mass hysteria and the search for convenient scapegoats--physically real or otherwise--are hardly unknown phenomena during crises of public health.

Bram Stoker. The Irish author of Dracula was influenced by earlier literary tales of vampires, but he also carried out intensive research into the folkloric vampire superstitions of the Balkan region while writing his famous novel.

en:W. & D. Downey [1], William Downey (1829-1915) and Daniel Downey (1831-1881), Bram Stoker1, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

But the effects of such stories on readers in western Europe and further abroad would be felt for a long time afterwards, and arguably continue to the present. Countless vampires in literature and in movies are portrayed as coming from exotic locations in eastern Europe. Transylvania--the home of the Count in Stoker's novel--is the quintessential home of the vampire, and it is significant that a peripheral area on the border between Europe and Asia was chosen as the setting for the book. Vampires in literature have always represented the fear of the other, the exotic and the unknown. It is worth noting that Kisilova was only briefly controlled by the Austrians, between 1718 and 1739, and was otherwise part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire; Arnold Paole had migrated from Turkish Serbia, and had reputedly been infected by a vampire there.

The discovery of the burials at Kilteasheen suggests that, instead of being a recent import from eastern European cultures, the vampire superstition was once also widespread in the west. Similar "deviant burials" have come to light in recent years in other locations close to Ireland--in Britain, for example, but also in western continental Europe. The beliefs among the Irish in Kilteasheen almost 1500 years ago would perhaps still seem alien to those of us familiar with the vampire superstition today, however; first of all, the word "vampire" would not have existed--the word was borrowed from the Serbian language and is likely Turkish in origin, fittingly--but other features may also have been very different. It is not clear, for instance, whether the people of Kilteasheen believed that the two men they had buried would come back and drink human blood or not, and the rocks in their mouths could have been intended to keep their souls from re-entering their bodies after death. Other elements such as the use of garlic to fend the vampires off and fear of crucifixes are all probably Balkan features of vampire lore mixed with literary embellishment, and would almost certainly be absent.

But the Kilteasheen discovery and the wealth of new evidence of deviant burials in general definitely point to the existence of a belief in revenants--or in Irish neamh mairbh, literally "walking dead"--among early medieval communities. And there was perhaps one important feature of suspected vampires that would be shared between the Kilteasheen locals and their Balkan counterparts of a millennium later--the men were most likely extremely violent, or had died extremely violent deaths. Chris Read believes that they may have been murderers or rapists, or had broken the conventional rules of their society in some significant way. As has been stated earlier, one of the men was older, between 50 and 60 at the time of his death, but the other was a young man aged between 20 and 30. Some analyses of this individual's skeleton have revealed that he was physically large and very strong, and had suffered some damage in battle before the time of his death.

A satirical cartoon from London's Punch magazine, portraying Nationalists as vampires. Despite the various Irish contributions to vampire literature, folkloric examples of Irish vampires are rare. Discoveries like the one at Kilteasheen, however, suggest that the superstition was common in Ireland a long time ago.

anonymous, The Irish Vampire - Punch (24 October 1885), 199 - BL, CC0 1.0

The dating of the bodies to the 7th- or 8th-centuries is curious; previously, this time period has been regarded as Ireland's "golden age"--between the introduction of Christianity in the 5th-century and the arrival of the Vikings in the 9th--when the country was peaceful and prosperous. The evidence being discovered in archaeological digs in Kilteasheen and other locations suggest that this view of Irish history is naive at best, and that the early medieval period was much darker and more dangerous than has been acknowledged. The two bodies buried in Kilteasheen--twisted around boulders and denied the niceties of Christian burials of the day--can certainly attest to that darker, more hidden past.

It's worth noting that there is at least one legend of a vampire in Irish mythology, the tale of the Abhartach (literally, "dwarf") from an area near Derry. The story goes that a tyrannical chieftain who practised dark magical arts in life returned from death to feast upon the blood of his subjects. A hero was dispatched to vanquish him, and it took three attempts to do so. On the third death, the hero--legendary warrior Fionn Mac Cumhail in some accounts--staked the Abhartach with a sword made of yew wood and buried him upside-down, then covered his grave with thorns and a large boulder. The upside-down burial should give some pause for thought; it was assumed that the other measures would not hold the Abhartach forever, and he was buried with his head at the bottom so that, when he awoke, he would start to dig facing the wrong way. He would therefore be condemned to dig forever. Considering the broken limbs and boulder-crushed corpses in the Kilteasheen burial ground, it is disturbing to think that this is probably what the locals had in mind for their vampires.

The Murder of Moll McCarthy

2020-07-19T22:16:00.000+01:00

A brutal murder in a small community leads an innocent man to the gallows.

The body of Moll McCarthy. Her murder in 1940 shocked the small community of Marlhill, and is unsolved.

moll mccarthy credit Irish Post

Prisons are not known for their beauty or charm, but the room in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison that Henry Gleeson entered in 1941 was a particularly grim one even by those low standards. Just a few square metres of grey stone, the one distinguishing feature there was also the most horrifying: a gallows occupied what little space there was in the small room's centre. Gleeson had been brought to the "Hang Room" of Mountjoy, and with the assistance of British executioner Thomas Pierrepoint, the sentence of death handed down to him earlier that year was enacted.

Gleeson was not the last person to die in the Hang Room. A total of 45 people--all but one of them men--met a grisly end there between 1906 and 1954. Many of the hangings were carried out by either Thomas Pierrepoint or his nephew, Albert, Ireland having no professional executioners of its own. And even though there were no executions carried out after that of rapist and murderer Michael Manning in 1954, the death penalty remained a theoretical possibility for many decades after. But he does have one dubious honour: he is the only person to have been pardoned by the Irish state after his execution. Almost 80 years after his death it can be said with certainty that Henry Gleeson, the supposed murderer of Mary "Moll" McCarthy, was innocent.

The pardon that was issued in 2015 by President of Michael D Higgins was, in the opinions of many, long overdue. In fact, the case of Gleeson is now widely considered to be one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Ireland's recent history. But the Irish judiciary in 1941 was not all that different from today's, so the question of how the courts got it so wrong that an innocent man was sent to the gallows remains.

Henry Gleeson was born in 1903 in Holycross in county Tipperary. In 1920, he was invited to move to the neighbouring community of Marlhill, an area near New Inn. He was asked there by his uncle, John Caesar, who owned a 70-acre farm. Henry was expected to work for free, but he probably thought it was in his best interest to do so, as Caesar had no children and Gleeson might therefore reasonably hope to inherit the land at some point. But Caesar was not an old man, and Gleeson spent the next two decades labouring as a farm hand for nothing but room and board.

Though rural and very isolated, the area of Marlhill was not without its scandals and secrets. A constant source of gossip could be found in the person of Moll McCarthy, who lived in a dilapidated cottage on land bordering John Caesar's. Moll would draw water from Caesar's well--presumably with his consent--to help raise her large family of seven children. Moll McCarthy was unmarried, which was scandalous enough in the ultra-conservative, Catholic Ireland of the 1940's. What was even more scandalous was how she earned the money to feed her children: in a sparsely populated, agricultural hinterland, Moll traded sexual favours for food and other resources. The seven children she birthed between 1921, when she moved to the area, and her violent death in 1940 had six different fathers. In an era when young, unmarried mothers were often sent by their families to the infamous Magdalene laundries out of shame, it is curious that a prostitute was allowed to operate with impunity in such a tiny community.

The crossroads of New Inn, Tipperary. New Inn is the closest village to the rural community of Marlhill, and it was authorities from here that first investigated the killing.

Seighean, New Inn Crossroads, colour by Irish Mysteries, CC0 1.0

But despite the local judge, Sean Troy, ruling that it was unnecessary to take her children into foster care because there was scant evidence that she was an unfit mother, Moll clearly had her enemies in Marlhill. In 1926, for example, the thatched roof of her cottage was set ablaze in an apparent arson attack. It is unknown who was involved in the attack, but it is reasonable to assume that the arsonists came from the local community. Moll and her children were lucky to escape with their lives on that occasion, but her luck eventually ran out in November of 1940.

The murder of Moll McCarthy was savage. She had been shot twice, once in the neck and once in the face, and her body had been left in a field on John Caesar's farm. It was there that she was discovered on the morning of Thursday, November 21st by Henry Gleeson, who was out searching for Caesar's sheep. With few suspects and little in the way of motive--apart from the rumours that started circulating as soon as Moll's body was found, that is--Henry was promptly arrested and charged with her murder.

There was much about the ensuing trial of Henry Gleeson that was questionable even by the standards of the early 20th-century, and--decades later--the Irish affiliate of the Innocence Network based in Griffith College, Dublin, would focus on the irregularities of the case in order to help secure Gleeson's pardon. The Irish Innocence Project raised awareness of some deficiencies in the case, and chief among these was the issue of the time of death. The prosecution insisted that Moll had been murdered and abandoned in the field some time on November 20th, when in fact the medical evidence strongly suggested that she had been killed in the early morning of the 21st. This might seem like a minor detail, but Gleeson's life was in the balance--he had an alibi for November 21st, but not November 20th.

British executioner Thomas Pierrepoint. Ireland had no executioner of its own, so Thomas and his nephew Albert carried out most of the hangings conducted at Mountjoy up to 1954. Thomas executed Henry Gleeson in 1941.

thomas pierrepoint credit people pill

The behaviour of the local Gardai was also strange. Not long after the discovery of Moll's body, they allowed some of her children to openly accost Gleeson, which did the suspect no favours in terms of public opinion. It was also odd that the shotgun register for the area was not entered in evidence; firearms have been strictly regulated in Ireland for most of its history as an independent state, and the failure to properly examine the records of who had access to guns in such a tiny community is inexplicable. Some witnesses whose testimony would seem indispensable in a modern case were also not called by either prosecution or defence counsel: John Caesar, for example, or his wife Brigid.

The prosecution's central argument was that Henry Gleeson had been having an affair with Moll McCarthy and was the father of her youngest child. The proposed motive behind the murder was that Moll was threatening to tell John Caesar about the affair, putting the possibility of Gleeson inheriting his uncle's farm in jeopardy. None of this was true; it is of course possible that Gleeson fathered a child by Moll McCarthy, but she also had no shortage of male punters in the area, including--if rumours are to be believed--John Caesar. But the prosecution successfully swayed the jury, who found Gleeson guilty of murder on February 27th, 1941, with a recommendation that mercy be extended in his case. It was not. Gleeson was hanged on April 23rd and buried in an unmarked grave.

So what was going on in this strange case? Some claim there were larger, more political forces at work. For example, there is one plausible reason why the local Garda sergeant, Anthony Delaney, allowed Moll McCarthy to ply her trade as a sex worker in Marlhill for 19 years with little interference: she was, according to some, informing on local IRA members to the authorities. She moved to the area when the IRA was still fighting the British and, later, Irish Free State forces, and even after the cessation of the Irish civil war the IRA remained active. They posed an existential risk to the fledgling Irish state, after all, and any actionable information that state forces got hold of would have been invaluable. In 2015, author Kieran Fagan argued in his book The Framing of Harry Gleeson that a number of Moll's neighbours who had IRA connections discovered her status as an informant, and assassinated her.

Sean MacBride, who served as junior defence counsel for Gleeson at his trial. Critics have argued that MacBride ignored evidence of IRA involvement in the case, but this has not been proven. MacBride was the son of Maud Gonne, long-time muse of WB Yeats.

Unknown author, Seán MacBride circa 1947, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

Proponents of this theory also point to the fact that Gleeson's junior defence counsel in the case was Sean MacBride, a veteran of the War of Independence and Civil War era of the early 1920's. MacBride would become a government minister in later life, but what is relevant to the theory of republican involvement in the McCarthy/Gleeson case was that he was the chief of staff of the IRA from 1936 to 1939. Critics of Gleeson's defence argue that MacBride was willing to ignore the possible involvement of his IRA colleagues in the murder, in effect condemning the innocent man that he was helping defend to the gallows. It's a fascinating theory, even if it is hard to reconcile this picture with that of MacBride in his later years, the one who won the Nobel Prize in 1974 for his tireless work in the field of international human rights.

Perhaps there is no conspiracy in the case at all. Perhaps Gleeson's defence was merely unprepared, and the prosecution got lucky. Republicans may or may not have been involved, but it is also true that Moll's lifestyle and profession would have made her a target for violence in such a small community, either from the men who potentially fathered her children, or from their wives. The two victims in the case remain that: a pardon means little after the hangman has done his job, after all, and Moll McCarthy's murderer or murderers--whoever they may have been--have never been definitively identified.

The murder of Moll McCarthy continues to provoke debate and fascinate; to date, two factual books have been written, two novels have been published, and there is both a documentary and a movie about the case. The real murderer may have been successful in ending the life of Moll McCarthy, and--indirectly--that of Henry Gleeson too, but their memories linger on.

Henry Gleeson. A pardon issued by Irish President Michael D Higgins in 2015 was welcomed by his family, but the real killer of Moll McCarthy has never been found.

harry gleeson credit Irish Post

Loftus Hall

2020-07-08T15:14:00.000+01:00

The Devil once came calling, according to legend, but is there something else lurking in Ireland's most haunted house?

Loftus Hall. Often claimed to be the most haunted house in Ireland, it is now a tourist attraction.

Gfox228, Loftus Hall, Wexford, Ireland - panoramio, colour by Irish Mysteries, CC BY 3.0

It is perhaps Ireland's most well-known tale of the supernatural.

On a stormy night in the early 1770's, a ship is wrecked off the Hook peninsula in county Wexford. One of the sailors washed ashore makes his way to Loftus Hall, the massive country house that dominates Hook Head. The Hall is home to Charles Tottenham, his daughter Anne and his second wife, Jane Cliffe. Charles is resting when the mysterious young stranger comes to call, but his wife and daughter take him in and offer him shelter from the raging storm.

Over the next few days, the visitor recuperates. Young, handsome and charming, he ingratiates himself with the small family unit, and grows particularly close to Anne. A few evenings after his dramatic arrival, the four decide to play a game of whist in the parlour. Anne and the stranger pair up against the elder Tottenham and his wife, and, after a few hands, the younger duo are winning quite comfortably. It is at this point that Anne makes a shocking discovery.

Having dropped a card on the floor, Anne leans down under the table to retrieve it. She is horrified to see a pair of cloven hooves where her paramour's feet should be, and screams in terror. As she scrambles from beneath the table, it is knocked over and the young stranger's diabolical nature is revealed to everyone present. The Devil--his cover blown--departs Loftus Hall as a ball of fire that shoots through the ceiling, accompanied by a deafening thunderclap.

This is the essence of the tale of the Devil and Loftus Hall, even though some details may change according to the teller. In some cases, for example, the stranger calls to the Hall because his horse is worn out and cannot ride any further. In others, Anne drops a ring, not a card. The Devil sometimes jumps through the parlour window. But the basic elements are the same. And all versions of the story hold that Anne, traumatised by her seduction at the hands of Satan himself, loses her mind and has to be confined to her bedroom--the Hall's Tapestry Room--until her lonely death some time around 1775.

A game of whist. A popular parlour game of the time, its inclusion in the tale of the Devil and Loftus Hall helps provide a very mundane background for the revelation of the visitor's true, satanic nature.

James Gillray creator QS:P170,Q520806 Hannah Humphrey creator QS:P170,Q18671367, Two-penny whist, colour by Irish Mysteries, CC0 1.0

It should probably come as no surprise that there are strong associations between Loftus Hall and the paranormal: the site where the big house stands is ancient. The area was seized by an Anglo-Norman lord named Raymond le Gros during the Norman conquest of Ireland in 1170, and his descendants--as the Redmond family--held it until the 1660's, when a later conquest under Oliver Cromwell replaced them with the Loftus family. The original Redmond Hall was built in the 14th-century to replace the castle erected by Raymond le Gros's immediate heirs, and the Hall itself remained relatively unchanged up to the 19th-century. It has been said that there were local rumours of strange goings-on at the Hall long before it fell into the hands of the Loftus family, and many from the area refused to go anywhere near the imposing residence.

The house itself must have seemed foreboding enough by the time Charles Tottenham (who had officially taken his first wife's surname, Loftus, in order to inherit the estate) moved in with his second wife and adult daughter. It probably also didn't help that the peninsula of Hook Head is a desolate area, often described by locals and visitors alike as a "wild and lonely place". Anne is said to have been particularly unhappy with the move, it having come about after her sister Emily's marriage. Anne and Emily were close, being the two youngest of six other children from Tottenham's first marriage, and Emily's departure made Anne miserable. It has also been suggested that she did not get on well with Jane Cliffe. That in itself would hardly be a unique experience for two grown women suddenly cast in the role of step-mother and -daughter, but it must have made life at the lonely Hall even more unpleasant for Anne.

All of which is perhaps why the visitor to Loftus Hall left such emotional carnage in his wake. For there was almost certainly a real visitor. What is interesting about the story of the Devil and Loftus Hall is that it was Charles Tottenham himself that first put it about, which has led to speculation that the diabolical tale was designed to deflect interest in a very human scandal involving Anne. In this version of events, the young man who visits is every bit as charming as his alter ego in Tottenham's fabrication. Instead of being unmasked as the Prince of Darkness, however, he is caught having sex with Anne and promptly escapes through a window.

Proponents of this theory hold that Tottenham was prepared to go to great lengths to back up his fanciful tale, even going so far as to have Loftus Hall exorcised by the local Catholic parish priest. As members of the Protestant landed class of Irish society, this was a highly controversial decision for the Tottenham family. Charles claimed that a spate of paranormal occurrences had begun after the eventful card game, and Father Thomas Broaders was eventually called in to put a stop to it once it became apparent that the Church of Ireland clergy could not. Father Broaders is supposed to have confined the occurrences to the Tapestry room, upon which that section of the house was cordoned off.

The Tapestry room of an English country home. Though opulent even by modern standards, it is likely that the Tapestry room of Loftus Hall was no better than a prison cell for the unfortunate Anne Tottenham.

Charles Latham (1847-1912), In English Homes Vol 2 Drakelowe Derbyshire tapestry room 31295007279283 0399, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps the paranormal occurrences of the 1770's were all just part of an elaborate fiction then, intended to distract the Tottenhams' peer group from the very real disgrace which Anne's dalliance with the young visitor could bring. Anne's captivity in the Tapestry room in this interpretation becomes all the more sinister as a result, but there is another mystery: why has most of the paranormal activity reported at Loftus Hall taken place after 1775, and has focused on the very room where Anne Tottenham died?

From the the late 1700's onwards, the Tapestry room was used as guest quarters. Hundreds of visitors stayed there, and there were countless reports of strange occurrences. There seem to have been two major phenomena that most affected the guests. There were continuous sightings of a tall lady in a stiff silk dress, who reportedly either entered the room every evening and passed through silently--exiting through the closet door--or stood quietly staring at whatever individual happened to be occupying the bed that night. Several witnesses also claimed that they were held down on that same bed by an invisible, sinister entity that growled like a wild animal.

The phenomena in the Tapestry room continued for years, with only very slight variations. For example, one guest had a suitcase full of jewellery and other expensive items which were inexplicably strewn around the room in the morning. In the latter half of the 19th-century, a billiard table was installed in the Tapestry room, and there were reports that the balls would be knocked about at night, making a "horrid noise". The vast majority of the witnesses were high-profile, credible individuals such as Church of England clergyman the Reverend Charles Dale, who stayed at Loftus Hall while serving as a tutor to one of the children. Some of Dale's experiences there--in 1867--were identical to those of other individuals from as far back as 1790.

A depiction of The Devil with cloven hooves. Although he probably did not appear at the Hall as the legend claims, several witnesses have claimed that there is a demonic presence that accompanies the suspected spectre of Anne Tottenham.

anonymous, Silvester II. and the Devil Cod. Pal. germ. 137 f216v, marked as public domain, colour by Irish Mysteries

In 1871, Loftus Hall was extensively renovated. The main reason for this was that the Loftus family was expecting a visit from Queen Victoria, which ultimately never materialised--even though many of the paranormal events related above were in fact collected in order to be related to the Queen. The fact that the most important guest of Loftus Hall never actually arrived was particularly galling for the family, as they had spent most of their money on the renovation and were left close to financial ruin. They lost the Hall as a result, and the property has changed hands quite a few times since.

But the renovation itself may have thrown up a possible reason for the unexplained incidents at the hall. It is believed that when the time came for work to be carried out on the Tapestry room, there was a disturbing discovery. The skeletal remains of a baby were found interred in the wall of the room. If this indeed happened, then it is likely that there were two victims of Anne's incarceration--Anne herself, and her child. Perhaps it is the restless spirit of Anne Tottenham who caused the disturbances at Loftus Hall, angered by the injustice she suffered at the end of her tragically short life.

From 1917 until the early 1980's the Hall served as convent, first for the Benedictine Order and later for the Order of Providence. The sisters of Providence converted it into a dormitory school for girls interested in taking holy orders, but the strange occurrences associated with the house continued. Bizarre accidents were common throughout this period, and rumours of something unholy stalking Loftus Hall were rife among the students. In 1983 the house was sold to Michael Deveraux, who intended to open it us as a guesthouse. But the new "Loftus Hall Hotel" was a commercial failure, and Michael Deveraux died not long after the grand opening. Strangely, Mrs Deveraux stayed on at Loftus Hall, alone, until one grey morning in the early 1990's when she abruptly stood up from the breakfast table--leaving all of the food and cutlery that she had laid out for her meal--and simply walked out, never to return.

There were rumours that Mrs Deveraux was tracked down years later in a nursing home in England. When she was asked why she had abandoned the house so suddenly, leaving all of her belongings there, her explanation was chilling. For the duration of her years alone there, Mrs Deveraux claimed that she had heard voices telling her to get out of Loftus Hall. All that she did that morning, she said, was to do what they asked.

If you enjoy stories like this, you might want to check out Feedspot's list of the top 75 paranormal blogs, websites and influencers 2020 at https://blog.feedspot.com/paranormal_blogs/

The Disappearing Town of Ardreigh

2020-06-16T16:04:00.001+01:00

The town of Ardreigh survived for centuries before disappearing, but what happened to this ancient Irish settlement?

A view of the plains of South Kildare. The area where the town of Ardreigh once stood now resembles this, with little evidence of a settlement having existed at all.

Sarah777 / Public domain

Bad sections of roads are common in Ireland, and one of the most notorious bad bends was for many years located just outside of the midlands town of Athy. A part of the regional road R417, leading southwards out of the town in the direction of its larger neighbour Carlow, was classified as an accident "black spot" because of an extremely precarious bend that resulted in numerous car crashes, both minor and otherwise. The road needed realignment and, with the dramatic increase in traffic witnessed in Ireland at the turn of the 21st-century, it was becoming urgent.

Kildare County Council--the local authority responsible for such works--was nonetheless aware that the Ardreigh area was of potential interest to archaeologists. A study had been commissioned in 1999 which examined countless historical documents, records of previous archaeological assessments, and even aerial photographs of the area. Based on this study, permission for preliminary archaeological digs was given before the roadworks commenced. What was discovered at Ardreigh was astonishing: thousands of artefacts and human remains, evidence of continuous settlement from approximately 7000 BC right up to the late middle ages. Despite such a long and illustrious past, however, there is practically nothing left to be seen above the ground. Which leads us to the question: what happened to the town of Ardreigh?

When the first inhabitants of the island of Ireland arrived during the Mesolithic period, they encountered a landscape that was drastically different from today's. The topography of modern Ireland is characterised by bucolic scenes of gently-rolling hills and stone-walled fields populated by grazing sheep and cattle. Less than 3% of the island is classed as woodland. By contrast, the first settlers were confronted with an almost impenetrable frontier of dense forest when they started to cross--most likely from the European mainland and not Britain, as has been historically presumed--after the end of the last ice age, probably starting from around 10 000 BC. With limited means of clearing woodland, and with animals such as the now extinct Irish species of wolves and bears to contend with in the forests, the colonists resorted to using natural waterways to migrate inland.

If we assume that these settlers arrived from the continent, perhaps from modern-day Spain or Portugal, then it is likely that they made landfall along the southern coast. In that case, the rivers known as the three sisters--the Barrow, the Nore and the Siur--were probably among the first to carry subsequent waves of migrants away from the coast and into the Irish midlands. These pioneers would most likely have settled at various points along the rivers, exploiting the resources of the waterways to supplement whatever food they found by hunting and gathering. Stone tools from this period were unearthed in the excavation at Ardreigh, suggesting that middle-stone age migrants had made the 66 KM journey upriver from the tidal limit of the Barrow and forming a settlement less than 200 metres away from a natural bend in the river's course.

The River Barrow. Early settlers would have navigated Ireland's rivers upstream from the coast, and it is likely that Ardreigh was one of the earliest inland settlements.

Artur Kozioł / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

And the excavations revealed that the area had been continuously inhabited from that point on, through all the subsequent phases of the country's historical development. Flint tools and evidence of dwellings similar to the log cabins of North America were dated to the Neolithic, when the inhabitants of the area started to clear woodland for the first time in order to grow their own crops. The cremated remains of a middle-aged man were found in a ceramic urn and dated to the Bronze Age, circa 1100 BC. Evidence of medieval settlement includes an early Christian church from around 500 AD, and the town of Ardreigh showed signs of continued growth from that point all the way to the arrival of the Anglo-Normans, who took control of the area after the invasion of 1169. That led to Ardreigh's real heyday--the town after that point is believed to have been impressive by the standards of the Irish middle ages, featuring a large church and a busy main thoroughfare lined by houses, shops and workshops.

The other significant find in the excavation was human remains. More skeletons were unearthed at the Ardreigh site than at any other archaeological site in the country--a total of 1259. The individuals buried at Ardreigh included those from all social backgrounds, and radiocarbon dating established that burials had started in the town's cemetery in the 7th- or 8th-century, reached a peak in the 13th- and 14th-centuries, and petered out by the late 16th. By that point more or less all the inhabitants of the town had left and migrated elsewhere, leaving what remained of the settlement's buildings to sink into the ground. The area became part of south Kildare's pasture farmland, and no visible sign of the once bustling town was to be seen until a road needed realignment more than four centuries later.

A human skeleton. The excavation at Ardreigh unearthed more skeletal remains than any other archaeological dig in Ireland.

Davidbena / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

A clue as to why this happened may have been revealed by an anomaly in the nature of the burial sites excavated during the dig. Most of the bodies that were laid to rest there were interred carefully, placed on their backs in their burial shrouds and aligned along an east-west axis. A small number of individuals were buried hastily, however, with little of the dignity and ceremony afforded to others. And when radiocarbon dating established that they had died at some point in the 14th-century, that started to make a great deal of sense. In the 1300s the Black Death swept through Europe, and according to some estimates claimed the lives of up to 60% of the continent's population.

Initially spread to humans by rats--or, more accurately, by the fleas that preyed upon both rats and humans--the bubonic plague quickly spread along Europe's trade networks. Urban settlements were the most badly affected, and there is evidence that the virus spread rapidly on the island of Ireland along the same waterways that had first led settlers to the site of Ardreigh thousands of years before. Large, important cities and towns, such as Kilkenny and New Ross, suffered devastating casualties in the first wave of infection and arguably never recovered. Kilkenny, for example, was a major socio-economic centre for the Anglo-Normans and was in fact once their capital on the island; as of today, its population stands at 26 512--small even by Irish standards. New Ross, once the largest port in the eastern province of Leinster, now has 8 040 inhabitants. This pattern of population decimation was replicated across all of the urban Norman strongholds in Ireland in the 14th-century.

And that disaster would soon be compounded by a resurgence of Gaelic Irish strength in the wake of the plague. Pushed out of the more arable areas in the east and south of the country, the Gaelic Irish had been forced onto the harsher uplands after the invasion of the 1100s. More isolated from large settlements, and living further away from major rivers and tributaries, they suffered a great deal less during the Black Death than their Anglo-Norman counterparts. And they started to take advantage of this fact in the latter half of the 14th-century, conducting frequent raids on towns and cities and gradually pushing back against the influence of the Norman lords and their colonists. Ardreigh, situated in a valley in the richly fertile agricultural lands of south Kildare, and flush with relative wealth, must have proved an enticing prospect for marauding Gaelic forces. Continuous attacks and unrest from the late 1300s on undoubtedly contributed greatly to the decline of the town, and perhaps its eventual abandonment.

An oil painting of a scene during the Black Death. Hastily buried corpses in the excavated cemetery at Ardreigh suggest that the town was stricken by the plague, as were most other urban settlements.

Rita Greer / FAL

Ardreigh's remains now lay within the area of the the town of Athy, which it both traded with and rivalled in the medieval period. The Black Death took its toll on this Anglo-Norman settlement too, but Athy had the advantage of having large defensive walls which were used to protect its status as a major fording point on the route from Dublin to Kilkenny. These almost certainly helped the town to survive the Gaelic Irish incursions which devastated other urban areas in the period.

But they may also have been used for something considerably darker. Years before the excavation at Ardreigh, a schoolteacher once remarked to an individual from the town that during the first outbreak of bubonic plague in the area, the townspeople of Athy heard that there were cases in the neighbouring town of Ardreigh. Fearing the spread of the disease, they closed their southern gate and left Ardreigh to its fate. Though unverified, the fact that this rumour even existed speaks volumes about the behaviour of human populations when their existence is threatened, and how even our closest neighbours can become expendable in the face of seemingly unstoppable infection. In the context of what we have seen in 2020, the very possibility that this took place is as significant--and disturbing--as ever.

The old town hall in Athy, whose townlands now incorporate the area of Ardreigh.

Eeno11 / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)

Bog Bodies

2020-05-12T16:32:00.002+01:00

The discovery of two preserved bog bodies raises questions about both political and religious rituals among the ancient Irish.

An Irish bog. Bog bodies are common throughout Europe, with several high-profile cases having been found.

Sarah777 / Public domain

In March of 2003, workers at Bord na Mona--Ireland's leading provider of peat fuel--encountered a problem with one of their harvesting machines. Closer inspection of the vehicle revealed something horrific: there was a body trapped in the machinery. Had it not clogged the harvester, the corpse could easily have gone unnoticed. The visible part--mummified by the cool, oxygen-deficient but highly acidic conditions of bog water--had turned a shade of brown that was indistinguishable from the colour of turf, as the peat used for fuel in Ireland is commonly known. Only the strange, leathery texture of the skin and an elaborate quiff of strikingly red hair marked the body out from the mass of peat surrounding it.

Following established protocol for such situations, Bord na Mona contacted both the Garda Technical Bureau (Ireland's police forensic unit) and the Archaeological Development Services. The body was extricated from the harvesting machine, but only the torso remained intact; it is believed that the machinery shredded the lower half of the body before stalling. To the relief of those involved in the find, the archaeologists were quickly able to determine that Clonycavan Man--named for the County Meath town close to where he was found--died at some point between 392 and 201 BC. Yet even though the workers had not come across the body of any individual known to the living, the Garda Technical Bureau's conclusions as to the cause of death would still prove gruesome. Because, as it turned out, Clonycavan Man was the victim of an ancient--and extremely violent--act of murder.

Clonycavan Man grabbed headlines around the world when he was discovered. Bog bodies are not uncommon in Europe, and there have been several high-profile, well-preserved cases that have attracted widespread interest: Lindow man was found preserved in a bog in Cheshire, England in 1984, while Grauballe Man and Tollund Man had both come to light in Danish bogs as early as the 1950s. But it is a feature that Clonycavan Man shared with Grauballe Man in particular that was especially arresting: the vivid shock of red hair. Among a population with one of the highest genetic tendencies towards red hair, the sight of Clonycavan Man's carefully arranged, blatantly ginger Mohawk-like hairstyle couldn't fail to strike a poignant chord in Ireland.

Clonycavan Man's hair turned out to be significant in the case. It was most likely arranged in the curiously modern, almost punk-like Mohawk in order to add the impression of greater height: Clonycavan Man was just short of 1.6 metres (5 feet 2 inches) tall--small for an adult male, even by prehistoric standards. He was young when he died, perhaps in his early twenties, and the suggestion of a young adult male going to such lengths due to insecurity about his height evoked a great deal of sympathy. Forensics had one more thing to reveal about the hair, however. Traces of a type of gel were found there, gel which had been made from resins that can only be found in the south of France and the north of Spain. For the time period that he lived in, this connection is extraordinary. It suggests that Clonycavan Man was able to take advantage of a specific, international trade network, and pay for the goods that travelled along it. Clonycavan Man was, therefore, quite wealthy.

Clonycavan Man's elaborate hairstyle is one of the most striking features of the mummified remains. The other clearly identifiable feature is the injury to his nose, which is most likely what killed him.

Sven Shaw / Public domain

Analysis of the contents of the stomach would seem to support this theory. He had traces of protein and cereal in his digestive system, indicating that he ate his last meal at a time of year when food was plentiful--perhaps summer--but also having eaten quite a large amount relative to the standard quantities available at the time. What, then, accounted for the apparent murder of this privileged young man, and the unceremonious dumping of his body in a lake in the bog? The cause of death was specific. A large skull fracture was evident, and the blow that most likely finished him off flattened his nose, resulting in the squashed appearance that can still be seen. Both are believed to have been inflicted with a stone axe. But apart from the assumption that there was some ritualised element to his murder, that he was a human sacrifice to a deity of the unknown religion of pre-Christian Ireland, there was little else to go on.

Until, that is, another bog body surfaced. In June of 2003--mere months after the discovery of Clonycavan Man--the complete torso of an iron-age individual appeared in a bog near Croghan Hill in County Meath. Old Croghan Man--as he came to be called--was determined to be physically quite distinct from Clonycavan Man in one way. Analysts were able to determine that he was exceptionally tall even by today's standards, measuring 1.98 metres (6 feet 6 inches) in height. Old Croghan Man's killers had ensured that no further comparisons could be made with regards to appearance, however, as he had been decapitated and cut in half after his death. The head and lower half of his body were not found with the torso.

But there were striking similarities between the two. He lived and died in roughly the same time period as Clonycavan Man--between 362 and 175 BC in Old Croghan Man's case--raising the intriguing possibility that they could even have been contemporaries. Like Clonycavan Man, Old Croghan Man was young when he died from multiple stab wounds--early twenties, in fact. He was also of evidently high social status; he had an elaborate arm-ring around his left arm, made from leather, fibre and bronze. The contents of his stomach showed that his last meal was wheat and buttermilk--standard fare for the time--but there were also signs that he had eaten a meat-rich diet for at least four months prior to his murder. And there was another strong indicator of Old Croghan Man's relative privilege: the condition of his hands. These were astonishingly well-preserved, with the individual's distinct fingerprints still easily visible. Archaeologists were quick to point out that these hands had done very little manual labour. It seems that, despite his exceptional size and strength, Old Croghan Man lived a life of relative leisure.

The remains of Old Croghan Man, found a few months after Clonycavan Man in a bog in County Meath. The arms and hands are particularly well-preserved.

Mark Healey / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)

It was at this point that a feature of both bog bodies that had previously been dismissed as insignificant started to draw more attention--the state of the nipples. It had been noted that the nipples were missing from the remains of Clonycavan Man, but the archaeologists and forensic technicians who examined the body could not say with any certainty that this was not the effect of its contact with the peat harvesting machinery. However, there was clear evidence on the torso of Old Croghan Man that the nipples had been mutilated either shortly after death or immediately beforehand. This curious coincidence led Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum of Ireland towards a theory that could explain the brutal slayings.

Working with both Clonycavan Man and Old Croghan Man, and comparing the remains with those of six other bog bodies that had been discovered in varying states of preservation in Irish bogs, Kelly was able to determine that there was relative consistency when it came to the mutilation of nipples. Given that there is ample evidence that sucking on a ruler's nipples was a common sign of submission among the ancient Irish (Saint Patrick even mentions it in his writings, as late as the 5th-century AD) and that both corpses were found a short distance away from hills associated with inauguration rituals for iron-age kings, Kelly proposed the theory that both men were failed or rejected rulers. The mutilation of the nipples would have been an important gesture; any amputation served to disqualify an individual from power among Irish communities at the time, and the removal or mutilation of the nipples would have sent an especially powerful message when their significance in submission rituals is taken into account.

This explanation tallies with what is known about the two men. They were of high status, and seem to have lived relatively easy lives for the time period. It is very likely that they came from the ruling classes. But, even for the era in question, they were both quite young to have achieved the status of king or chieftain. In ancient Irish kingdoms--of which there were about 150 on the island at that time--kings were elected the ranks of an elite which included seasoned warriors. Even taking into account the shorter life-spans that people had two millennia ago, it would be difficult for an individual to ascend to the rank of ruler by his early twenties. Old Croghan Man's remarkable physical stature may have helped somewhat in this regard, even if he had apparently done very little manual work; it is less easy to imagine how the diminutive Clonycavan Man could have risen through the ranks.

An artist's impression of Christian missionaries interrupting a human sacrifice ritual among the ancient Britons, drawn in the 19th-century. Human sacrifice theories invariably surface whenever bog bodies do.

Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0

Perhaps the alternative theory is more accurate. It has been suggested that, despite--or perhaps even because of--the wealth and high status of both men, they were selected for human sacrifice to appease the gods during times of poor harvests. From this point of view, the placement of the bodies in bog lakes becomes more significant--the two men were offerings to the earth goddess. This explanation is an attractive one, and Eamonn Kelly also believes that there was an element of human sacrifice in the murders. But if this was indeed the case, the question remains as to why the victims of a ritual intended to ensure the return of good harvests and sufficient food supplies were so evidently well-fed. Of course, religious notions do not always correspond closely to logic and there may have been a ritual significance to their last meals, but it is worth asking why they had such rich diets in times of scarcity.

It may well have been the case that neither Clonycavan nor Old Croghan Man were rulers or sacrificial victims. They could have been the collateral damage in dynastic struggles or tribal feuds--their murders being symbolic acts of violence intended to intimidate despised rival groups. It is also possible that these particular bog bodies do indeed bear the scars of ritual sacrifice, but that does not necessarily mean that such practices were common. Both men may have been taken hostage by groups that followed marginalised belief systems--cults in modern parlance--and put to death in ceremonies that may have seemed just as bizarre and horrific to society in general back then as they do to us today.

And there is another possibility. Considering that those who killed both Clonycavan Man and Old Croghan Man went to great lengths to dispose of the remains, dumping them at the bottom of bog lakes where they were unlikely to be found again, it is clear that they wanted no evidence of the deed to remain. Bogs were not used as a source of fuel by the Irish until at least the 16th-century, once the process of deforestation on the island was more or less complete, and nobody at that time could have foreseen either the preservation or re-emergence of the bodies. It is possible, then, that both are the victims of simple, old-fashioned murder.

The Suicide Room of Maynooth

2020-04-28T22:11:00.000+01:00

Two students committed suicide in the same dorm room, but could a demonic entity be responsible?

St Patrick's College, Maynooth. The pontifical university was once the largest seminary in the world.

Elisa.rolle / CC BY-SA

The small county Kildare town of Maynooth is located 15 miles (24 kilometres) from Dublin city and is home to two important educational institutions. There is Maynooth University, one of the 8 major higher education providers in the country and a popular choice for many young school-leavers embarking on their undergraduate studies. But there is also St Patrick's College, from which Maynooth University officially separated in 1997. St Patrick's is famous in Ireland and abroad because it was, at one point, the largest seminary in the world; the original purpose of the institution was to train about 500 Roman Catholic priests a year.

Yet despite the vast numbers of clergymen who have graced the hallowed halls of St Patrick's over the last two centuries and more, there is a part of this small pontifical university which is shrouded in darkness. According to the lore of Maynooth, room number 2 of Rhetoric House--now home to the History department--is haunted by an evil entity. However, the activities of this unwelcome visitor extend far beyond merely cultivating an uneasy atmosphere; two related incidents from the mid-1800s suggest that the presence in room 2 has actually directly contributed to the deaths of two seminarians by suicide.

Even though Ireland has always been a predominantly Catholic country, there was a long period of time when it was difficult--even dangerous--to be a member of the church. This is known in Irish history as the era of the Penal Laws, a succession of measures introduced and developed by various British governments after the Reformation. That tumultuous event led to numerous prolonged conflicts in Europe, with the already strained historical relationship between Britain and Ireland being particularly badly affected. Britain's population mostly followed Henry VIII in his split with Rome, but the Irish--generally--remained stubbornly faithful to the Vatican. As a result, British policy in its neighbouring colony became focused first on discouraging Catholicism, and then later, actively punishing it. The vast majority of Irish Catholics were forbidden from owning property, becoming members of parliament, or even voting. Priests themselves became outlaws, celebrating mass illegally in the woods at the country's numerous "mass rocks".

An example of an Irish mass rock. During the Penal Laws, Catholic services were forbidden and mass had to be celebrated in secret.

Kenneth Allen / Glen Mass Rock / CC BY-SA 2.0

Ultimately, however, the Penal Laws failed to bring Ireland into line with Britain. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, a Republican movement began in Ireland that aimed to put the country's Catholic population on an equal footing with the Protestant minority. There was a major rebellion in Ireland in 1798, and even though it failed to establish a republic, it was one of a number of developments that finally motivated Britain to begin the relaxation of the Penal Laws. There were very pragmatic elements at work too, one of which was the realisation that most active Catholic priests in Ireland were being trained in France--home, at the time, to some very radical political ideas. Instead of having Catholic priests influenced by dangerous, anti-establishment French teachers, perhaps it was best to have them train in Ireland? Perhaps it was also best that those they would end up preaching to would have some opportunities in life, instead of remaining a constantly disenfranchised and resentful fifth column within the United Kingdom.

It was in this context that St Patrick's first opened its doors to seminarians in 1795. For many Catholic Irish families, the possibility of sending a son to seminary was an incredible development. For the entirety of the 19th-century, and a great deal of the 20th, having a family member become a priest was a mark of social prestige, and many young boys must have set out for St Patrick's with a considerable weight of expectations placed on their shoulders--often regardless of whether they even wanted to become priests or not in the first place. Many of those who ended up attending St Patrick's as seminarians did so because they were the youngest male child in families of eight or more children, and some parents were as motivated by practical matters of inheritance as they were by any other social factor. It was often the case at the time that an oldest male child would inherit whatever small property his parents owned, the middle male children would emigrate, and the youngest would become a priest.

Of course, we can only speculate about what this meant for each individual seminarian in terms of his personal relationship--or lack of it--with God, and there is no historical record of the religious convictions of either of the students that met their end in room 2 of Rhetoric House in Maynooth. But the details of the cases do remain.

A priest's library, photographed in Wexford in the 1930s.

National Library of Ireland on The Commons / No restrictions

In 1841, Rhetoric House was used by St Patrick's as a dormitory. Room 2 was occupied by Sean O'Grady, a 21-year-old seminarian from Limerick. One day in that year, for no apparent reason, O'Grady jumped out of the window of Room 2 and fell to his death. His classmates and the academic staff of St Patrick's were shocked and mystified by the act; O'Grady was generally known to be a cheerful and popular student, and nobody could quite figure out what could motivate him to do such a thing. It is worth noting that, at that time, suicide was considered a grievous sin by the Catholic church, and the suicide of a seminarian--a priest in training--must have been a truly horrific act to contemplate. Perhaps this was what prompted some of O'Grady's colleagues at the time to start talking of a demonic presence in room 2, one that had got under the skin of the young seminarian and, ultimately, caused his death.

Room 2 was closed for a long period after the incident, but in 1860 it was reoccupied by Thomas McGinn from county Wexford. The 27-year-old actually arrived at the campus a week before term began, and so he was allowed to lodge in the room while the quarters he would take for the academic year were being prepared. McGinn apparently found the atmosphere in room 2 oppressive and reported feeling uneasy. In particular, he was concerned with the mirror over the room's tiny washbasin, telling classmates that he was both drawn to and repulsed by it. It was only after he was moved from room 2, however, that he learned of O'Grady's suicide 19 years earlier. This revelation disturbed McGinn greatly, and he became obsessed with the room and what had happened there. One Friday morning, while McGinn's classmates were preparing for a lecture, it was remarked that he was missing from the assembly. After a short search, he was found lying in a puddle of his own blood--on the ground beneath the smashed window of room 2.

Thomas McGinn did not die immediately, however, and before he succumbed to his injuries he was questioned by Dr McCarthy, the Vice-President of St Patrick's college. Dr McCarthy learned that McGinn had been experiencing horrific demonic visions in the room. Nonetheless, he had still felt a powerful compulsion to return to it. On the Friday morning in question, he had visited room 2 directly after mass and, upon looking in the mirror, felt a diabolic power urging him to slash his own throat. Incredibly, he began to do just that, and at the last moment ran for the window in a frantic effort to escape. Later that day, McGinn died from blood loss and the injuries sustained in the fall.

There is a legend among alumni of Maynooth that, following McGinn's death, a priest spent a night in room 2 and emerged the next morning in a state of distress, his hair turned white from shock. This is probably not true; those who tell tales about any haunting naturally add embellishments to the details and, at any rate, there is no evidence that it happened. What did happen, however, was that the Trustees of St Patrick's college, acting on advice from Dr McCarthy, agreed to convert room 2 of Rhetoric House from a dormitory room to an oratory of Saint Joseph. A statue of the saint now blocks the window from the inside, although it is still visible from the outside. Saint Joseph, incidentally, is the patron saint of a peaceful death. The room has never been occupied since, although it is now used as a waiting room for the History department. Visitors are politely--but firmly--urged not to bring mirrors into the room.

The vaulted path to the cemetery of St Patrick's, Maynooth. Sean O'Grady and Thomas McGinn were laid to rest in the cemetery after their deaths by suicide.

William Murphy from Dublin, Ireland / CC BY-SA

There has been sporadic interest in room 2 since the events of the mid-19th-century. It was once visited by Hans Holzer--a paranormal researcher and author--and his wife, who reported psychically detecting an oppressive presence and the suggestion of a "four-legged" demonic entity that inhabits the room. That is interesting, but perhaps the claims made by psychic researchers--whose job is to "feel" unseen presences--should be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps the room is a hotspot of so-called "infra-sound", a phenomenon of low-frequency sounds which are believed to induce feelings of dread in some people and may go some way towards explaining paranormal experiences. Or perhaps there was nothing more mysterious at work than the "ripple effect" of suicide, where the decision of one individual to take their own life influences another to do the same.

There are problems with both of these too, however; 19 years is a long time for the ripple effect to have any real impact, and infra-sound--though fascinating--has not yet been consistently demonstrated to explain hauntings. In the cases of O'Grady and McGinn, there will be no definitive answers and only speculation remains. The two seminarians are buried in the cemetery of St Patrick's, Maynooth. Their graves are marked. As suicides, who committed a grievous sin in the eyes of the church, their final resting places remain unconsecrated.

The Sinking of HMS Wasp

2020-04-18T21:42:00.000+01:00

A Royal Navy vessel sinks in calm weather along the Irish coast with the loss of most of the crew, along a route it had travelled many times before.

HMS Wasp, pictured in 1880.

Unknown, HMS Wasp (1880), marked as public domain

On September 21st, 1884, HMS Wasp set out from the harbour in Westport, County Mayo, on Ireland’s western coast. It was bound for Inishtrahull island, the most northerly of the many small islands that flank the country’s Atlantic seaboard. The Royal Navy gunboat had sailed the route many times in its short career as a commissioned ship of the line. Most of the journeys it had undertaken since 1881 had been relief missions to the islands, and it had even visited Inishtrahull in 1883 to deliver much needed seed potatoes for the island’s struggling inhabitants.

Wasp’s mission in September 1884 was not a humanitarian one, however. Her orders were to proceed north from Westport and dock at Moville, on the shores of Lough Swilly in Donegal. There, she was to pick up a number of bailiffs. HMS Wasp was then to sail on to Inishtrahull, directly north of Lough Swilly. The bailiffs would then do their job—in this case, evict a number of islanders who were in arrears on their rent. It seems that, even though the people who lived on Inishtrahull were going through hard times in the 1880s, the patience of their distant landlord had finally worn thin.

HMS Wasp would not make it to Inishtrahull. In fact, she would not even make it to Moville. In calm weather, on a route that the crew of the vessel were very accustomed to, she would wreck off the coast of Tory island within 24 hours of departing from Westport and sink with the loss of all but six crew members. And despite a Royal Navy inquest ruling that the wreck had been accidental and there was no indication of either foul play or incompetence on the part of the crew, there were many who believed that the sinking of HMS Wasp was no accident. In their opinion, the ship had been placed under a curse and was doomed from the start.

The latter half of the 19th-century was a politically tumultuous period in Ireland. The Great Famine of the 1840s had decimated the country’s population through starvation and emigration, and left a legacy of anti-British feeling which—arguably—persists to the modern day. To make a bad situation worse for the tenant farmers who made up the majority of the country’s population, rents for small hold farms were exorbitant and there was little protection from eviction. Ireland’s landlord class—part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant elite—were often absentee landlords who used excessive rents to finance their expensive lives in England.

Against such a backdrop, it is unsurprising that the period from the 1860s to the early 1900s is often known in Irish history as the Land Wars, with the 1880s being a particularly restless decade. In response to the heavy-handed evictions of tenant framers carried out by the police (the RIC) on behalf of the landlords, grassroot political pressure groups such as the Land League emerged to pursue tenants’ rights. The Land League helped to organise non-violent resistance to evictions, including massive non-payment of rents and boycotting—the process by which anybody who interacted with an evicting landlord or their agents was ostracised both socially and economically. Such tactics worked well, especially in a rural environment where isolation often posed a real threat to survival.

But there were others at the time who had no qualms about pursuing less peaceful means of advancing the cause of tenant farmers. Agrarian secret societies had begun to spring up in the previous century, but throughout the 1800s they flourished. Groups such as the Defenders organised nightly raids on landlords and their cronies in remote rural areas. These rural groups were encouraged, infiltrated and sometimes taken over completely by the Fenians, the forerunners of republican paramilitaries of more modern times. The Fenians wanted a complete break with Britain, and viewed the Land Wars as the perfect opportunity to promote that agenda.

James Stephens was a founding member of the Fenian movement. The group advocated violent resistance to British rule in Ireland, and provided future revolutionaries and paramilitaries with a template.

Unknown, James Stephens Fenian, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

It was in this political climate that HMS Wasp set sail from Westport, bound for Inishtrahull. The inhabitants of the island were in serious arrears in 1884, but they could hardly be blamed. Making a living off the land on the barren islands strewn along Ireland’s coasts was hard enough, but the sea often offered little in the way of prosperity either. The people on the much larger Tory island knew this too. But Tory also had a large Fenian contingent among the population, including the elected king of the island—a man called Heggarty—who was intent on resisting any evictions that might be attempted to redress the £2000 debt claimed by their landlord. Word had mistakenly reached Tory island that HMS Wasp was on its way to unload bailiffs to carry out evictions there, and Heggarty was not about to let that happen.

Since the defeat of the first Irish republican movement, the United Irishmen, in 1798, strategists for the various groups that urged a violent break with Britain began to focus less on open battlefield warfare and more on insurgency tactics. The Fenians—despite attempting an open rebellion in the 1860s—also largely adopted this strategy. The Fenians were the first Irish group to plant bombs in England, for instance, and one of their more daring plans even included taking Canada hostage in order to force a British withdrawal from Ireland. But king Heggarty of Tory island knew that armed resistance to an eviction attempt would be fatal for all of the Fenians on the island, and most likely for any known collaborators too. How then could the people of Tory protect themselves from HMS Wasp, presumably on its way to dispossess them? For Heggarty, there was a secret weapon that hadn’t yet been used: the island’s ancient cursing stones.

Cursing stones are a well-known pre-Christian relic in Ireland and the rest of Europe. Sometimes known as godstones or bullauns, they usually come in the form of rocks placed in bowl-like recesses in bigger boulders. They are believed to have offered prehistoric communities a sense of security—that they had some supernatural means of fending off attacks from outsiders. The long process of Christianization in Europe succeeded in removing the cursing stones themselves from most recesses, while blessed water was left in their place in order to retain the sites’ sacred aspect.

On Tory island, however, not only one but two cursing stone sites had survived up to 1884. One was simply called the Cursing Stone and was situated at the north of the island. The other was located at a site referred to as the Church of the Seven—where local legend has it that the bodies of six men and one woman were interred after a shipwreck. (When locals stopped by the grave the following day, they were shocked to discover the corpse of the woman lying in the open again; they took this to mean that none of the male sailors was her husband, and reburied her elsewhere.)

Saint Brigid’s stones, from Blacklion in County Cavan, Ireland. The stones can be used either for cursing or for blessing.

Anonymous, St Brigid's stone, Blacklion Co. Cavan. Wellcome M0006003, CC BY 4.0

St Brigid's stone, Blacklion Co. Cavan

Nobody knows which one of these stones Heggarty and a band of his followers made their way to on either the 21st or 22nd of September, 1884, nor what specific curse was uttered. It seems likely that, as the elected king of the island, it would have fallen to Heggarty himself to do the honours. It is also reasonable to assume that at least some of the rituals surrounding the cursing stones were known to some of the islanders present at the time. This was a serious thing, after all; the cursing stones were treated with respect and fear by the islanders, and their use in this fashion was unprecedented.

But we do know that a curse was places, and it was a huge risk for Heggarty. If his curse didn’t work, most of the islanders would (he believed) be evicted; if it succeeded, he would have used pagan magic to harm or kill Christian sailors and bailiffs—many of whom were his own countrymen. For a leader of poor, tenant farmers who were also devout Catholics, these were high stakes indeed.

HMS Wasp, in the meantime, had been making her way steadily up Ireland’s western coast, and her commanding officer had made a couple of decisions which the later naval inquest would highlight as odd, if not entirely unheard of. The first of these was that the ship was moving entirely under sail, even though it was capable of being steamed. There is no way of knowing why this decision was taken. Perhaps the weather was calm, although a combination of steam and sail was still the safest way to navigate the wild Atlantic coast. Whatever the reason, the boiler of HMS Wasp was inactive that evening. The second, more curious decision is that the senior crew of the gunboat had apparently decided to retire to bed soon after dinner was served, leaving sole command of the vessel to junior crewmen.

It was probably this unusual turn of events which would prove fatal for HMS Wasp. Although the route was a well-known one for the Royal Navy in general, younger and less experienced personnel may not have been aware that the best course to take around Tory island was via the Atlantic ocean to the west, giving the island itself a wide berth. Instead, they steered a course between the island and the mainland. This strait of water contains a vast array of barely concealed, narrow rocks lurking beneath the surface of the waves. At about 3.55 AM, one of these collided with the hull and Wasp started to take on water rapidly. It took about 15 minutes for the ship to sink, with the loss of 52 members of the crew. The senior officers drowned in their bunks.

Six survivors managed to escape by climbing the rigging of the ship, then struggling through the choppy waters to the shore of Tory island. They were soon found by some of the islanders, who gave them shelter for the four days that it took for HMS Valiant to reach the island and retrieve them.

An aerial view of Tory island.

Towel401, Tory Island 3, CC BY-SA 4.0

It must have been a strange, tense few days on Tory island after the sinking of HMS Wasp. For all the islanders knew, the people that they had rescued had been sent to evict them. From a modern perspective, it is fascinating to speculate as to what conversations were held between the locals and the surviving crew members. Did the sailors set the record straight, informing the islanders that their destination had been the island of Inishtrahull all along? Did anyone let slip the fact that an ancient cursing ritual had been enacted, directed at HMS Wasp and her crew? It could be argued that, even if it had, the more rationally-minded among both the islanders and surviving crew would have dismissed it as a coincidence. But if it was a coincidence, it was an extraordinary one.

We do know that Heggarty boasted about wrecking HMS Wasp, even while the remaining crew were still present on the island. News of this soon reached the only person on Tory who could rival the king in terms of local power: the parish priest. Father O’Donnell was sympathetic to the Fenian philosophy, and supported those on the island who had refused to pay their rents. He believed that the system was unjust and the poor had a right to non-violent protest. But he drew the line at pagan cursing rituals. It is said that once he heard of Heggarty’s curse, he immediately cast the stones into the sea. They were never seen again.

The Royal Navy or the bailiffs of the RIC probably never gave any credence to stories of cursing stones. A later inquest into the sinking concluded that there was nobody to blame for the incident, and the case was closed. HMS Wasp was later salvaged, and sold for scrap. In the end, no evictions took place either on Tory island or Inishtrahull. Who knows, perhaps Heggarty’s curse worked after all?

The Case of Michael Faherty

2020-04-11T18:36:00.000+01:00

A house fire in Galway leads to one of the strangest coronary verdicts in Irish history.

Above: Galway City, where Michael Faherty died in 2010.
Gerd Eichmann, Galway-14-Fussgaengerzone-2017-gje, CC BY-SA 4.0

It is 3 AM on 22 December, 2010, in Ballybane, Galway city. It is late, and with Christmas just three days away, peacefully quiet in the suburban housing estate of Clareview Park. In the house of Tom Mannion this silence is suddenly broken by the sound of his fire alarm. He quickly checks his house, but can find no apparent cause. Suspecting a false alarm, Tom decides that he will take a quick look outside, just in case. As he opens the door he is confronted by the sight of heavy smoke coming from number 64, home to his elderly neighbour Michael Faherty.

Mannion pounds heavily on the door. This succeeds in waking more residents in the estate, but there is still no sign of Faherty. The Galway fire brigade and Gardai are soon at the scene and, wasting no time, they quickly break down the front door and enter. Although the emergency services have no way of knowing it at the time, what they are about to encounter inside will baffle investigators and lead to one of the strangest rulings on a cause of death ever recorded.

Less than a year after the fire in Ballybane, an inquest into the death of Michael Faherty will be held in Galway. The verdict reached that day will go on to make headlines in Ireland and abroad and will set a unique legal precedent. The inquest will rule that Michael Faherty, 76, died as a result of spontaneous human combustion.

Spontaneous human combustion has been a source of fascination and exasperation in equal measures for some time. There are those who believe that it is just what its name suggests—spontaneous and inexplicable, and there are the many doubters who prefer rational explanations. Some of the more basic of these include high levels of alcohol in victims’ bloodstreams, lack of care with cigarettes and associated objects, and simple proximity to open fireplaces and other hazards. Ardent detractors will routinely argue that a combination of all three of these are to blame for all historical cases of spontaneous human combustion. More fanciful theories involve the suspected build-up of flammable gas in the intestines and “lightning balls”. And of course there is the much vaunted “wick effect”, whereby a flame will, somehow, cause subcutaneous human fat to burn like a candle for hours.

Although spontaneous human combustion is not a new phenomenon, it is not a widely recognised one either. This is especially true when it comes to cause-of-death rulings. The Galway case was unique in Ireland for two reasons; not only was it the first time that a death was attributed to spontaneous human combustion, it was also the first time there was a suspected case of the phenomenon in the country at all. Such a historic lack of cases either points to a serious level of under-reporting, or the much more likely explanation that it simply hadn’t happened in Ireland—in modern times at least—before 2010.

In contrast, the neighbouring island of Britain has no shortage of suspected spontaneous
human combustion cases. Interest in the subject probably peaked during the Victorian era, when individuals involved with the temperance movement were keen to stress the prevalence of alcohol as a presumed aggravating factor. Even Charles Dickens suggested this: there is a character in Bleak House who meets a fiery end as a result of his excessive drinking. But recorded cases continued through the 20th-century right up to the present.

Mary Reeser died of suspected spontaneous human combustion in Florida, 1951, in very similar circumstances to Faherty. The FBI attributed the cause of death to the wick effect. She is one of the most frequently cited cases of the phenomenon.

marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

And yet, despite the fact that there have been several coroners’ inquests in Britain where spontaneous human combustion has been suggested as a factor in otherwise unexplained deaths, there has been a reluctance to attribute any of them to the phenomenon in final rulings. What has stopped inquests from doing so, and thus stopped the inclusion of the anomaly in British legal precedent, is the fact that accelerants are almost always present. They may be there in obvious forms such as petrol and lighter fluid, but some types of clothing are also classed as accelerants. The combination of accelerants and misadventure has therefore been deemed the most likely explanation of suspected cases in the UK and, as nobody has ever reported actually seeing somebody abruptly burst into flames, the idea of spontaneous human combustion is considered fringe theory at best. Ireland—with a legal system inherited from centuries of British rule, and no cases of its own to consider anyway—duly followed suit. But that was all to change in September 2011.

As the first emergency responders to enter the house of Michael Faherty in the early hours of December 22nd, 2010, the fire brigade were called upon to give their deposition to the inquest into his death first. The representative of the Galway brigade at the proceedings was assistant chief fire officer Gerry O’Malley. When O’Malley had told the coroner what he’d encountered in the sitting room of number 64 Clareview Park, he was asked if he had ever come across such a scene in the course of his duties before. ‘I can’t say that I have’, was his reply. Next, Garda Gerard O’Callaghan gave his account of the scene, and the same question was put to him. ‘Garda, have you ever seen anything like this?’ O’Callaghan considered the question briefly, and then said, simply, ‘no’.

An Irish Garda (police) car. Members of the emergency services were shocked by the details of the case, with many claiming never to have experienced anything like it before.
Max 997, Garda and police car, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

One person who might reasonably have expected to have seen something similar in his career was the man in charge of proceedings himself, Dr Kieran McLoughlin. For 25 years a coroner of Galway west—a district that comprises not just the city but also the seaboarding region of Connemara—McLoughlin had come across all manner of strange and grisly deaths in his time, and more than his fair share of cases where fire was involved. But the evidence that was put to him that day from the fire brigade, Gardai, Michael Faherty’s neighbours, and pathologist Grace Callagy was leading him towards a very unusual conclusion.

The details of the case as presented to Dr McLoughlin on that day were as follows. Michael Faherty was discovered lying on his back in the sitting room, his head directly in front of an open fireplace. He was declared dead at the scene, as most of his body had been completely cremated. His organs were too badly damaged for examination. Despite his proximity to the fireplace, and the fact that a fire was indeed burning in the grate, the fire brigade were confident that this was not the source of the blaze that had killed him. There were no accelerants found at the scene and Gardai were certain that nobody had broken into number 64, and had ruled out foul play. But it was Garda O’Callaghan who had the strangest piece of testimony to deliver. Despite the fire burning so intensely that it put Michael Faherty’s body beyond the reach of any meaningful post-mortem examination, the damage to the inside of the house was limited to the areas directly above and below the area where he was found. Nothing else had gone up in flames that night—not curtains, furniture, flooring, nothing. Only Mr Faherty himself had burned in the fire—well, Faherty and his clothes, that is.

Having considered all the evidence presented to him that day, the coroner delivered what will certainly be the strangest cause of death verdict in his long career. In closing the proceedings, Dr McLoughlin told the inquest that, all things considered, he was ‘left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation’.

When people hear of bizarre deaths and accidents they often resort to a defence mechanism that is flawed, but uniquely human. In psychology, it is known as the fundamental attribution error. It involves the brief consideration of the circumstances of somebody else’s misfortune, and then the rapid conclusion that they must have done something wrong or made some basic mistake. In short, they earned their misfortune in some way. The fundamental attribution error is important for our species; it allows an individual to observe what has happened in the past and conclude that, where others have failed and perhaps died, they will succeed. Without this counter-factual way of thinking we would never have crossed oceans, or captured wild animals to domesticate, or learned how to harness the power of electricity.

But sometimes this characteristic only serves to cast the victim of extreme circumstances in a negative light that is undeserved. Speculation that historical cases of spontaneous human combustion are caused by carelessness with lighters and cigarettes tends to ignore the fact that millions of people are careless with such items every day, and few burn to death. When Victorian commentators emphasized the supposed connection to alcohol, they were making a statement about the moral character of the victims. Their heirs continue to assert this unproven link today. Yet while Michael Faherty was probably no stranger to drink he was certainly no souse, and even if he had been he would hardly have been alone. It’s never been explained why alcohol would cause some people to burn to death in private, while almost everybody else can drink as much as they like in public and never have to worry about suddenly bursting into flames.

Although the circumstances of his death may be debated in the future, for the time being the case of Michael Faherty is settled—legally speaking at least. And while Ireland’s first official case of spontaneous human combustion raised a few eyebrows almost everywhere it was reported, it is worth remembering that he was a person, with people who knew and cared for him. Asked on the day of the inquest if she was satisfied with the finding, his grown daughter Mairin Faherty told reporters that she was. She paused briefly before adding, quietly, ‘although it doesn’t really help me much’.