Bloody Ireland: The Castle of 24 Ghosts
By my heritage, I am 100% Irish mutt, meaning I am anything but 100% Irish, but that part of my lineage is the only one I generally acknowledge, for it is the only one I feel in my veins. Ah, Ireland. I have always been able to count on the little island for many pleasant images in my head: the picturesque beauty of the countryside, quaint villages with small winding streets, aging castles and keeps overlooking the gray sky and the even grayer sea…
It is these very castles that make Ireland all the more intriguing to me, as their histories and haunts provide such ample fireside fodder for the weaving of tales, and that, along with my Irish blood, is the stuff that I am made of.
So we begin our tale this evening in County Offaly, not so far from the town of Roscrea in the central part of Ireland. Here stands Leap Castle (Leim-ui-Bhanain in Gaelic, meaning “Leap of the O’Bannon’s”), erected in the mid-thirteenth century on a hill overlooking a pass through the Slieve Bloom Mountains. Leap Castle is widely said to be the most spirit-infested castle in all of Ireland, and with its bloody past, it’s no wonder why. At that time, the area was under the rule of the O’Carroll Clan, and the O’Bannon’s ruled as sort of seconday chieftans. The O’Carroll’s eventually took control of the castle, and that was the point in time when the blood began to spill on its ground. There are a number of stories of violence and torture surrounding the castle. One tells of the O’Carroll Cheiftan inviting some of the clan to dinner at the castle only to slaughter them all at the table. Another tells of two O’Carroll brothers, in a mad struggle over the rule of the family. One brother, a priest, was giving a sermon in the chapel when the other burst in and ran him through with a sword, killing him on the altar. The chapel, now called “The Bloody Chapel,” is said to be haunted by the priest, and many visitors have reported seeing apparitions and even being assaulted while in the chapel.The castle remained in the hands of the O’Carrolls well into the 17th Century, when it is told that an O’Carroll daughter helped a British prisoner escape from the dungeons there and later married him. Through this marriage, the prisoner’s family, known as the Darby’s, eventually inherited the castle. Generations later, Charles and Mildred Darby moved into the family castle, and it is said that Mildred, a dabbler in the dark arts, is responsible for summoning the hunchbacked creature that still terrorizes the castle to this day. The creature is said to be an elemental, which, for those of you unfamiliar with that term, is believed to be a spirit of alchemy that is attuned with one of the elements of nature: earth, air, fire or water. People who catch a glimpse of this creature often report smelling rot and sulfur at that same moment. Mildred herself described it as being about the size of a sheep, and smelling of decomposing corpses.
A depiction of an Earth Elemental
The castle’s history took another nasty turn in 1922 when it was burned by the IRA during the Irish Civil War. During reconstruction, workers located a shaft with spikes at the bottom of it. This kind of dungeon is called an “oubliette,” which comes from the French word “oublier” which means “to forget”. Prisoners were tossed down the shaft and onto the spikes and then were “forgotten,” or left to die. If they were lucky, the spikes got them; if not, starvation or slow death from their wounds was their fate. It took three cart loads to remove all of the human bones that were uncovered in this oubliette. Three cart loads. Enough said.
A view down the oubliette
The number of people who wrongfully lost their lives at Leap Castle remains a mystery, though the castle is said to house some twenty-four spirits, ranging from the harmless to the malevolent. It is also said that the castle lies on a powerful ley line. Some believe the castle is one of three that make up a triangle of ley lines in the Earth. Charleville Castle and Kinnitty Castle are the other two of this triangle, and they are both purported to be mightily haunted as well.
Leap Castle was purchased in 1991 by Sean Ryan and has undergone massive restoration under his care. Though he will not deny that there have been some odd occurrences at the castle since he and his family purchased it, Ryan believes his family has found a way to peacefully coexist with the spirits.
In 2002, the British television show Most Haunted spent an evening in the castle, and the folks from the American television show Ghost Hunters did the same in 2006. I will leave you, then, with a clip of the findings presented by the T.A.P.S. team from their 2006 investigation, and allow you to draw your own conclusions.
Yours in this life and the next!
GhOsTwRiTeR KiM
Tags: castle, County Offaly, elementals, ghost hunters, ghosts, Ireland, Leap Castle, most haunted, paranormal