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When we began our journey to Ireland, I chose to stay at Carraigin (as it is listed on VRBO) Castle because it was beautiful and had plenty of space for my family to spread out into.  I would be lying if I wasn’t also beguiled by the idea of Tina, the woman who brings full Irish breakfasts and dinners to the castle at our request.  I dug through the internet and found no records of any tragedies occurring at this castle and there were no ghost stories that I could find.  This didn’t bother me much since I knew I would find other stories to occupy my time.

Yesterday, I met David.  David is an Irish Fisherman who knows the waters of Lough Corrib as well as I know my own office.  I wasn’t particularly looking forward to his tour of Lough Corrib (The lake the castle sits on) because I don’t care for fishing.  I was pulled out onto the water against my will.  I was really looking forward to Tina and her dinner and had no interest in any activity that took me away from it.  David was wonderful, however.  As he took us out onto the water he told us the history of Corrib.  He showed us islands with stone rings (Dolmen) dating back thousands of years before Christ.  He told us myths and legends and old stories about the Lough and its people.  He told us fairy tales and ghost stories and history.  I could hardly keep up with it all.  Finally,  I gave up and just listened and looked and decided I would ask him to come back and take a notebook next time.

What I do remember clearly, was his telling of the history and ghosts of Cargin Castle.  He even pointed us to a small, self published book in the library of Cargin Castle where I could find its history written.  The book he guided me to was called “A Beauty Most Rare” and its history seemed to contradict much of the history I found online about the castle.  First, according to online sources the castle was just a manor house of no military significance.  According to Michael Carol, Castle Cargin was built by “the Norman DeBurgos in the late 13th century.  It was a strategic fortress, along with Annaghkeen Castle in defendint the Manor of Headford from incursions across Lough Corrib (or Lough Orbsen as it was then known) by the dispossessed O’Flaherty clan.”  The castle was of military and strategic use and was more than a country house.  Carol sites Oscar Wilde’s father’s histories of the region (William Wilde) in his bibliography as well Christopher Murphy.    According to Carol, De Burgo installed another Norman family, the Gaynards, as tenants of the castle and woods in Cargin and Clydagh.  In this turbulent period of Irish history, raids and counter-raids to and fro across the lake made life at the castle and in the area a turbulent one.  The Gaynard family which was considered an Old English family was tossed out of the castle by Cromwell supporters  in the 1650s and the house was passed to the New English Staunton family.  The Stauntons stripped the castle of stone and abadoned it.  They used the stone to build a Georgian Manor house and the castle was left to decay.   In the 1970’s the castle was restored to what it is today.

The book told several stories associated with the castle and I will retell two of them.  One came from Thomas Egan:

“The Normans who lived in Cargin Castle were very friendly with those of Annaghkeen who were bitter enemies of the soldiers of Cong.

One day a small band of Cong soldiers came to Annaghkeen and seeing a man working in a field, they cut off his hands and legs and killed him.

When the soldiers in Annaghkeen Castle heard of this outrage, they sough help from the soldiers in Cargin and together marched to Cong.  A great battle was fought on the plain of Maigh Tuireadh in which many men from both sides were killed.

Neither of the parties were satisfied and they fought another more bloody battle a few hundred yards from Cargin Castle beside Lough Corrib.  The Cargin and Annaghkeen soldiers were victorious although very few of either army returned home.

At the place where that terrible battle took place there is a small hill, supposed to have been formed by the heap of slain soldiers who were buried there.  The hill is now covered by the trees of the Clydagh Woods.”

I will save the second tale of bloodshed from Cargin Castle for the second part of this post.  There is too much for one blog post.    But I will end today’s post with the name of the ghost David said haunts the castle.  He calls her Elizabeth and I think we have had a few run ins with her since we have been here.  She kept my oldest son up quite a bit one night and she had fun with us and the light switches on another night.

If you would like to stay at the castle, you can find it on VRBO.

Reposted from Ghost Stories and Haunted Places | Go to Original Post

When we began our journey to Ireland, I chose to stay at Carraigin (as it is listed on VRBO) Castle because it was beautiful and had plenty of space for my family to spread out into.  I would be lying if I wasn’t also beguiled by the idea of Tina, the woman who brings full Irish breakfasts and dinners to the castle at our request.  I dug through the internet and found no records of any tragedies occurring at this castle and there were no ghost stories that I could find.  This didn’t bother me much since I knew I would find other stories to occupy my time.

Yesterday, I met David.  David is an Irish Fisherman who knows the waters of Lough Corrib as well as I know my own office.  I wasn’t particularly looking forward to his tour of Lough Corrib (The lake the castle sits on) because I don’t care for fishing.  I was pulled out onto the water against my will.  I was really looking forward to Tina and her dinner and had no interest in any activity that took me away from it.  David was wonderful, however.  As he took us out onto the water he told us the history of Corrib.  He showed us islands with stone rings (Dolmen) dating back thousands of years before Christ.  He told us myths and legends and old stories about the Lough and its people.  He told us fairy tales and ghost stories and history.  I could hardly keep up with it all.  Finally,  I gave up and just listened and looked and decided I would ask him to come back and take a notebook next time.

What I do remember clearly, was his telling of the history and ghosts of Cargin Castle.  He even pointed us to a small, self published book in the library of Cargin Castle where I could find its history written.  The book he guided me to was called “A Beauty Most Rare” and its history seemed to contradict much of the history I found online about the castle.  First, according to online sources the castle was just a manor house of no military significance.  According to Michael Carol, Castle Cargin was built by “the Norman DeBurgos in the late 13th century.  It was a strategic fortress, along with Annaghkeen Castle in defendint the Manor of Headford from incursions across Lough Corrib (or Lough Orbsen as it was then known) by the dispossessed O’Flaherty clan.”  The castle was of military and strategic use and was more than a country house.  Carol sites Oscar Wilde’s father’s histories of the region (William Wilde) in his bibliography as well Christopher Murphy.    According to Carol, De Burgo installed another Norman family, the Gaynards, as tenants of the castle and woods in Cargin and Clydagh.  In this turbulent period of Irish history, raids and counter-raids to and fro across the lake made life at the castle and in the area a turbulent one.  The Gaynard family which was considered an Old English family was tossed out of the castle by Cromwell supporters  in the 1650s and the house was passed to the New English Staunton family.  The Stauntons stripped the castle of stone and abadoned it.  They used the stone to build a Georgian Manor house and the castle was left to decay.   In the 1970’s the castle was restored to what it is today.

The book told several stories associated with the castle and I will retell two of them.  One came from Thomas Egan:

“The Normans who lived in Cargin Castle were very friendly with those of Annaghkeen who were bitter enemies of the soldiers of Cong.

One day a small band of Cong soldiers came to Annaghkeen and seeing a man working in a field, they cut off his hands and legs and killed him.

When the soldiers in Annaghkeen Castle heard of this outrage, they sough help from the soldiers in Cargin and together marched to Cong.  A great battle was fought on the plain of Maigh Tuireadh in which many men from both sides were killed.

Neither of the parties were satisfied and they fought another more bloody battle a few hundred yards from Cargin Castle beside Lough Corrib.  The Cargin and Annaghkeen soldiers were victorious although very few of either army returned home.

At the place where that terrible battle took place there is a small hill, supposed to have been formed by the heap of slain soldiers who were buried there.  The hill is now covered by the trees of the Clydagh Woods.”

I will save the second tale of bloodshed from Cargin Castle for the second part of this post.  There is too much for one blog post.    But I will end today’s post with the name of the ghost David said haunts the castle.  He calls her Elizabeth and I think we have had a few run ins with her since we have been here.  She kept my oldest son up quite a bit one night and she had fun with us and the light switches on another night.

If you would like to stay at the castle, you can find it on VRBO.

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Somewhere between Headford and Tuam in County Galway, Ireland on a lonely road lives the remains of Castle Hackett.  There isn’t much left of this castle.  It has been mostly reclaimed by the earth.  Ivy covers its stone walls and you have to pass through an archway of ivy to enter the castle. In many of the photos I took of the location, it is hard to tell if I was taking pictures of the woods or a castle.  Once you walk up a small, winding staircase you emerge onto what was once the second story of this once formidable tower house.  The second story feels as much like a quiet glen as a castle.  Trees have taken root in the stone and dirt and moss cover the floor.  Bits of the castle peak through the branches of trees, flowers and Ivy.  There is nothing left of the third and fourth floors.  You can look up and see the remains of fireplaces, but time has reclaimed all else.  Castle Hackett looks more like a fairy fortress now than a human one and that is appropriate as the castle is steeped in old fairy legends.

According to Irish legend,  the hill of Knockma that stands behind Castle Hackett is the home of the Sidhe and the fairy King Finvarra.  The fairy city  is built somewhere in the hill of Knockma.   In the 17th century the Kirwan family built Castle Hackett by the doorway to the fairy kingdom and haunting stories have been part of the stones of the castle ever since.  One morning a Kirwan lord described meeting a dark rider on a steed made of fire on his morning ride.  The man gave the Kirwan Lord answers to all his questions and helped him bet on the races.  Luck always followed the Kirwan family after this which was usually attributed to the fairy magic.   They prospered and their horses never lost in the races.  Sadly, in 1912 Colonel Denis Kirwin Bernard inherited the Castle Hackett estate and the castle was burnt in Irish Civil war.  The Colonel was a very unpopular man due to his stance in the civil war and although he was buried on Knockma Hill his grave was desecrated by locals.

Castle Hackett is said to be haunted still by the fairy king and all his subjects.  Local lore says that he kidnaps young women and carries them away to be his lovers.   Anyone who has visited Castle Hackett could believe this to be true as the castle is as close to a fairy kingdom as I have ever seen.

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 The Hellfire Club was a club of young, wealthy gentleman that came together in the early 18th century to rebel against traditional Christian ideology.   They were largely a product of the humanist movement and the Irish called the blasters, short for blasphemy.    The actual hunting lodge that is commonly called The Hellfire Club is considered to be one of the most haunted places in Ireland by some and was a meeting place for the blasters off and on.

 

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Ireland is known for its haunted castles and creepy locations.  The countryside there crawls with legends and folklore and tales of dark spirits.  We leave for Ireland next week and I can’t wait to explore as many of Ireland’s haunted nooks and crannies as possible.

Every expedition requires a base camp.  And although the primary goal of our journey is to see Leap Castle and all the most notorious haunted, castles of Ireland, we chose our primary residence with care.  We will be staying at Carraigin Castle in Galway for our two week journey to Ireland.  Carraigin Castle is perfect for us.  It is beautiful and has an amazing view.  It is comfortable and is large enough for our little family to be spread out in and it has a little bit of dark history to keep us up at night.

For ten generations Castle Carraigin was home to family and descendants of Adam Gaynard III.   The castle dates back to 1238 and was never intended to be a fortress or a protective structure.  It was a family home.  It was owned by the Gaynard family and the Staunton family.  The castle had a bit of a dark history when it was burned down by the IRA in 1922 ( http://www.ciaranmchugh.com/?pagid=carraigin-graveyard) and local folklore says that there is a tunnel that connects the castle to the neighboring cemetery.  The castle was restored in 1970 and is now available to rent on VRBO, which is where we found it.

We leave next week and I will be posting videos and photographs from all the wonderful places we will be going and there will certainly be many stories from Carraigin Castle. 

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My office manager is a wealth of ghost stories.  Her brother used to live in the haunted South Pittsburg Hospital and her family has been haunted by one specter or another for many years.  Today she told me a tale of a family that lived in a home in Faulkville, Alabama.  They lived in a home in the country near an old civil war site.

This family had a daughter who used to love playing with her imaginary friends.   Her imaginary friends names were Scott and Lotion.  Scott was a little girl and Lotion was a little, purple boy.  They played all day for over a year and the family thought nothing of it.  The names were silly and the idea of a purple boy made the two friends seem even more fictitious. Imaginary friends are a healthy and normal part of any child’s development.  So the little girl played with her friends and no one really cared.

It wasn’t until the family found an old cemetery on the site that anyone realized the significance of the girl’s friends.  They found tombstones from the 1850s and the tombstones were labeled Lucien Scott and Donna Scott.  Both tombstones were for children who had died before they turned ten. Lucien had smothered to death and Donna liked to go by her last name.  She was a bit of a tom boy.   So Lucien was purple because he had died of asphyxiation and Scott was a girl because that was her last name.  The imaginary friends finally made sense.

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The Catacombs of Paris have always been a source of endless fascination for me.    The catacombs are a series of labrynthian tunnels that burrow beneath the city of Paris.   The walls of these tunnels, or this ossuary, are covered in the bones of Paris’s dead.  Opened in the late 18th century, the underground cemetery became a tourist attraction on a small scale from the early 19th century, and has been open to the public on a regular basis from 1867.

The history of the catacombs starts with the booming population of Paris.  As more and more people flooded this populous city, there began to be serious problems with overcrowding cementeries.  Around the 12th century, this problem became more than serious.  The wealthy could still afford expensive cementery plots, but the bodies of the poor were flooding the streets.   As solution to this,  Saints-Innocents cementery was created for the poor.  The poor were buried here in less regal style that usually involved being dumped in a sack into a mass grave.   This solution worked for a while and other mass burial plots for the poor were established.

However, by the 17th century even the mass graves of Saints-Innocents were overflowing and the sanitary conditions around these poor cementeries was becoming intolerable, even by 17th century standards.  The bones of the older dead were exhumed and laid in piles to make room for fresh corpses.  So that the cementery was laden with the unburied remains of the dead.    Luckily, the government was also looking for a solution to dealing with a series of abadoned quary mines beneath the city.   The solutions to the two problems came in the form of the l’Ossuaire Municipal, the official name for the catacombs.  

Alexandre Lenoir first had the idea to use empty underground tunnels to the outskirts of the capital to use as the ossuary. His successor, Thiroux de Crosne, chose a place and the exhumation and transfer of all Paris’ dead to the underground sepulture began in 1786.  At first the catacombs were merely a place to place the bones of the dead.  It wasn’t until Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury assumed responsibility for the ossuary that it became a work of art.   He rearranged the skulls and bones to create symbolism within the tunnel and also added old cementery decorations to the underground mortuary to turn it into what you see within the catacombs today.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on youtube today viewing videos of ghosts visitors of the catacombs have caught on tape. The list is more than lengthy and several people have caught honestly scary images of the spirits of the dead on tape in the catacombs. The stories of ghosts here are more than prolific.  The place is considered to be one of the most haunted places in the world and according to http://www.hauntedamericatours.com/FRANCE.php  the most haunted place in France.   To learn more about the catacombs or to find out how to visit them  go to http://www.catacombes-de-paris.fr/english.htm.

Reposted from Ghost Stories and Haunted Places | Go to Original Post

The Catacombs of Paris have always been a source of endless fascination for me.    The catacombs are a series of labrynthian tunnels that burrow beneath the city of Paris.   The walls of these tunnels, or this ossuary, are covered in the bones of Paris’s dead.  Opened in the late 18th century, the underground cemetery became a tourist attraction on a small scale from the early 19th century, and has been open to the public on a regular basis from 1867.

The history of the catacombs starts with the booming population of Paris.  As more and more people flooded this populous city, there began to be serious problems with overcrowding cementeries.  Around the 12th century, this problem became more than serious.  The wealthy could still afford expensive cementery plots, but the bodies of the poor were flooding the streets.   As solution to this,  Saints-Innocents cementery was created for the poor.  The poor were buried here in less regal style that usually involved being dumped in a sack into a mass grave.   This solution worked for a while and other mass burial plots for the poor were established.

However, by the 17th century even the mass graves of Saints-Innocents were overflowing and the sanitary conditions around these poor cementeries was becoming intolerable, even by 17th century standards.  The bones of the older dead were exhumed and laid in piles to make room for fresh corpses.  So that the cementery was laden with the unburied remains of the dead.    Luckily, the government was also looking for a solution to dealing with a series of abadoned quary mines beneath the city.   The solutions to the two problems came in the form of the l’Ossuaire Municipal, the official name for the catacombs.  

Alexandre Lenoir first had the idea to use empty underground tunnels to the outskirts of the capital to use as the ossuary. His successor, Thiroux de Crosne, chose a place and the exhumation and transfer of all Paris’ dead to the underground sepulture began in 1786.  At first the catacombs were merely a place to place the bones of the dead.  It wasn’t until Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury assumed responsibility for the ossuary that it became a work of art.   He rearranged the skulls and bones to create symbolism within the tunnel and also added old cementery decorations to the underground mortuary to turn it into what you see within the catacombs today.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on youtube today viewing videos of ghosts visitors of the catacombs have caught on tape. The list is more than lengthy and several people have caught honestly scary images of the spirits of the dead on tape in the catacombs. The stories of ghosts here are more than prolific.  The place is considered to be one of the most haunted places in the world and according to http://www.hauntedamericatours.com/FRANCE.php  the most haunted place in France.   To learn more about the catacombs or to find out how to visit them  go to http://www.catacombes-de-paris.fr/english.htm.

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