Irish Ghost Tales (10 page)

Some people have said that they have felt the presence of an angry man who didn't want them there. There may be some truth to that. Some will say it's haunted and others will tell you to cop on to yourself, there's no such thing as ghosts. All I'll say is that it's unlikely you'll come into contact with the Cooneen poltergeist, but there is certainly something not quite right about that cottage …

I
n the seventeenth century, Europe entered a new era, that of the Enlightenment. It was also known as the Age of Reason as it was a time when man began to cast off the superstition and fear of the medieval world and use his faculties of reason to discover a new world. In the efforts to discover the natural laws that govern the universe, man was to make huge scientific, political and social advances. Rational thought was the new belief and this led to the rejection of the authority of both the Church and the State. Immanuel Kant expressed the motto of the Enlightenment when he said, ‘Dare to think.' However, the Hellfire Club had its own motto over the entrance to their first building: ‘Do what thou wilt.'

The first Hellfire Club was founded in London in 1719 by a drunkard, the aristocrat Philip, Duke of Wharton, but it is his successor Sir Frances Dashwood (Chancellor of the Exchequer) who was to go on to gather together what he termed ‘the most esteemed persons of quality' in Ireland and Britain. Dashwood bought the grounds and subterranean caves of Medmenham Abbey in 1746 and transformed them into a hedonistic playground for the wealthy. Excesses of food, drink and women, not to mention rumoured blaspheming, black masses, satanic rituals and paganism, sacrificing publicly to Bacchus and Venus, the gods of wine and sex. This was to become the club's primary philosophy. Over the years, the club included amongst its members Benjamin Franklin and a former Prince of Wales.

The Irish branch was founded in Dublin in 1735 by the Earl of Rosse, 1st Grand Master of the Irish Freemasons, a position he held twice. However, upon inheriting £1 million from his grandmother, he resigned his position. He then did what most well-to-do young men did at that time: the Grand Tour. Europe and Egypt and all their mysteries fell open to him and he began to further his interest in the ‘dark arts', quickly making a name for himself as a ‘sorcerer and a practitioner of black magic'.

In 1735, he emerged on the Irish social scene and founded the Hellfire Club. The details of what the members got up to are still open to conjecture but the rumours would make you shiver. It was even said that servants were doused in brandy and set alight. Some said black cats and even dwarves were sacrificed on an altar.

Lord Rosse never lost his sense of humour. In 1741, as he lay dying at his house on Molesworth Street, he received a letter from Dean Madden, the vicar of St Anne's, lambasting him as a blasphemer, scoundrel, gambler, etc., and imploring him to repent of his sins without delay. Noting that the dean simply addressed the letter to ‘My Lord', Rosse put the letter into a fresh envelope and instructed a footman to deliver it to Lord Kildare, who lived at nearby Leinster House. The ruse worked and Lord Kildare, one of Dean Madden's most pious and generous parishioners, was mortified to think the letter was addressed to him. Lord Rosse died before anybody discovered his deceit and was probably laughing as he drew his last breath. The Hellfire Club disbanded following his death.

What follows are a few stories that concern a couple of Hellfire Club members.

Darkey Kelly was burned as a ‘witch' 250 years ago, but was really a serial killer.

Darkey Kelly, whose real name was Dorcas Kelly, ran a brothel in Copper Alley, off Fishamble Street. She was supposed to have become pregnant with the child of the city sheriff and member of the Hellfire Club Simon Luttrell (Lord Carhampton) and she demanded he support her financially. Folklore suggests that he responded to her demands by accusing her of witchcraft and sacrificing her baby in a satanic ritual. The baby's body was never found. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. She was partially hanged and then burned at the stake in a public execution on Baggot Street in Dublin. The date was 7 January 1761.

However, it has been suggested that the real reason for her execution was murder. She was actually accused of the murder of John Dowling, a shoemaker. Those investigating the murder found the bodies of five other men hidden in the brothel. Reports of rioting in Copper Alley by prostitutes were recorded after her execution. She may even be Dublin's first female serial killer. It has been said that in eighteenth-century Ireland women were second-class citizens. This was reflected in the manner in which they were executed. Men found guilty of murder were simply hanged whereas women were first half-throttled then cut down and burnt alive.

In the 1780s Simon Luttrell's son Henry, who also had the title Lord Carhampton, was in the news. He was accused of raping a young teenage girl in a brothel (like father, like son). The girl was supplied to him by the brothel keeper, Maria Llewellyn. By a strange twist of fate, Llewellyn was the sister of Darkey Kelly. Henry Luttrell had the young girl and her parents imprisoned. The girl's mother died in prison. Luttrell's charges against the girl and her family were later dismissed in court.

Simon Luttrell was created Baron Irnham (of Ireland) in 1768 and Earl of Carhampton in 1785. After the usual fashion of satirising any unpopular character, the first Lord Irnham was woven into a satirical ballad, in which the devil is represented as summoning before him those who had the strongest claim to succeed him as king of hell. Irnham, the base, the cruel and the proud, eagerly cried, ‘I boast superior claim to hell's dark throne; Irnham is my name.'

The Lord Santry Trial chronicles events that took place in eighteenth-century Dublin at the Hellfire Club. The club had acquired the name, ‘The Devil's Kitchen', and its members were called ‘bucks'. They were often the bored sons of the aristocracy who engaged in drunken sexual orgies. One of the leading lights of the Hellfire Club was Lord Santry, an infamous 29-year-old aristocrat. He caused outrage when he stabbed a servant named Laughlin Murphy to death with his sword.

Following the incident, Santry simply tossed the landlord of the tavern where the incident had occurred a coin and implied that the whole thing was better hushed up. However, that didn't happen. Santry was tried for the death of Murphy and found guilty by his peers, causing a major scandal in those times. However, Santry never went to the scaffold. He was awarded a full pardon thanks to the Duke of Devonshire, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who had been largely responsible for petitioning King George II.

If Santry had gone to meet his death, he would have been beheaded. Instead he continued living his rakish life. He was attainted, which meant he had to forgo his estate, but it was returned to him after the pardon in 1740. A year after his pardon, Santry travelled to see George II in person and thanked him face to face. On Lord Santry's death his title became extinct.

In the early 1960s, workmen renovating a derelict eighteenth-century farmhouse near the notorious Hellfire Club in Rathfarnham witnessed strange phenomena culminating in the appearance of a gigantic black cat. Artist Tom McAssey, who was helping to convert the house into an arts centre, said the temperature in the old ballroom plummeted suddenly and a locked door swung open, revealing a hideous black cat with blazing red eyes. Afterwards the house was exorcised and no sightings were reported for several years. Then in 1969, a group of actors staying at the centre held a mock séance and apparently invoked the spirits of two women. The women had assisted at the Hellfire Club's satanic rituals, during which black cats were worshipped and sacrificed. The arts centre was replaced with Killakee House, in which a portrait of the hellish cat painted by Tom McAssey glowered down upon brave diners. The house was demolished in 1947.

N
ot that long ago, we had a certain class of criminal who preyed upon the dead. In some parts of the world such criminals still carry out their macabre trade. Thankfully it is no longer the case in Ireland, but at one time their name would cause fear to many grieving families. They were the Irish resurrection men.

Body snatching was a morbid way of making money. In the nineteenth century body snatching was a lucrative business for those who chose it as a profession. The resurrection men robbed the graves of the recently deceased and sold their corpses to medical schools. It became so common that it was not unusual for relatives and friends of the deceased to watch over the grave after the burial to stop it being violated. Iron coffins were also used and sometimes graves were protected by iron railings known as mortsafes. They came in a variety of different designs and sizes and could be reused after six to eight weeks.

One method the body snatchers used was to dig at the head end of a recent burial, using a wooden spade (quieter than metal). When they reached the coffin (graves used to be quite shallow), they broke open the coffin, put a rope around the corpse and dragged it out.

Another method used by the grave robbers was to remove a square of grass about twenty feet away from the head of the grave. They would then tunnel down (about four feet) to intercept the coffin. A small boy would be employed to crawl down the tunnel and the end of the coffin would then be pulled off. He would place a noose around the neck of the corpse and it would be pulled up slowly through the tunnel. The square of grass would then be replaced and no one would be any the wiser. This method was used if the grave was protected by an iron cage or railings as it allowed the grave robbers access without disturbing the actual area of the grave site.

During 1827 and 1828 William Burke and William Hare took bodysnatching one step further. They began to murder people in order to keep up with the demand for fresh corpses from the medical profession. This was to lead to the passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832. Burke and Hare were both from Ulster and had gone to Edinburgh in Scotland to work as navigational engineers, or ‘navvies', on the New Union Canal. This they did during the day but at night they took to their other more sinister and profitable trade: grave robbing, at first, and later murder. Their victims were usually those who wouldn't be missed: the homeless, orphans, travellers. Soon they began to target drunks and others who roamed the dark streets at night. They would follow them and then strangle them when they got the chance, thus ensuring an undamaged corpse.

Another Irish connection led to the eventual end of these gruesome activities. Mrs Docherty had recently arrived from Ireland. Burke met her in a local shop and befriended her. He invited her home to his lodgings for a bite to eat and it was there he murdered her. It was believed that Burke and Hare murdered up to thirty people, but Burke was the only one prosecuted

Hare turned ‘king's evidence' and appeared as a witness for the prosecution when Burke was tried for the murder of Mrs Docherty. On his testimony, Burke was found guilty and was hanged on 28 January 1829. Hare was reported to have died a penniless pauper in London in 1858. The final twist in the story was that Burke's body was donated to medical science for dissection and his skeleton is still displayed in Edinburgh's University Medical School. His skin was used to make a wallet and this is displayed at the Police Museum in Edinburgh.

In Ireland, the medical schools of Dublin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were constantly looking for new corpses. The Bully's Acre, or Hospital Fields, at Kilmainham was a rich source of new corpses as it was a communal burial ground and easily accessed. Soldiers attached to the nearby Royal Hospital were always on the alert for grave robbers, mainly because many of their comrades were buried there. In November 1825 a sentry captured Thomas Tuite, a known resurrectionist, in possession of five bodies. When searched, his pockets were found to be full of teeth – in those days a set of teeth fetched £1.