Castle Leslie — Norman's Room and the Red Room

OVERVIEW

Castle Leslie, also known as Glaslough House, stands on a thousand-acre estate beside the village of Glaslough, eleven kilometres north-east of Monaghan town. A seventeenth-century Leslie mansion stood here — Jonathan Swift stayed in it and wrote of its 'rows of books upon its shelves, written by Leslies all about themselves' — until most of it was pulled down in the nineteenth century. The present castle was designed in 1870 by the firm of Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon for Sir John Leslie, 1st Baronet. It is run today as a hotel by the family.

HISTORY

Captain Norman Leslie, second son of Sir John Leslie, 2nd Bt., was killed in France in October 1914. His elder brother Shane — the writer and diplomat, a cousin of Winston Churchill, who wrote at length on religion and the supernatural — had been disinherited over his politics and his intention to become a priest, and the estate had been made over to Norman.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The family's own account, which the hotel publishes on its room pages, is that Norman was seen on the terrace in broad daylight about a week before he was killed, that estate workers saw him about his usual places, that his mother woke to see him standing at the foot of her bed two days before his death, and that Lady Marjorie Leslie saw him in the Red Room some weeks after he died — beside the chest of drawers, as if in a cloud of light, going through his letters; he turned, smiled, and faded. Guests in Norman's Room and the Red Room have reported the same figure since. The source is the keeping family, in print, about their own son.

VISITING

A working hotel; Norman's Room and the Red Room are bookable. Glaslough village, County Monaghan.