Leap Castle — the Elemental

OVERVIEW

A tower house of about 1250 on a rock above the Slieve Bloom foothills, six kilometres north of Roscrea, built by the O'Bannons for their overlords the O'Carrolls of Éile and held by that family through two centuries of feud. It passed by marriage to the Darby family in the seventeenth century, was burned out in the Civil War in 1922, stood roofless for fifty years, and has been restored since 1974 — first by the Australian historian Peter Bartlett, who died in 1989, and since 1991 by the musician Sean Ryan and his wife Anne, who live in it and show it to visitors.

HISTORY

After Mulrooney O'Carroll's death in 1532 his sons fought for the chieftaincy; in the tradition one brother, a priest, was saying Mass in the upper chapel when the other burst in and ran him through at the altar — the Bloody Chapel. Off that chapel is an oubliette, a shaft into which prisoners were dropped onto spikes; when workmen cleared it around 1900 they took out three cartloads of human bones, reckoned at some 150 people. Jonathan Darby's wife Mildred, a spiritualist who held séances in the castle, published her account of it under the pen-name Andrew Merry in The Occult Review in 1908–09 ('Kilman Castle, the House of Horror'): a grey, upright thing about the size of a sheep, with black holes for eyes and a face like a decomposing corpse, that smelled of an open grave and once laid a hand on her shoulder in the passage outside the chapel. She called it an elemental, and the word stuck to the castle.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The Elemental, the murdered priest in the chapel, a red lady with a dagger and lights in the chapel window seen from the road are the tradition; the castle's own archive publishes Darby's text and a reader's letter to the Review describing a second encounter. The Ryans say they have never felt anything sinister in thirty years of living there. The entry rests on a printed first-person account of its own decade and on bones that were really carted away.

VISITING

A private home. Visits by prior arrangement with the owners (leapcastle.net); Sean Ryan shows visitors round himself. Do not enter the grounds unannounced.