Renvyle House — Yeats's séance

OVERVIEW

A house at the end of the Renvyle peninsula in north-west Connemara, looking out at the Atlantic with the Twelve Bens behind it. The surgeon, poet and senator Oliver St John Gogarty bought it and filled it with his friends — Yeats, Lady Gregory, Augustus John, Winston Churchill among them. The original house was burnt to the ground in 1923 during the Civil War; Gogarty rebuilt it and it has been a hotel ever since.

HISTORY

Gogarty wrote about the house and what happened in it in his own memoir, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) — the fullest account of the matter and a printed source of its own decade. Before the burning, he and his staff reported doors opening and closing on their own, noises with no cause, and bedclothes pulled by hands that were not there.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Yeats, who had a lifelong interest in the occult and was a member of the Golden Dawn, held a séance in the library to speak to whatever was in the house. The account is that a male presence answered and said it did not care for strangers coming to the place. Yeats's wife George later described seeing a young man with a pale face and red hair standing by the fireplace, whom the household took for a Blake — the family that had held Renvyle before the Gogartys, and one of whom was said to have taken his own life in the house. The entry rests on the owner's own published memoir and on the presence of named, documented witnesses.

VISITING

A working hotel on the Renvyle peninsula, open to guests and diners. The coordinates are the peninsula; the hotel is signposted from the R'road at Tullycross.