Springhill House

OVERVIEW

A white seventeenth-century house in the townland of Ballindrum, built about 1680 under the marriage articles of 'Good-Will' Conyngham, with a walled garden, a costume collection and the National Trust's care since 1957. Its Blue Room is the setting of the Trust's own ghost story, told on its tours and in its Halloween programme.

HISTORY

George Lenox-Conyngham, who inherited in the 1780s and served in the Irish Volunteers under Castlereagh, resigned his commission in disgrace in 1816 and, depressive for years, shot himself in the house that year. His second wife Olivia, who had been in the next room, is the tradition's ghost. The family lived at Springhill until 1961.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Olivia is reported on the staircase, in the Blue Room — where in the nineteenth century a guest woke to a woman at the bedside — and in the nursery, where a nursemaid in the twentieth century saw her standing over the children. The Trust and the Northern Ireland press carry the accounts; the family recorded them over generations, which is why the Trust calls her well documented. Entered as the house's tradition with a documented death behind it.

VISITING

National Trust opening; house by guided tour, gardens and grounds. Halloween events run by the Trust.