Spooky goings-on in County Westmeath (Part 2)

Eerie experiences at Killynon House

Although now demolished, Killynon House, near Cloughan, was well known for its paranormal goings-on, many of which were listed in ‘Irish Ghost Stories’, a spine-chilling collection of tales compiled by the late Mullingar writer and army officer, Padraig O’Farrell.

Padraig received an account of the incidents at Killynon House from the late Westmeath poet, John Sheehy. The house had been home to the Reynell family for close on 500 years, and Sheehy lived nearby and knew the family well.

The tale began with accounts of horses, riders and hounds of centuries past galloping in the dead of night, ghostly hunting horns sounding and the thunder of hooves. In the morning, there would be no trace of any hunt.

Stories also circulated about a ghostly black dog, banshees, apparitions, noises, the sound of breaking glass and many other odd things.

John Sheehy did not, at first, take these tales seriously – until he began noticing some peculiar occurrences himself.

Late one autumn night, John saw a moving orange glow. He concluded the stop-start glow was caused by the combustion of methane – but then his heart gave a leap for beside him stood a tall man, also watching this mysterious moving light. John did not know of any local who came close to this man’s great height but when he moved towards the mystery man, he disappeared.

Later, John remembered a story he’d heard about a dying member of the Reynell family, a great, tall man, calling a trusted herdsman to his death bed and asking that after his death, the herdsman would keep a close eye on the animals during the day, and stating that he himself would keep vigil by night.

This prompted John to wonder if the tall man he had seen was the Reynell family member’s ghost, keeping his promise.

Another evening, John heard the echo of many voices coming from the horse stalls, and assumed there was a party going on. He paid no heed, but asked a member of the Killynon staff the next day if they had had a good night. However, it transpired, there had been no party, and indeed, most of the family and staff were actually away on holidays.

Days later, John heard that a close relative of the Reynell family had passed away.

A further episode that Mr Sheehy recalled involved him querying from staff at the house who the young girl he had observed standing rigidly still beside a sink in the basement scullery was.

He asked somebody upstairs if they knew who the girl was – and when they returned, the girl had vanished, despite the fact that the scullery had no windows and only one door, which was in view to those upstairs at all times.

Another mystery female appeared to John one bitterly cold spring afternoon.

Wondering why the elderly lady in a light blue summery dress was walking exposed to the harsh elements, he walked towards the gate where it appeared she was headed.

When he reached the gate, she was nowhere to be seen, but later John knew why she looked familiar: “her features were those of a family member who had died a decade earlier”.

Years later, Richard Reynell told John his dead aunt often came back to visit him.

In the garden one day, a deafening bang from the potting shed stopped John in his tracks. He and the gardener went into the shed – but nothing was broken. The gardener said it was not the first time he’d heard such noises.

When the Reynell family left the house once and for all, none of the subsequent owners stayed long.

One occupant gave John permission to take some laurel plants to make a hedge – but as John attempted to carry them to his nearby home, he found himself engaged in a deathly game of tug-o-war with an unseen force trying to jerk the laurels from his hands.

Finally getting home after a long, hard struggle, he managed to plant the laurels – but in the subsequent times, weird howling and crying could often be heard from them, so bad one night that it actually stopped him from sleeping. Two days later, his aunt died, leaving him wondering if what he had been hearing was not in fact the sound of the banshee’s cry.

By the early 1970s, the house was unoccupied but the spooky goings-on continued. Finally, an unexplained fire gutted the house, leaving just a shell, which was cleared away in 1978.

The lady of Lough Ennell

A strange woman at Lough Ennell who had something of the supernatural about her was spotted by a number of local people, Padraic O’Farrell revealed in his book ‘Irish Ghost Stories’.

A Brendan L’Estrange told Mr O’Farrell that one cold night he was walking by the Dysart shore of the lake when he saw a slim woman dressed in dark clothes paddling in the water.

The woman began gesticulating wildly as if she was reprimanding the lake itself. She roared and shouted and then hurried out of the cold water, disappearing into the dusk.

Mr L’Estrange spoke to a few people about the incident but no one believed him until Matt Gallagher, from the Carrick side, noticed the same woman a few days later.

That time she was wearing a bright blue cloak and wore a veil.

Word soon spread around the town and soon other sightings were reported.

The description from each was that the woman was slim, barefooted and gesticulating wildly towards the water.

She became known as the Lady of Lough Ennell and soon, people camped on the lakeshore in the hope of spotting her, but she only appeared to lone wanderers or fishermen not expecting to see her.

O’Farrell wrote that Dysart man Jack Tuite told him: ‘At the bottom of the lake lies my treasure.’

She then vanished, never to be seen again.

Staff at Iralco spotted ghost of old lady

In November 1995, reports started coming in of supernatural sightings at what was then the Iralco factory (now Decotek) in Collinstown.

The story was that a number of people had seen an old woman dressed in period clothes walking through the factory at six o’clock in the morning.

"It was something that looked like a woman, then it looked like a ghost. It was gone before you realised it was a ghost," one eyewitness told the Westmeath Examiner, estimating that the sighting had lasted for a mere 12 seconds.

However, even though it was Just a short episode, it left him feeling frightened. He described the ghost as being dressed in an old fashioned, cream colour frock.

A second eyewitness also described what he saw: "All I saw was an old woman passing. A few in the polishing room saw it too. She was a good bit away, between the machines. It was around 6am."

He did not think the woman was a ghost, and it hadn’t crossed his mind that it was spooky initially. However, he agreed that it was unusual to see an old woman walking through the plant at that hour of the morning.

The journalist writing the story observed that the Iralco factory was at Barbavilla, and located near the scene of the bloody murder of Mrs Maria Smythe during the agrarian troubles of the 1880s.

On Easter Sunday, April 2, 1882, Mrs Smythe, wife of Henry Smythe, was murdered on her way from church on the avenue leading to Barbavilla House.

It was believed that she was shot in error, and that the intended target was her brother-in-law, William Smythe.

No one was ever convicted of the killing, and it is believed that the murderer fled to Australia.