Loftus Hall
Ireland's 'most haunted house', where a card game with a shipwrecked stranger revealed a cloven hoof beneath the table — and the devil left through the roof.
Case File No. 120
FILE 01 The Legend
The Redmonds raised the first hall around 1350; the Loftus family took it after the Cromwellian confiscations, confirmed in 1666. On a stormy night in the 1770s, so the story runs, a young man from a ship wrecked off the Hook peninsula was given shelter, stayed on, and grew close to Anne Tottenham, daughter of the house. One evening at cards, Anne bent to pick up a dropped card — and saw that the stranger's foot was a cloven hoof. He went up through the roof in a blast of smoke and sulphur. Anne never recovered; she was shut away in the Tapestry Room, refused food, and died there years later. Father Thomas Broaders, who later exorcised the house, is buried nearby with an epitaph boasting that he 'expelled the evil spirit from the bodies of two persons'. The hall hosting all this was demolished in 1870-71 and replaced by the present mansion — which did nothing to retire the legend.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Anne's ghost is said to walk the stairs; horses are heard outside at night; tours report cold spots and unexplained bangs. The house hosted the US show Ghost Adventures, and since 2011 the Quigley brothers run dedicated paranormal and Halloween tours.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The 'hole in the roof that could never be repaired' cannot be true — the haunted building was demolished in 1870 and today's house is a century younger than the events. The tale is Ireland's oldest and best cautionary legend against card-playing, hitched to a suitably old house. A later garnish claims renovations found an infant's skeleton in the Tapestry Room wall — a detail which surfaced long after and can be checked by no one.