Collectanea. 347
house. The old residences are in ruins, and their desertion took place over sixteen years ago.^^
It is to the credit of the people of Eastern Clare that it possesses hardly any haunted houses, but there are two of transcending interest.
The first lay near the Fergus. A footstep followed one at night on the upper stairs, and curtains were drawn round the old- fashioned beds, — if not by " a hand of bone," at least by a " thing that no man sees." On more than one occasion all the bed- clothes were lifted, " as if by four people," off a sleeper. Even the late Mr. Richard Stacpoole, a man of iron nerve, told how once on a visit this happened to him ; indignant at what he supposed to be a foolish joke, he got up, locked the door, searched the room, and kept awake, only to find the action repeated twice ; he struck a light at once, but no one was visible. Hands were laid on the doors and their handles. Anyone who "married into" the family or its connections was liable to have their hands kissed in the dark on their first visit. An invisible dog used to howl before deaths, being only heard from the room of the relation of the foredoomed person. A ghost, (said to be of no less a person than Maureen Rhue, the famous Amazonian O'Brien of 1640-50), used to pass up and down the long, straight avenue. Legend said that, after the murder of her twenty-fifth husband, — (only three husbands are known to history, which is also ignorant of their murders), — she was fastened into a hollow tree and starved to death. There were also the ghosts of two nuns, — for the place was said to have been a convent, without a particle of evidence,^'^ — and, in 1838, a lady on horseback at a " Druid's Altar." (The last-named was probably a pure invention of the then owner.) There was, however, another ghostly object of which I heard from an eye-witness still living. A dark spot used to break out in the wall of a quaint old brick-floored room, with an inside window looking down into the kitchen. The legend was that an old nurse, a pensioner of the family about 1750, used to live in this room, and died, aged over 90, suddenly
18 So Mrs. MacDonnell.
1' Except that skeletons, and, it is said, crucifixes, were found in the garden just beside the house.
