Return to Gillhall Castle

In my last post, I said that Sheila St Clair, the “investigator and lecturer in supernatural phenomena,” had accompanied the Ulster Tape Recording Society on one of their visits to Gillhall, and that she had - quite some years later - told the story of that night in her book, “The Step on the Stair.”

Strangely, St Clair doesn’t mention in her book that a journalist and a photographer from the Belfast Telegraph were also there that night. The journalist’s account - which I’ve reproduced here - appeared in the Belfast Telegraph on 28 June 1960.

SOCIETY TAPES SOUND PICTURE OF HAUNTED HOUSE

I have just spent a night in a haunted house. I heard coughing in an empty room, dogs howling for no apparent reason, and inexplicable crashes.

The house is Gillhall, a 300-year-old mansion near Dromore, Co. Down. Cameraman Roy Smyth and I motored there with nine members of the Ulster Tape Recording Society.

Led by their honorary secretary, Mr. Wiliam Scott, they were making their second visit to capture mysterious sounds they had heard there a fortnight ago.

Also with the party were Miss Sheila St. Clair, investigator and lecturer in supernatural phenomena.

Though no one claims to have actually seen a ghost, local legend has it that Lord Tyrone visited his childhood friend there the night after he died more than 150 years ago [1].

On a pane of glass in the bay of a second-storey bed chamber is strange writing.

Stories differ on this, but it is said to have been scraped 200 years ago with a diamond engagement ring by a girl who was locked in the room after being either jilted by her sweetheart or forbidden by her parents to marry the man of her choice. Some say she was burned to death when the house went on fire.

A VERSE

The writing takes the form of a verse. In old English style, it says:

The beauty of holiness

Is best understood

To him that beauty beheld

By the fair and the good

Though the glass in many of the other windows of the 50-roomed house has long since disappeared, this pane has withstood the storms and explosions by troops who trained there during the war.

We arrived shortly before 10 o’clock at the gaunt, grey house, once proud but now derelict, with weeds creeping up the steps of its impressive entrance and gaping holes in its floors and ceilings.

To avoid the notice - and, perhaps, unwelcome “assistance” - of the locals, we approached by a back entrance, through a high, iron gateway, past the gamekeeper’s house and along a long, narrow drive overgrown with grass.

SOUND-PROOFED

Immediately the society members started to “sound-proof” the house. 

By 11-28 nothing could have moved without being heard over one of the many microphones installed throughout the house and linked to a monitoring loudspeaker and tape recorder in the main downstairs room which had been converted into a control centre.

Then I watched as Miss St. Clair placed a number of objects  - a paint tin, the cowling off a stove pipe and a pot handle - in a cellar. Their positions were ringed with tar and around all of them Miss St. Clair made circles of flour to show up the footprints of anyone who might tamper with them.

We had not long to wait before things started happening. 

Ten minutes before midnight, as we sat having supper by candlelight in the only furnished room, some of the members thought they saw the door of the central room, which had been blocked by a stool, move. A few minutes later a metallic crash was heard from the cellar.

The night was still, without a breeze, yet one of the three candles flickered while others did not.

ANOTHER CRASH

Then the crash was heard again from the cellar.

Seven minutes later, on the stroke of midnight, a gong sounded from the same room. 

A quarter of an hour had barely passed when a floorboard in the hall creaked.

Shortly after 12-15 two distinct coughs were heard from the cellar and there were sounds of movement.

This was the record of events - all heard from the basement - I noted after that:-

12-19: Regular squawking like that of a bird.

12-22: Rumble like that of a distant motor-cycle.

12-25: A scraping noise, a thud, and a cough.

12-29: A sound like the latch of a door being lifted.

12-40: A rumble from the microphone in the cellar, as though it had been moved.

At 12-35 two gun dogs in an enclosure behind the house started to bark and howl [2].

It was then we decided to send out two reconnaissance parties with torches, one down to the cellar and the other round the outside of the house.

QUIET OUTSIDE

Nothing in the cellar had been moved and all was quiet outside.

But immediately the outside party rounded the corner of the house the dogs started barking again. The main front door, left open by the last member of the party to enter the control room originally, was shut tight. No one had left that room before the parties went out [3].

At 12-55 a metallic tapping was heard from the cellar, and at one o’clock there was a tremendous crash, followed by a growling sound.

Five minutes later there was another crash, as if something had been thrown or dropped in the cellar.

Before dismantling the equipment we paid another visit to the cellar. All was as we had left it, but two wooden planks, which some members said had been leaning against the wall, were now lying on the ground … which could have accounted for the crashes.

LIGHTS

As we left the house shortly before dawn down the main winding drive along which proud carriages and four had once driven, we paused to look back at the house. Almost all the members said they could see phantom lights flickering at the windows.

Miss St. Clair said later: “Apart from the explainable noises of an old house settling into the night and the flickering candles, I can find no reasonable explanation other than the supernatural for the coughs, the sound of the tapping and the two crashes, all of which appeared to come from the cellar.” [4]

Mr. Scott said the sounds recorded would be investigated and perhaps sent to an expert for analysis.

Notes:

1 According to the account given in “The Step on the Stair,” Lord Tyrone appeared to Lady Beresford - who was holidaying in Gillhall - and made a number of predictions - all of them grim - about her life to come. In addition to the mental scarring, Lord Tyrone also scarred Lady Beresford physically when he grabbed her wrist. To be fair, she did ask him to leave her a sign that their strange encounter wasn’t just a dream. Until her death, or so the story goes, Lady Beresford wore a black ribbon on her wrist to cover the disfigurement. 

2 St Clair adds: “After a time we timed the howls, and they appeared to precede paranormal activity in the house by about twenty seconds: it was as though the unhappy dogs had psychic stop-watches!”

3 According to St Clair, there was more to this incident: “The door, having shut itself, now proved unwilling to open; and two burly members of our group who struggled to re-open it found the task beyond them. I went back into the hall with them and turned the knob, and the door opened easily under my hand. I must confess I enjoyed the look of amazement on their faces!”

4 In “The Step on the Stair,” St Clair states: “There was an aspect of the visit to Gillhall that I had shared with no-one, and that was a strong suspicion that somewhere occult practice had intruded upon the paranormal. I had received several anonymous phone calls that hinted delicately at the ‘inadvisability’ of investigating Gillhall. In the house itself I found evidence of ritual practices in some of the rooms, and the curious atmosphere in the house itself had bothered me.”

Sources:

The Belfast Telegraph, 28 June 1960

Sheila St Clair, The Step on the Stair, (The Glendale Press Ltd, Sandycove, 1989)