1.2 The Leap Castle Elemental
Many spirits wander Leap Castle, but none so terrifying as the spectre known only as The Elemental.
When we were planning this episode we came across dozens of tantalising stories about Leap Castle and the spirits who roam its halls. In fact, there were so many that it was quite difficult to pin down the episode to just one story. In the end, Mildred Darby’s tales of her encounters with the Elemental (listen to the episode for more details) won us over with its gothic mix of Victorian spiritualism and domestic drama. But this meant that we didn’t quite have time to talk about all the druidic curses and fratricide that make Leap Castle the ideal setting for a horror story or two. Here are the bits we didn’t completely cover in the episode.
Leap Castle as a druidic site.
Legend has it that Leap was once the site of druidic ritual. Some suppose that this could have been the origin of the Elemental. The thinking goes that the Elemental is a nature spirit used by the druids in their spells or set there to protect the site. Those who map out magical energy have said that the castle sits on the crossing of two ley lines, which would have made it a natural location for druids to pick for rituals.
2. The Brothers in the Bloody Chapel
Give the age of the castle, it is not surprising that there are many stories of skullduggery and murder associated with various rooms. The most famous of these was one of our top contenders for a re-telling: the tale of the two O’Carroll brothers whose struggle for control of their clan after their father’s death led to a violent and deadly confrontation in the castle’s chapel. One brother, a priest, was giving mass, when another brother stormed in and mortally wounded him. This room in the castle is associated with smells of rubber and blinding lights pouring from the windows, even in the days when it was an uninhabited, burned-out shell.
3. The Red Lady
One of the more tragic stories connected with Leap Castle is that belonging to the so-called Red Lady. This spirit makes a brief apprence in The Unwilling Guest- the tale in which sceptical Mr. Irving comes face to face with the Elemental. The legend goes that this Red Lady was a captive or relative of the O’Carrolls who become pregnant. When the child was born it was decided that there were already too many mouths to feed and the baby was murdered by the family. In the original tale the woman kills herself with the dagger that she carries as a spirit. She is said to haunt the rooms that were used a the nursery. There’s a first hand account from one of Mildred’s guests at Leap on the Leap Castle website.
A photograph of Mildred Darby on her wedding day (taken from the Offaly History blog)
4. The Writings of Mildred Darby
Writing under the pseudonym of Andrew Merry, Mildred wrote many novels and short stories, mostly focused on her home in Ireland and the people around her, including the lives of her tenants and the poor in Ireland. Her works include ‘Kilman Castle: A House of Horrors’ in which she told a fictionalised account of an encounter with an elemental spirit. Jonathan Darby disapproved of his wife’s writing but it wasn’t until she wrote The Hunger ( a novel about the lives of the poor during the Irish famine) that he forbade her to continue publishing her work. There is a much more detailed account of this on the Offaly history site.
5. The Oubliette
Popularised in the bloodthirsty wars of the medieval period, these ‘forgotten rooms’ were used as the ultimate form of torture and execution for troublesome enemies. Essentially, they were deep, narrow pits, often not wide enough to crouch down. Prisoners were lowered (or pushed) through a trap door and left there until the lord of the castle decided to release them. Many were left to rot in there, dying of either hunger or starvation. The oubliette at Leap Castle seems to have been a particularly gruesome example, with the floor covered in sharp spikes (perhaps to hurry along those prisoner to their graves). The story goes that when the oubliette at Leap was excavated during some improvement works to the castle the workers found the bones of nearly 150 individuals, including one carrying a pocket watch from the early 19th Century. No wonder then that the castle is one of the most haunted places in Ireland.