Loftus Hall

These imbued in me a love of narrative, of the spoken word and of listening.

Then there was the story of Loftus Hall, a mansion on the Hook Peninsula.

A stranger appeared one night at a party.

The guests, and in particular the owner's daughter Anne, fell under his charms.

She screamed and he jumped through the roof.

Now every August we would travel the Slade Head in the shadow of Hook Lighthouse to fish off the rocks for mackerel.

At the time, Loftus Hall was a hotel.

I stared out into the dark night at the lights, terrified, expecting to see the devil appear at any moment.

and a family that allegedly invited something inside, they couldn't get back out.

On the Hook Peninsula in County Wexford stands Loftus Hall, a sprawling mansion overlooking the Irish Sea.

The building you see today is largely the result of a major 19th century rebuilding, but the haunted legend attached to that property reaches back to an earlier house on the same site, Redmond Hall and the Tossendam family who were living there in the 18th century.

The story is usually placed around 1766, and to be clear, what I am about to tell you is legend.

Because an exorcism that works completely is an ending.

An exorcism that leaves one room untouched, that's a franchise.

Here's where Loftus Hall gets especially interesting to me.

The house connected to Anne's original legend isn't exactly the mansion standing there today.

But I have really, spirituality is something that I can accept totally.

I actually have written about something, an experience I had in the 90s in Loftus Hall, where I saw a woman who we would say did not exist.

I have never spoken about it before because I always felt people would think I'm bonkers.

But why would they think I'm bonkers thinking that when we can believe in an afterlife and, you know, a God out there as well? And that's confidence.

And we'd had a day in Dunmore East, which was the, and the Mary's in Tramore.

Coming back, the kids, we're looking for something to eat.

Stopped by this, this beautiful building, Loftus Hall.

The kids ran ahead of me.

But I think one of the ways that it went wrong was that too many different types of businesses were all crowded into the same group.

I mean, we've gone through the various things they had from owning a bowling alley to owning a golf resort in the Irish Midlands to buying something like Loftus Hall with a view to doing it up down in the Hooke Peninsula in Wexford.

And there was just a lack of specialisation, I think, was one of the difficulties.

Had there just been a restaurant group? Had there just been a hotel group? Then...

So they probably needed to get into the trenches, work off the debts.

They had tax debts warehoused with revenue, try and get through that.

And instead, they bought things like Loftus Hall.

They also bought Larry Murphy's pub on Baggis Street, which had a lot of other publicans scratching their heads because really nobody's been drinking down that street for many years.

Okay.

And it's when they go to, I believe, Loftus Hall in there.

And there's a broken Jesus? Yeah.

And it's, like, the big house where they only, like, really use, like, a couple rooms.