‘In the shot is a woman’s profile you can’t explain’
Armagh mum-of-two Rebecca travels far and wide photographing buildings that have been left to decay and posting them on her Abandoned NI Facebook page. She says:
The photography started initially when I was part of a paranormal group back in 2010 called Paranormal Ulster, which went round locations in Northern Ireland and did investigations. My role in the group was to be the team photographer and I found the locations.
Where my interest in the paranormal really originated from was a place called Gill Hall in Dromore. It was a mansion that was supposed to be one of the most haunted places in the whole of Ireland. It was blown up in the Seventies so it’s not there anymore.
But I used to go up to it when I was a teenager and we would hang out at night. One night we were out the back and we got out of the car and I decided to hide on the others. There was a wall behind the car and I got up on the wall — this was about 1am and it was really dark.
I’m on the wall and I can see the car and the next thing I can hear in my ear is a man going ‘Shhh’. There couldn’t have been a man on the wall behind me. I jumped down and got back in the car! But maybe that’s where my fascination with the paranormal came from.
With Paranormal Ulster we would have started at maybe 11pm and it could have gone on until 3 or 4am. We would have gone round all the castles, including Charleville Castle.
That one was really good — one night we heard a bouncing ball going down the stairs. There was a young girl who was supposed to have died on one of the back staircases and that was well documented, so it’s possible that it was her, but who knows?
Then I came across Cairndhu House in Larne, a former hospital. It was the first house that really sparked an interest where I preferred to concentrate on photographing the house. After that, I stepped back from the paranormal bit and focused more on the abandoned buildings.
The building has been empty from the late Eighties and recently it’s been named one of Ireland’s most haunted houses. On one visit I had the keys to
Cairndhu House when it was relatively secure, almost 10 years ago.
We had walked the entire house and had come back to the dining hall and walked through its exiting door, only to hear a loud crash come from behind us, almost like the sound of a metal radiator being thrown towards us with force. We froze in fear for a few seconds, and I shouted ‘hello’ hoping someone would reply.
We briefly waited and then we could hear footsteps and the arms swooshing on a coat coming towards us. We didn’t look but ran down the main corridor and out the front door. We waited for five minutes to see if someone came out — no one did. At the start of this year I went to a convent up the country near Londonderry — it has now been knocked down. It was five storeys high and we were up on the fourth floor on the main staircase.
I took photos of the staircase, including the bannister and door, and then I moved a foot to the right and took the shot again. In that shot you can see what looks like the profile of a woman through the door.
I only saw it afterwards when I was going through photos and I thought ‘Oh what was that’. It was really noticeable and there was no-one else in there at the time. It clearly looks like the profile of a woman — you just can’t explain it.
We also went to what used to be a priest training college in Omeath. We were walking down a long corridor and I opened a door on the left and as I opened it I heard a male voice as if it was beside me. My friend was recording on an iPad and when we played it back we could hear a faint voice but we couldn’t hear what he was saying. But when we worked on the recording we could make out a man’s voice saying ‘you are crazy’ and it’s almost in an Ulster accent.
We also visited De Salle College in Co Cork five years ago — it was used to film Song for a Raggy Boy. As we were walking along one of the long corridors we could hear someone behind us banging doors and we got to the end of the corridor and found we couldn’t go any further.
The banging was getting louder and we pulled a board off a window and got out onto a small balcony. You could almost hear someone coming along the broken glass along the corridor. We stayed for a couple of minutes but no one came. We went back through the building, but the banging started again behind us, almost as if whatever it was was chasing us out.
After we went outside we moved off around the front and could hear the banging again from the inside out. If it was somebody, why did they not approach us?
That was one of the most terrifying things. It got us into a situation where we didn’t know what to do next!”