Eerie happenings in a Kilmore cottage

November 1989

Eerie happenings prompted a Kilmore Quay man and his elderly mother to move out of a traditional thatched cottage which is now up for sale.

The old cottage in the centre of the scenic fishing village was later bought by a Dublin family and it will be auctioned on their behalf by Kehoe & Haythornthwaite, Auctioneers, on Wednesday afternoon next.

For Marty Scallan, who lives with his eightyfour years old mother in a new bungalow at Tenacre, leaving the cottage was a welcome move.

‘We couldn’t have stayed there. We had to leave it in the end,’ said Marty this week, as he recalled the unearthly occurrences he witnessed while he lived there.

‘We heard strange noises and footsteps moving around all the time. You could be sitting in the kitchen and you’d hear the voices of people talking, but you couldn’t make out what they were saying,’ he recalled.

Marty, a fisherman, is not inclined to be nervous, but he was disturbed by what happened.

He was concerned for his elderly mother, he said, who was happy to leave the cottage despite having lived there for fifty-four years.

‘It had been happening all along, but it wasn’t so bad until about four years ago. It got worse shortly after I had been in an accident. You’d hear doors opening and people walking around at night,’ he said.

Marty sustained serious leg injuries in a hit-and-run accident outside the Saltees Hotel, and looking back on it now, he recalls a strange feeling about the night it happened.

‘I had only walked about a hundred yards from the cottage when I stuck to the ground. I almost felt there was something bad going to happen,’ he said.

Following the accident and on his return from hospital, the disturbances became more frequent. He slept downstairs for a while because he was on crutches and he remembers one incident vividly.

He heard doors opening inside the house and then heard the front door opening and as the footsteps moved outside, a voice saying ‘so long now’.

On another occasion, a nephew was visiting and he and Marty were in the sitting room talking when the handle visibly turned on the door. The door opened and then closed again. ‘But there was nobody there.’

According to Marty, it became so bad that relatives of the family were nervous about staying overnight in the house.

He and his mother had the house blessed a few times and eventually had a Mass said in the cottage.

During the Mass, the room went icy cold, Marty recalled. ‘It was in the kitchen, and everything went stone cold.’

After the Mass, things quietened down considerably, and the happenings became rarer.

His firm belief is that there was someone not at rest. The thatched cottage stands on the site of what was formerly a burial ground and Marty believes that a person who was interred there was not at peace.

Adrian Haythornthwaite of the Wexford auctioneering firm was surprised to learn about unearthly disturbances in the cottage which his company will be putting under the hammer next Wednesday.

‘The news would probably increase interest in the cottage,’ he suggested. ‘I’m sure there are people who would like to buy spooks.’