Ghost story or just a gag in Curracloe?

January 1995

Talk of ghostly happenings on the Sandy Lane in Curracloe has created a public stir in the style of a ‘moving statues’ alert - everybody has heard about it, but nobody has seen anything.

Over the past few weeks, people have been flocking to a particular spot on the lane, where, the story has it, a young boy is supposed to appear around 6.30 in the evening.

Ghost seekers have been gathering in the lane waiting to see the blonde-haired child walking across the garden of a particular house and disappearing mysteriously through a hedge.

Nobody has succeeded in witnessing the supposed apparition, but that hasn’t stopped the ghostly rumour from continuing. Of growing concern to parents and teachers in the area is the fact that local children are spooking one another with exaggerated additions to the tale.

Efforts to trace the source of the story have established that the rumours bloomed out of a simple but unexplained appearance of a child on the lane in broad daylight last August.

The boy, who wasn’t familiar to the local residents who saw him, was most likely a summer visitor who had just strayed temporarily from his holidaying family.

No-one knew where he came from, and those who observed him couldn’t be sure where he went. To that extent, his appearance and disappearance were unexplained.

It appears however that the story ‘lost nothing in the telling’, until it took on a supernatural aspect and the story began to go round that the ghost of a young boy was appearing every evening. However, a number of local people contacted by this newspaper this week said they have not seen the alleged ghost, and not one of them believed the story to be true.