A big welcome for seasonal socially distanced spooks this Halloween

There are even ‘zip-line ghosts’ that facilitate tricking and treating well away from front doors!

But we’re exceedingly well supplied with banshees, poltergeists and ghouls here, and while it’s hard to comprehend socially distanced spooks, we’ve no need to concoct ghosts in Northern Ireland - there’s plenty of the real thing!

Drive-through haunted houses are all the rage in the USA, some requiring temperature checks at entrances. There’s a fully-authenticated Haunted Road in Florida, and Halloween costumes with built-in PPE masks are making millions of dollars for their manufacturers all over America.

But in Northern Ireland the old-woman ghost of Londonderry’s Bligh’s Lane has often been verified, in a city that also boasts a headless coachman, a hound of Iskaheen, a Brandywell banshee and the iconic half-hanged McNaughton.

Belfast too is riddled with spooks, like the ghostly spectres of cholera victims regularly seen in Friars Bush Graveyard; the phantom stoker on HMS Caroline; the fatal accident victim who returns to Steam Mill Lane, and the elderly professor who checked my exam notes in the QUB library in 1975 before walking through the wall at the end of the aisle!

Beyond our towns and cities, well-validated ghosts and ghouls inhabit the countryside, many of them recounted on this page down the years.

There’s the grey lady who haunts the stretch of road near Gracehill House; the unexplained mist that descends on the Giant’s Ring at Shaw’s Bridge where human sacrifices and dark rituals took place in pagan times, and the Tyrone-woman who turned into a hare and caused patches of animal fur to appear behind new-born babies’ ears.

I narrate these spectres and apparitions with tongue firmly in cheek, but one particular ghost, of world-wide acclaim, manifested itself to me several years in a more ominous way.

The Cooneen Ghost had been mentioned on this page more than occasionally but I’d never visited the house that it haunted.

The lonely, dilapidated ruin of the country cottage on the Fermanagh/Tyrone border was surrounded with safety barriers and ‘Keep Out’ signs when I arrived in bright summer sunshine, during the lengthy heatwave of 2018. It’s a well-trodden path to the house.

In 1939 the BBC broadcast a chilling, network radio programme about the house. Prize-winning documentaries, frightening films and unsettling articles have attempted to unravel the mystery.

Paranormal experts, churchmen and specialist investigators have visited the Murphy’s falling-down farmstead, departing with discomforting conundrums best summarised by two RTE radio investigators as “the most authentic and disturbing poltergeist account in Ireland.”

Mrs Bridget Murphy and her husband Michael moved there in 1913 and had a son and four daughters. But Michael fell off a horse-cart and died, the start of a relentless onslaught of events that many people believed was paranormal. The children were in bed one night, grieving for their departed dad. Widow Bridget and eldest daughter Anne were sitting beside the turf-fire when they heard the children screaming in terror. With the screams came loud tapping on the walls and heavy footsteps. Son James and his mother searched the house but could find nothing untoward.

Similarly alarming occurrences became frequent - loud knocking on the door when no one was there; heavy footsteps on the stairs when everyone was in bed; pots and pans flying around the kitchen and crashing onto the floor; blasts of cold air when all the doors and windows were shut and furniture rising and falling while mysterious shapes appeared and disappeared through the walls.

Neighbours, priests and politicians who came to console the Murphys also experienced these terrifying ‘visitations’.

Local priest Father Eugene Coyle said “I stood in the children’s bedroom and watched bedclothes on an empty bed rise and fall. I felt a cold, evil presence…at times the bed lifted several inches off the ground before falling back down again.”

Author Shane Leslie wrote about the Cooneen Ghost, recounting that the Murphy girls were avoided in school “for no one would sit by them.”

When the children went to neighbours’ houses the ghost “always followed them and as the Parish Priest would not believe them, they marched to his house and after that he believed, for it came down his back.”

Folk who came to comfort Mrs Murphy and her frightened family heard unexplained noises and often detected hissing, whistling, scraping, tapping and “a sound like a kicking horse” Shane Leslie recounted.

The Murphy children were traumatised. Holding her hand to her stomach one of Mrs Murphy’s daughters whispered, “I can feel something pressing down here.”

The little girl had woken, screaming, when her bed started sliding across the floor.

Neighbours were convinced that it was all due to a ghost and claimed that there’d once been a murder in the house.

Following two unsuccessful exorcisms by a local priest, and hoping to escape from their perilous predicament, the Murphys sailed for America. Passengers in the cabin next to them complained bitterly to the ship’s Captain about hearing constant night-time banging and scraping! And having arrived at the remains of Murphy’s house two years ago under blue skies and sweltering sunshine, Roamer was suddenly soaked by a torrential downpour of rain.