Haunted Battlefields

Having beard that the Battle of Marston Moor (1644) in the English Civil War and Culloden (Scotland) where the Scots cause was lost in 1746 are fought all over again on their anniversaries, I did an investigation to see if any Irish battlefields are haunted, which had some fruitful results.

At Dun an Oir at the southern tip of the Dingle penisula in county Kerry, on 1 October 1580, during the Desmond Rebellion, 806 Spaniards landed and captured the English garrison. Unfortunately, no help arrived from the Irish and the Spaniards were besieged by the English under Lord Grey de Wilton, and forced to surrender unconditionally.

When they had laid down their arms, the English troops cold-bloodedly slaughtered over 600 of them. Ever since on the anniversary of this horrible event people in the vicinity have heard agonising cries in Spanish, and have smelled the horrible stenche of dead bodies.

Mr F. W. Gumley, a regular correspondent to me on ghostly matters tells of two other such stories. The first concerns an ambush which took place in 1920 somewhere on the road between Sligo town and Bundoran, near the townland of Streedagh. On one misty November night in the 1930s a latecomer going home along the stretch of roadway where the ambush took place was horrified to find himself in the middle of a ghostly battle. In the moonlight he was able to make out the peaks of the R.I.C. caps of the ghostly contestants, accompanied by the clicking of rifle bolts and the panting of excited men. He ran away from the scene in terror.

The other instance concerned an ambush which took place at approximately the same time at Glenwood, Kilkishen, county Clare where a tragic encounter took place in which the R.I.C. were worsted. Years afterwards several people in the neighbourhood claim to have seen and heard the conflict, with the agonizing cries of the wounded on the anniversary of the conflict.