Leap Castle

The last of the Darby family to own Leap Castle was Jonathan Charles Darby who left in 1909. Jonathan's wife Mildred wrote an article for the Occult Review describing how she had held several seances at Leap Castle during which she had attracted the unwelcome attentions of an elemental - a primitive and malevolent force that attaches itself to a particular place. Mildred Darby described how she was "standing in the Gallery looking down at the main floor, when I felt somebody put a hand on my shoulder. The thing was the size of a sheep. Thin gaunt and shadowy, its eyes which seemed half decomposed in black cavities stared into mine. The horrible smell gave me a deadly nausea. It was the smell of a decomposing corpse".

Following its destruction by fire in 1922, workmen had commenced gutting the interior. Behind the wall of the chapel they discovered an oubliette, a small dungeon whose name, derived from the French oublier, meaning forget. It was a small room with a drop floor, prisoners would be pushed into the room to fall through the floor and land on a spike eight feet below. If you were not lucky enough to die quickly on the spike, you died of starvation in a door less room while the aroma of food and the sounds of merriment drifted up from the rooms below. Three cartloads of human bones were eventually cleared from this hidden room..

Over the next seventy years, it remained an empty building its fearsome reputation ensuring that the locals shunned it, particularly at night when all manner of ghostly activity was known to stir within its walls. From across the fields people would watch the window of the "Bloody Chapel" suddenly light up, as though hundreds of flickering candles were blazing within. Some, who dared walk amongst the ruins, experienced alarming encounters with a lustrous lady wearing a billowing red gown.

In 1972 the castle was purchased by an Australian of Irish decent who sold it to Sean and Anne Ryan in 1991 and Sean set about converting the ruin into a habitable family home. Shortly afterwards, restoration was suddenly halted when the ladder Sean was working from was inexplicably pushed away from the wall forcing him to jump several stories and sustain a fractured knee. No sooner had he resumed work, than another freak accident caused him to break an ankle.

Leap Castle - Elemental

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