During my family’s trip to Ireland, we stayed at Ross Castle in Meath. This castle, and its land, has a long and torrid history surrounding war and death as the tower of the castle was designed to be a watchtower to alert for attacking clans.
The most prominent of these tales takes us back to the 1500s when Richard Nugent, otherwise known as the Black Baron due to his cruel heart and ill-tempered rage, was the reigning Lord of the castle. He had a daughter named Sabina who fell in love with the son of an Irish Chieftain which was quite unbecoming of an English Lady. As time passed and their love grew stronger, they realized that their father’s would never allow them to marry. One night, under the secret watch of the stars, they decided to run away and elope. Unfortunately, a storm overtook their boat, and it went down beneath the waves. Sabina woke to discover while she had been rescued, her lover had perished in the storm. Heartbroken, she fell into a deep despair and locked herself in her tower refusing to eat or drink. She soon faded into a sleep where she would never wake up. Her spirit is said to roam the halls of the castle looking for her lost lover. As for Lord Richard Nugent, his fate was sealed with his daughter’s untimely death and is cursed to stay on the lands in payment for his horrible deeds to his people and his daughter.
Okay, now back to the present. As soon as we pulled in, I knew this was going to be an amazing stay for many reasons. There was a beautiful lake out back where we could watch the sunrise, we had a huge kitchen to cook, and a giant parlor where we could all eat together and play games. When you travel with this many people, it is always more enjoyable to stay at a house over a hotel so that you can actually be together. Not to mention, my family is quite loud. The first night we stayed there, it was a typical night with nothing out of sorts.
The second night though, things got hinky. At about 2:30 in the morning, I was woken up to a loud bang. I jolted up thinking something was wrong with my cousin, who was 6 months pregnant at the time, to find her sleeping beside me. Then I noted that the light sensor outside our room was on with no one out there. The hallway where my cousin and I were sharing a room had a motion detected light sensor. Then our room started to smell strongly like an old library. You know the smell of an old bookstore that has books decades old, otherwise known as bibliosmia. My cousin was then startled awake from a dream, and in comparison of our dreams, it turns out we had almost the same one. We decided that it was time for us to wake up at that point since sleep was no longer an option when our other cousin across the hall came into our room and asked us what was going on. Apparently, she was seeing the lights and hearing the loud noises as well. Her hair was sticking straight up on her neck, she said. The three of us gathered together to start preparing for the day and packing to go to our next town.
When the rest of the family woke up, we learned that everyone had experienced very similar things the night before – loud noises and strange smells. There were even footsteps heard in the empty parlor followed by the strong smell of a fire being set. Was it ghosts or just the consequence of sleeping in a castle hundreds of years old? I will let you decide, but mind you, this night was the night of the Spring Equinox when the veil separating us is quite thin.
