The Spirit of Enniscorthy
Irish and Celtic myths and legends, Irish folklore and Irish fairy tales and Irish Ghost Stories
Mind would you hear any thing that goes bump in the night
The Redmonds were a comfortably well off family living in Court street in Enniscorthy back in 1910, and they supplemented their income by renting out rooms in their house to lodgers. However, their quiet life was soon to be interrupted by a sinister guest they hadn't invited in!
In July of that year they had rented out the room above the kitchen to three tradesmen who were working nearby. One of the men, a carpenter by the name of John Randall, was laying asleep on the 7th, when all of a shot the bedclothes were pulled clean off him. He half woke, believing his room mates were messing with him, and called out for them to stop.
The other two denied responsibility, and they lit a match to see what had happened, finding John's bedclothes in a heap near to the window. They gathered up the blankets and went back to sleep.
But they would get little rest that night! Before too long, a loud tapping was heard, getting faster and faster, until just when it was at its fastest, the bed of the other two men slid suddenly across the floor!
Frightened now, they lit a lamp, looking for some natural explanation, but none was to be found, so they called the landlord out of his own bed, and were told to move the bed back to where it had been. Poor John was so scared he refused to sleep in the one bed by himself, so the three of them shared the large bed.
No sooner had they closed their eyes than the bed once again moved into the middle of the room! They stayed awake the rest of the night, hearing footsteps throughout the house, and these peculiar goings-on persisted the rest of their stay.
On one occasion, a chair began to rock back and forth by itself, and on another, phantom hands lifted one of them up in the air. On July the 29th, the bed was flipped entirely on its side, sending the men down in a heap to the floor, and they swore afterwards it made no sound as it righted itself.
Well of course the local press got wind of these events and decided to go see for themselves, so the Guardian sent a man called Murphy to have a look, with the permission of the Redmonds. Another fellow by the name of Devereux joined him, and they set up between the two beds in the room.
Around midnight they heard the tapping, and thought it was rats chewing, but their scepticism soon vanished with Randall's bedclothes under the bed! Having checked for wires or other trickery, they were at a loss to explain how this had happened.
Eventually Randall himself was wrapped in his sheets and dragged from his bed before the horrified eyes of the reporters, and the tradesmen left the next morning. By the end of it, John Randall was a shadow of the man he had been.
To this day, no explanation has been found.
Enniscorthy can be found on the map below.
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