Loftus Hall ~ Part 1 ~
Hey everyone! Was snopping on the website, and notice that there hasn't really being any ghost stories submitted in awhile,
so I thought that I add another Irish one in :)
Hope everyone is still interested and are not getting annoyed with my random posts?
SOURCE: http://www.abandonedireland.com/Loftus_Hall.html
Charles Tottenham, Baron Loftus, had been married to the Honourable Anne Loftus, daughter of the first
Viscount Loftus. Anne Loftus however died in 1768 and in 1770, Tottenham married his cousin Jane Cliffe.
Tottenham lived in the houe with his second wife, Jane, and his daughter from his first marriage, Anne.
During a storm, a ship unexpectedly arrived at the Hook Peninsula and when a young man called at the
Loftus mansion he was welcomed in. The young man stayed several days and became close friends to
Tottenham's daughter, Anne. Indeed it was said the entire household became intoxicated with the young
man's charm.
One evening the party sat around a table to play a game of cards. Although it was not the custom for a lady
to play cards, Anne insisted and joined the table. When she dropped a card on the floor, and leant down
to pick it up, her glance strayed and she noticed the young man had a hoof in place of a foot. She
screamed, and as the party discovered their guest was in fact the devil in disguise, the young man showed
his true form and then disappeared through the ceiling in a puff of smoke, leaving a vile sulphuric stench
and a large hole in the plaster work behind him.
Legend relates that the hole in the ceiling could never be properly repaired and can still be seen today.
This is of course a myth as the entire house was demolished in 1870, when the new Loftus hall was built.
Anne fell deeply in shock, she refused food and drink and became bed bound in the Tapestry room. Her
health and mental state deteriorated. Becoming an embarrassment to her family, she was hidden away,
locked in the room for days on end. Around this time the house became infested with a particularly
virulent poltergeist. A number of Protestants, eventually called on Father Thomas Broaders, a Catholic
priest who was a tenant on their estate, to exorcise the house.
In spite of fierce opposition from at least one hostile spirit, Fater Broaders managed to rid the house of
its evil forces. The success of Broaders led to many concessions being made to local Catholics whose
religion, at that time, was still technically illegal.
Father Broader's gravestone can still be seen today. It is populary, but incorrectly, believed to contain
the inscription "Here lies the body of Thomas Broaders, who did good and prayed for all, and who
banished the devil from Loftus Hall."
In the 1940s the door to the Tottenham mausoleum was vandalised and Anne's strangely shaped coffin was
discovered. The coffin's unnatural shap was apparently, due to the fact that before her death, Anne's
bones had become fused into a strange distorted form.
I find it interesting that most haunting stories in Ireland, the Devil usually shows up! Still an interesting story!
Any Devil stories around your way?
64747 Category:(Hauntings) Created:(2/3/2014 2:13:00 PM)