Derrygonnelly Poltergeist

The case broke out in 1877 in a farm cottage stranded some seven miles beyond Enniskillen, past the hamlet of Derrygonnelly in County Fermanagh. William Fletcher Barrett, who went there, called it one of the loneliest spots in the country: sunk in the hollow of a field, with no other house in sight, the bog stretching before it and the limestone cliffs of Knockmore behind. It held a grey-headed farmer who had just been widowed (his wife had died a few weeks before Easter that year) together with four daughters and one boy; the youngest was about ten, the eldest, Maggie, about twenty. The noises began once the girls had gone to bed in the room off the kitchen, and went on night after night. The family blamed rats at first. They stopped blaming rats when objects began to move on their own.

The repertoire was short and stubborn: raps, scratchings, stones falling inside the house and, above all, candles and boots thrown out of it over and over. What wore the family down most was being left without light, because candles and lamps vanished beyond recovery; they took to keeping them in a neighbour's house and fetching them lit each night. Another neighbour, Jack Flanigan, lent them his own, swearing the devil himself could not steal it since he had got the priest to sprinkle it with holy water; by the next day that lamp had gone too. Being Methodists, they did not send for the priest their neighbours urged on them: their class leader advised laying an open Bible on the bed. They did so, in the name of God, weighting it with a big stone. The stone was found lifted off and the Bible set on top of it; afterwards the book was carried out of the room with seventeen pages torn right across.

It was Thomas Plunkett of Enniskillen, a student of the county's geology and archaeology then exploring some prehistoric limestone caves nearby, who alerted Barrett. Barrett came, and on the first night had Maggie lie down fully dressed so that her hands and feet stayed in view; the raps sounded all the same on the walls, the ceiling, the chairs and the bed itself, and a large pebble fell onto the bed in front of him. Whenever he set the candle back on the kitchen window-sill the knocks grew louder, like a carpenter's hammer driving nails into flooring. The next day he telegraphed to Dublin for the Reverend Maxwell Close, a man of great learning and one of the earliest members of the Society for Psychical Research, and they went back together. The test that made the case famous came then. The family had already tried the alphabet, but the farmer distrusted it: the thing lied as often as it told the truth, and would only knock at L, M and N. Barrett asked mentally, without a word spoken, for a certain number of knocks, and got exactly that number. Then he put his hands in his overcoat pockets and asked it to knock the number of fingers he held open: it was right four times running, with a different number each time.

On the last night the farmer begged them not to leave without ridding him of the thing. Barrett asked Close to read a few verses and offer a prayer. At first the knocks drowned his voice; they subsided as he prayed, and when everyone joined in the Lord's Prayer a profound stillness fell on the cottage. According to the letters Plunkett went on sending him, the poltergeist fled that very night and did not return, until some curious visitors who had read the published account turned up at the cottage to provoke it: they said it came back feebly and furtively, though Barrett never knew whether that was genuine or Maggie's wish to please her callers. He told all of this in the Dublin University Magazine for December 1877, under the title The Demons of Derrygonnelly, and summarised it in 1911 for the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, which he had himself helped found in 1882; until then the case had never appeared in the society's papers. It is worth knowing what those pages do not contain, because modern retellings supply it: no family surname appears, there is no ghostly apparition and no figure of a woman or a child, no ropes or scales were used, and the affair did not end in hymns nor drag on to 1879.