CASTLE PLUNKETT
Location: Castle Plunkett is perched in an area of Ireland close to Haughlin Bog near Dromore in the shadow of the Knockmealdown Mountains in Waterford County, once part of the ancient province of Munster. Guests are welcome year round with reservations often booked well in advance.
Description of Place: Plunkett Castle is a prime example of most Irish castles with turrets and towers around a courtyard. Even with modern additions and restorations over the years, much of the aging and drafty edifice's rooms and corridors have been closed off. Only eight rooms are welcome to guests. The interior includes a vast main hall with a grand iron-wrought fireplace, a guest dining hall, on-site tavern and a gift shop. It should be noted that with the unpredictability of spirits that some of the corridors have been equipped with modest and simplified fake ghost effects. The rates are modest, the local cuisine optional with the stay and the rooms requiring the patience of guests who are willing to experience life as it was in days of yore.
Ghostly Manifestations: Upon reaching Castle Plunkett, the typical guest is sure to meet the thin, gaunt figure of its owner standing out front. He is quite real and quite alive with a lively twinkle in his eyes and an Irish brogue dancing through his voice. Tall and bold with a regal air, the impeccably-dressed presence of a man might seem to be pale at first, but his personality and voice are a welcome guide to what is sure to be a daring stay. He is Master Peter Plunkett, the castle's owner and host to the guests arriving at the castle. With sherry in hand, he proudly boasts the claim of Plunkett Castle being "the most haunted castle on the Emerald Isle where the ghosts outnumber the living." He cannot insure a good night's sleep, but he will confess that some of the ghosts are fake when the real ones prove to be too elusive.
The full inventory of hauntings in the castle would practically fill a book in itself. Suits of armor sometimes shudder, inexplicable winds pour through the interiors, furniture moves and changes location, shadows as well as figures have been seen, objects vanish or move about, voices and sounds come from closed off rooms and sensations of being touched by disembodied persons occur. The sheer layout of the place often dismays guests. Persons thinking they are heading to the main hall have become incredibly lost and confused in the myriad layout of rooms as if "the walls and doors were constantly changing location." It seems as if the location becomes truly active at times when the castle is in financial trouble because since the castle began taking guests, the actual ghosts seem to have become more active than ever before.
"My father..." Master Peter Plunkett sits with scotch in hand and a cigarette in the other. "died during a walk in the garden, but that has not stopped my mother, God bless her, from talking to him. Fifty-eight years of marriage and when he finally gets a chance to get away from her, he's got her voice going on into eternity. I can walk by her room and she will be in the middle of a long story. She'll acknowledge myself, her only son, and then continue exactly where she left off in her story. Now, she either truly exists my father is still around, or she's jumped head first into the vast sea of senility. God bless her little lonely heart, but now her stories are getting to everyone else because at one time or another, my father's ghost, or some blaggart who looks just like him has been seen pacing deep in thought through the garden. Eamon, one of the castle caretakers, just saw the sodden old specter just last week standing there, arms thrust up like this, chin to his chest and just staring at him as if he was bloody Jack the Ripper!"
The late Peter Plunkett Sr. also seems to be a bit of a peeping tom to get away from his wife still in the realm of the living. Female guests have described a person resembling him loitering in the bathrooms when they are taking showers, or trying to get dressed. One American actress staying here in 1995 for a movie filmed in location came streaking down to the grand hall with open décolletage because someone was leering at her from the window, but she didn't even have a ledge outside her window. Female guests in the castle pub have felt someone blowing in their ears, caressing them and palming their hair. Master Plunkett has seen this domino effect several times as one young lady jumps up and looks round and then straight down, one after another, all the seated young ladies jump or look around for the flirtatious guest. Several young men have been slapped just for the price of standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Peter's mother, however, doesn't blame her departed husband for all this flirting. She blames the majority of sexual carousing on Martin Brogan, the member of a rival clan who committed suicide in the castle.
"Sometime around 1658," Peter tells the story. "there was a brief truce between the feuding families, and Old Martin was given the hand of my distant cousin, Mary Plunkett. Now, that marriage was built in hell before it even existed. Mary did not even like Martin, and was forced into this marriage against her will. When she refused to share a bed with him, he accused her of being unfaithful and murdered her on their wedding night before taking his own life. This did not sit well with the Brogans who branded poor Mary, innocent and harmless as she was, a witch and an adulteress, and the feud starts up again anyway, but then, there's no peace when dealing with a Brogan. They were sired for war and being difficult. Regardless, since then, Mary's screams have echoed from her room as she relives the night of her murder into eternity while Martin spends the rest of his time trolling for sweet young pieces of flesh down here."
During his stay in 1988, Jack Crawford, an American CPA, reportedly saw Mary's apparition somewhere around ten times when he stayed near her old marital chamber. Admittedly drunk at first, he testifies having seen Mary emerging from a bricked up arch and racing into her room with the tall powerful form of martin in pursuit.
"I think she made a emotional link with me or something." Jack recently told Steve Barnette of the Collinsport Ghost Society. "She looked real, but ethereal, but Martin looked practically solid, like a real person, but when I reached to grab him, there was nothing there. I looked again, and there was nothing there, but Mary returned several times. I saw her reflection in a mirror, I saw her form sitting upstairs in the window seat and again outside beneath a tree." Jack chuckles a bit. "My wife kept telling me she was a figment of my imagination, but Mary must not have liked that and must have confronted her sometime when I wasn't around because by time we left, my wife suddenly was a lot nicer to me and more romantic than she ever had." Jack's mind starts drifting off and he scowls as he continues. "She also developed an Irish brogue as if...."He makes a knowing grin and draws silent. "Well, that's just impossible."
Several guests have been alarmed by the visages of spectral nuns on the castle grounds. What's so alarming about these ghosts is that they seem to be the most frightening of the Castle Plunkett gallery of ghosts. Where their faces should be are nothing but black voids within their empty coronets. Others have described tiny red eyes staring out from those vacant headdresses. Three to four spectral nuns have been seen floating down halls or through rooms. When the Castle first opened as retreat in 1988, a young priest on sabbatical here confessed to be pursued by them and jumped down into the wading pool to escape them. Several years later, in 1993, an eleven-year old girl saw one of them standing at the foot of her bed in the middle of the night and started screaming her head off. Master Plunkett and Eamon O'Toole have heard the long rustling of their skirts dragging across the rooms without seeing a single thing.
The remarkable thing is that these ghosts don't seem to know they are dead. They appear in dark corners, sitting in chairs out of eye shot, wander out of view, try to be helpful and get into mischief when they aren't watched. Glasses of whisky left unclaimed are finished off, books not returned to shelves return on their own, the belongings of guests are neatly tucked away and people loitering in the corners vanish into nothing. Once in a while, a guest still unfamiliar with the interior gets directions from a lady in period dress or strikes up a conversation with someone they befriend in the library. When they try to make company with their friendly benefactor once more, the news almost always is that they don't exist or that had died years before.
"We have our own personal food taster here and no one knows who or where he is." Master Plunkett insists. "Fingerprints appear in the icing of cakes and half-empty bottles of fresh sherry pop up in the darndest of places. Pipes rattle and shake as if something is crawling up the sides of them and doors close and lock all the time. One day, the door to my office closed by itself while I was down beside it, and I said, half in jest, "Father, have you finally decided to say hello." and it opened up again and stayed open."
"There's been a lot of documented and unconfirmed hauntings at the old castle." Parapsychologist Malcolm Clay had originally come to Plunkett to debunk it, but he's changed his view on it and has come back several times to document new experiences. "There's been poltergeist activity in the old nursery, images of a ghostly couple dancing in the main hall, sounds of laughter and talking in the parapets, extra shadows from empty corridors... There's been a lot of phenomenon here to suggest something is happening here. Admittedly, when I first came here, it was with the intention and preconceived notion to expose a hoax, and I was inexplicably struck by lightning or something as a result and knocked straight to my back. I survived that, and my hair has yet to go back to normal!"
"I don't know how many ghosts we have, nor am I sure if they are aware of each other." Master Plunkett continues. "The names of them are many; there's my father, Great Aunt Nan in the northeast bedroom, Uncle Toby in the kitchen, an Elizabethan lady in the corridor, my Uncle Oliver's illegitimate son in the library, the nuns bricked up in the walls, Lady Purebride riding naked on the horse, poor Mary and her stupid lout of a husband..."
It was at that moment that Martin took offense. During the interview in the great hall, there had been a number of items on display on table in the sitting area. One of the objects was a glass cigarette holder and it had been relatively stationary during the interview. Upon the words, "stupid lout of a husband," the glass bric-a-brac suddenly flew across the room nearly clipping Master Plunkett square to the face but instead smashing into the wall above the souvenir counter behind Jack as if someone had come along and swatted it off the table. Everything went quiet at that moment as one of the Plunkett Castle staff routinely collected broom and pan to clean the mess.
History: The castle has been in the Plunkett family for over five hundred years. It was possibly built in or around the Eleventh century, possibly around a much older pre-existing Celtic stronghold. Struggles with bankruptcy through the turn of the century required family members to borrow money from other landowners such as the Brogan family with whom the Plunketts have been feuding with for years. According to some accounts, the feud between the two families has been going on for centuries. Recent serious money problems led to the opening of the castle as a retreat to the public much to the advantage of the ghosts.
Identity of Ghosts: The majority of the ghosts are named after deceased family members, but this is by no means accurate since new phenomenon over the years was often named after the last person who died. A few of the identities of the spirits can be wholly identified by the rooms and activities of the deceased. While it is unclear if figures such as Lady Amelia Purebride on the horse truly existed, the more notorious figures haunting the castle include Master Peter Plunkett Sr. whose frightening visage has been reported often resembling exactly how he looked in life. Mary Plunkett was a 17th Century maiden forced into a marriage with Martin Brogan of a rival clan, but he accused her of not being faithful on their wedding night and murdered her that same night. He later took his life in a rage by hurling his body from the parapets upon realizing what he had done. However, their repeating behavior over several years has all the earmarks of a place memory on the site rather than surviving consciousnesses.
Source/Comments: High Spirits (1988), Phenomenon and description based on Stirling Castle in Scotland and St. Joseph University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Actor Steve Guttenberg ("Jack Crawford") also starred in two other haunted house/ghost movies: "Tower of Terror" and "Casper: A Spirited Beginning," as well as "Three Men and A Baby," a movie surrounded by a ghostly controversy.
Actor Peter Gallagher ("Father Tony") also starred in "House on Haunted Hill," another haunted house movie.