School: Drakestown, Ardee (roll number 1554)
- Location:
- Drakestown, Co. Louth
- Teacher: Michael Ó Flynn
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0668, Page 325
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- The following story is told in this locality. The scene of the incident is Drakestown House. The house no longer remains as it was demolished last year by the Irish Land Commission when the Drakestown estate was divided. The incident happened about 100 years ago.
According to the story the ghost who took the form of a woman occupied a room in the top storey of the mansion. The owner, a Protestant gave the site of the present Catholic Church of Ballapousta in order to obtain the power of the priest to banish the ghost. The priest with great difficultly succeeded in taking the ghost from the mansion and he put her into a big tree in the lawn.
In the course of time the ghost returned to the mansion. The priest was summoned again and he banished the ghost to the Red Sea. When she was leaving she was heard to say the words "for ever and ever".
About fifteen years ago a timber merchant bought timber on the Drakestown estate and amongst the trees which he bought was the "ghost tree". This tree was cut through but refused to fall. It remained standing that night and next day it was pulled down(continues on next page)
