Did Victor come face to face with the White Lady?

BACK in 1993 there was something rather dramatic going on at Clotworthy House in Antrim - and it had nothing to do with the Oriel Theatre Group.

You see, things had been going bump in the night.

Security man Victor Smiley had heard them. And then, terrifyingly, he caught sight of who - or what - was responsible...

At first Victor thought that vandals had broken into the newly renovated arts centre and were giving him the runaround.

And then he heard the tell-tale knocking coming from the theatre, so he went to investigate.

Peering into the darkness, he spotted the intruder standing silently at the very back of the room

‘Got you!’ he thought as he silently closed the door behind him to block off the only escape route.

But this visitor had another trick up their sleeve - for as Victor approached, the spooky figure disappeared into thin air.

The local man had ‘absolutely no doubt’ what he had seen - and he was pretty certain who it was too.

Most people are familiar with the spectral White Lady who is said to stalk the Castle Gardens by night.

The lady in question is thought to be Ethel Gilligan, a servant who perished in the fire that destroyed the castle back in 1922. In the 1960s reports of her nocturnal walks sparked a ‘ghost watch’ by police - though she failed to put in an appearance.

She has been spotted numerous times since then. In 1978 there were reports of a white figure floating over the Sixmile. A few years later she was seen again, though the eyewitness did confess that had spent a few hours in the Bailiwick Bar beforehand!

Not Ivan, though. He was stone-cold sober and on duty.

Speaking 29-years-ago, he also revealed that he was not scared in the slightest.

“If I saw the ghost again I would probably try to talk to it,” he said.

“I’m not afraid of things like that at all.”

Which is probably just as well, given that Clotworthy creaked with over 150-years of history.

“I regularly hear footsteps in the old building in the small hours,” he said.

“The footsteps sound like they’re on a floor and they’re moving quite quickly.

“The first night I heard them I was sure someone had broken into Clotworthy House and I ran into the courtyard.

“I locked the door behind me so there was no way anyone could get past me. Then I searched every room in the place and found nothing.

“The same thing happened for four nights in a row - and then on the fifth night I saw the white figure at the back of the theatre.

“I closed the door behind me and stood perfectly still because I knew there was no other way out of there. Then the white figure just disappeared.

“It didn’t move away or anything. It just vanished.”

Victor dismissed any notion that his eyes had played tricks on him.

“Definitely not,” he said.

“I've been in this line of work for years and have sat in lots of deserted buildings at night.

“I haven’t got an imaginative mind and I know what I saw and what I heard.”

So take it or leave it. For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who do not, no proof is possible.

The problem with the White Lady is that there is no real pattern to the ‘sightings’. But there is hope for the hardy souls who are deadly serious about coming face to face with the seriously dead.

For the Castle Gardens is a preferred haunt for another ghostly apparition - and, according to believers, you can set your watch by it.

Back in 1973 author Andrew Green published his magnum opus ‘Our Haunted Kingdom’, and in it he relates the story of paranormal activity in the grounds on May 31 each year - on the anniversary of a tragic accident in the 18th century.

“They consist of a large coach with four fine horses seen galloping down the highway from the castle straight into the long pond where the combined apparition sinks out of sight,” he said.

“The incident that caused this persistent haunting occurred when a drunken coachman late one night mistook the moonlit waters for the road surface and plunged himself and his passengers in a cold, wet grave.”

Closer to the ruins of the castle itself, there have been reports of ‘heavy breathing’. Ghost hunters are advised, however, to investigate this one at their peril!

Another alarming manifestation has been spotted at the corner of the Belmont Road and Cunningham Way in Antrim. A number of residents have reported seeing people ‘hanging from trees’. Record suggest that there was indeed a hanging tree in the vicinity. Creepy.

Further along the Dublin Road, close to the British Road, a spirit of a very different kind was spotted as far back as 1991.

While traveling to work a man observed a young girl wearing a ‘long 1900s-type dress’ riding an old fashioned bicycle across the road. When the witness reached the point where he had seen her he realised there were no gaps in the heavy hedge rows - and there were deep ditches and heavily ploughed fields which would have made her journey impossible...

Shane’s Castle has made the list too - and not just for its famous banshee.

Ghostly figures have been seen staring balefully from the trees near the ruin, and in the subterranean tunnels.

Back in 2017 the team also considered a chilling image caught on camera in Randalstown. Ostensibly a picture of a young woman and her little brother, it was only when the 23-year-old examined the picture when she realised there were three faces looking back at her.

For there, on the right of the frame, was another frightening figure glowering down the lens just over the four-year-old’s shoulder.

The picture took on a life of its own, with one Guardian reader suggesting that it could in fact be his grandfather who had vowed in his death bed to return from beyond the grave after his landlord had refused to pass the tenancy on to his son.

Whether he succeeded or not is anyone’s guess, but down the years two families fled unexpectedly from the property...

Witchcraft also features heavily in local lore. Back in 1698 Antrim’s witch hunters were out in force following an alarming incident in the town.

A 19-year-old girl fell gravely ill after she was given a sorrel leaf by an ‘evil harridan’. George Sinclair in his early 18th century study of the supernatural - ‘Satan’s Invisible World’ - gave a graphic account of what happened next.

‘It was scarcely swallowed by her but she began to be tortured in the bowels, to tremble all over and even was convulsive and in time swooned away as dead’, said the scribe.

‘They sent for the Minister, who scarce had laid his hand upon her when she was turned by the demon in the most dreadful shapes.’

Alarming symptoms indeed, but then the already extraordinary case took yet another unexpected turn.

‘She began to rowl herself about, then to vomit needles, pins, hairs, feathers, bottoms of thread, pieces of glass, window nails, nails drawn out of a cart or coach wheel, an iron knife about a span long, eggs and fish scales’.

It may not stand up in court today, but the angry locals had seen enough. A lynch mob descended on the ‘hag’s hovel’ and she was strangled . She was then burned at the stake just to make sure.

Just 15-years-later another Antrim woman felt the wrath of the puritanical rabble. In his 1913 study ‘Irish Witchcraft and Demonology’, St John Seymour uncovered the case of another unfortunate wretch killed for dabbling in things ‘best left alone’.

The penniless old woman was driven to distraction by the ‘cruel and barbarous’ treatment she received from her fellow townsfolk who believed she was a witch.

To escape their jibes she sought refuse in a cave near the Old Meeting House in the town. But this self-imposed exile did nothing to quell the rising tide of resentment. Indeed, for some her decision to ‘live like a wild woman’ only confirmed their suspicions.

Sadly it was quite literally a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. The woman was dragged screaming from her makeshift home and stabbed to death. Her body was then torn asunder with much of it thrown into a bonfire and the rest scattered over places she was supported to have exercised her ‘evil influence’.

For years after her execution her ghost, in the form of a goat, was said the haunt the Meeting House. It was known as ‘McGregor’s Ghost’ after the saintly Sexton who had hastened the woman’s demise.

Threats of a nocturnal visit were used to chasten naughty children. The irony, of course, is that Antrim’s own bogey man was guilty of no other crime than looking the part.

There are many other tales of Antrim’s restless dead, with real life calamity often blurring into lurid fancy.

A couple of years back the Antrim Guardian revealed the location of the ‘Rebels’ Grave’ on Massereene golf course where many of the dead or dying from the 1798 Battle of Antrim were unceremoniously dumped. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the area has lore of its own.

Back in the winter of 1975 an intrepid Antrim Guardian reporter set out to investigate sightings of ‘the walking dead’ near the greens.

‘Lately there have been reports of mysterious nocturnal visitations in the region of the Lough Road, along the pleasant fairways of Massereene.

‘Several people walking along the quiet road towards the Sixmile have been startled by the eerie groanings and rumblings and then dim, shadowy figures running - apparently in great distress - and uttering queer panting sounds.

‘Just as quickly they disappear towards the grey waters of the Lough and merciful oblivion. Some time later, however, they reappear still uttering low cries of distress along the shores of the Lough.

‘Dimmer figures because of the distance, with pleading, extended arms stretched imploringly towards the comfortable lights of the clubhouse and Antrim in the distance disappear into the shadowy trees behind the 18th green. Some time elapses before their plaintive panting starts to fade away, leaving the spectators wan and shaken.

‘What ghostly figures are these? What ghastly events do they portend? No-one knows and we have only a slim chance of finding out’.

Cynics might suggest it was probably nothing more sinister than swans. Complete and utter nonsense. Case closed.

Until, of course, you hear that footstep on the stair in the dead of night, that breath in the darkness, that tap on the window...