Leap Castle

Leap Castle stands near Roscrea in County Offaly, in the Irish midlands. The O’Carroll clan built it around 1250. For the next seven centuries, the castle accumulated violence the way other buildings accumulate dust.

The Bloody Chapel

In 1532, a member of the O’Carroll family known as One-Eyed Teige murdered his brother during mass. The brother was a priest. He was saying the liturgy at the altar when Teige drove a sword through him. The chapel where it happened has been called the Bloody Chapel ever since.

The O’Carrolls later hired forty McMahon mercenaries for a campaign. When the campaign ended, they invited the mercenaries to a feast at Leap Castle. The food was poisoned. All forty died.

The Oubliette

During nineteenth-century renovations, workers discovered a hidden dungeon beneath the Bloody Chapel. It was an oubliette: a pit accessible only through a trapdoor in the floor above. Prisoners were dropped in and forgotten. The pit contained hundreds of skeletons, enough to fill three cartloads when they were removed. Some of the bones showed signs of having been impaled on wooden spikes set into the floor of the pit.

The Elemental

In the 1900s, Mildred Darby, wife of the castle’s owner, practiced occultism in the castle. She reportedly attempted a seance or ritual that released something she called the Elemental. She described it as a hunched, roughly human-shaped creature about the size of a sheep, with a grey decaying face and black holes for eyes. It smelled of decomposition. It was not a ghost in the traditional sense. It was something else.

The Elemental has been reported by subsequent occupants and visitors. It is associated with the Bloody Chapel and the area above the oubliette.

Visiting

Leap Castle is privately owned by musician Sean Ryan, who has been restoring it since 1991. It is open to visitors by appointment. Ghost tours and overnight stays are occasionally offered. The Bloody Chapel and the oubliette are accessible. The castle is about ninety minutes from Dublin by car.