Last month, a tourist named Thomas Beavis took a photo at Loftus Hall in County Wexford, Ireland. The photo appears to show the translucent phantom of a young girl at the mansion’s entrance.
‘Ghost of little girl’ photographed in notorious haunted mansion Loftus Hall http://t.co/e76dYoF0Sx
— Metro (@MetroUK) August 27, 2014
Now, this may not be an actual ghost (as it’s a photo and we all know how that goes), but a strange legend does haunt the mansion, one that involves the devil himself.
The Legend of Loftus Hall
According to Wikipedia, the legend dates back to 1766 when Charles Tottenham and his family, including his daughter Anne, came to the mansion.
One night, a terrible storm occurred, and a ship unexpectedly arrived at the Hook Peninsula, not far from the mansion. The family welcomed a young, mysterious man from the ship inside, to provide him shelter from the storm. He and Anne quickly became close friends.
Some nights later, the family and the mysterious man decided to play cards together. During the game, each player received three cards, except for Anne, who found she had only two. Thinking she had dropped her card on the floor, she bent down to pick it up. However, as she looked beneath the table, she noticed that the mysterious man had a cloven foot.
Anne jumped up with fright and shouted, “You have a cloven foot!” and the man, revealing himself to be the Devil in disguise, shot up through the roof and vanished.
Soon after, Anne became mentally ill. Locked away in her room, hidden from the world, she refused food and drink and sat with her knees under her chin looking out the window, out across the sea toward Dunmore East, waiting for her mysterious stranger to return. He never did, and she died in 1775.
To end this macabre tale, it’s said that the ghost of Anne Tottenham still haunts Loftus Hall. Could she be the translucent figure in Beavis’s photograph? How about the second figure in the lower right?
As unlikely as it is – the spectre in the photo could very well just be a reflection or even another hoax – there’s no doubt that it adds to the mansion’s already impressive mystique.
