Extreme Hauntings: Britain's Most Terrifying Ghosts by Adams Paul & Brazil Eddie

Author:Adams, Paul & Brazil, Eddie [Adams, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Killakee House and tower, Rathfarnham near Dublin, whose violent history includes tales of devil-worship, murder and haunting. (South Dublin County Libraries)

Killakee lies in the shadow of Montpelier Hill, a steep rise on which, around the same time, William Conolly, the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, also built a second stone hunting lodge, one which, unlike the Stewards House, commanded views out in all directions over the surrounding countryside. This building occupied the site of a prehistoric cairn from which stones were taken and used as part of the new structure. Conolly died in 1729, after which the lodge became associated with the activities of Richard Parsons, the 1st Earl of Rosse. A Freemason and noted libertine, he was born in 1702 and became the 1st Earl on his sixteenth birthday. At one time the Grandmaster of the Grand Lodge of Ireland, Parsons followed the example of his close English contemporary, the likeminded Sir Francis Dashwood, 2nd Baronet and later fifteenth Baron le Despenser, and established the first incarnation of the Dublin Hell-Fire Club, with the lodge on the summit of Montpelier Hill as its principle meeting place. In West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, for a period of four years beginning in 1748, Dashwood had employed local labourers and farmhands made idle through a series of poor harvests to dig out a network of interconnecting tunnels and chambers that sank deep into the chalk under West Wycombe Hill, and it was here that he held court over orgiastic ceremonies and pseudo-Satanic ceremonies dedicated to unrestrained excess and the parody of conventional religious worship and practice.

At Wycombe, Dashwood located the deepest of these artificial caves directly under the fourteenth-century church of St Lawrence to create a veritable ‘church in Hell’, and although the lodge at Killakee was not so grand in its design or bold in its construction, the Earl of Rosse likewise drew around him a company of young bucks and libertinous intellectuals whose activities, like the English ‘Monks of Medmenham’, involved a wild explosion of drinking, gambling, prostitution and possibly even murder. Those involved included Henry Barry, known as Lord Santry, a violent and drunken rake who killed a man in an unprovoked attack following a drinking binge in a tavern in Palmerstown in 1738, Colonel Jack St Leger, who co-founded the Club with Parsons, and Richard ‘Burnchapel’ Whaley, a notorious descendant of Oliver Cromwell. The Hell-Fire Club normally met at the Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill in Dublin, but the Conolly family also gave Parsons and his fellow revellers the use of Montpellier Hill, with the result that the lodge has become inextricably linked with stories of dark and sinister deeds involving gambling, pistol duelling, Satanism, black masses and even cannibalism.

Some form of devil worship was almost certainly practised by Richard Parsons and his cronies at Killakee. It was said that one chair was always left empty during the Hell-Fire Club meetings in case Satan himself decided to grace the club with a personal appearance, and on one occasion the Earl of Rosse placed a black cat in the seat of honour to make up for the master’s absence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.