With Halloween upon us we will be keeping our eyes open for the Ghosts of Glenarm Castle, should they decide to grace us with their presence.

Inevitably there are ghost stories, although sometimes it was the teller rather than the tale that was memorable.  One young man asked the 10^th Earl about his famous ghost story, but the Earl’s tale disintegrated into such a meandering of disconnected anecdotes that finally the young man asked him what had become of the ghost.  The Earl looked at him furiously: “The ghost!  What ghost?  I know nothing of a ghost, nor dammit do I care!”

Fortunately a better-described ghost appeared in 1853 to a guest, who saw a figure standing in his bedroom doorway.  “She was tall, with a careworn face and deep-set eyes.  She wore what seemed, in the momentary sight I had, a short petticoat of blue and brown homespun.  Her arms were extended, holding the strings of a cap with frills such as the Irish women used to wear.”

Two years later, another guest saw the same figure, who “wore a mop cap, and was holding the strings out in a dazed manner with bare arms.  “Well?”  I cried sharply, and she was gone.”  Then, curiously, the ghost reappeared in the 1990s, once again in or near guests’ bedrooms.  Just as before, the woman seemed so real to those who saw her that they thought she must be a servant dressed in the fashion of an earlier age.