story and photograph credit to u/drink_the_wild_air
I was born & raised in the States, but my mother is Irish, and her father's (my Grandpaddy) family owned a large farm outside a small village in the SE of Ireland.
I would say the farmhouse now is probably 200+ years old, but I don't have exact dates. All I know is it's so infamously haunted that it has its own folklore surrounding it down in the village. They say that the house was built on the axis coming out from the parish church, which acts as a roadway for the spirits. So basically our home blocks them from continuing on and the ghosts get stuck there. They also say that when the house was being built, an old man that nobody recognized appeared three days in a row, warning that if they didn't stop building this house, someone would die. The next day, a set of scaffolding collapsed and three workers were killed.
Anyway! Pretty much anyone who has stayed overnight in the house has had weird experiences. Anything from the innocuous -- my cousins living there now have had their keys moved, or things knocked over -- to the more intense, which I'll get into.
So my Mom spent all her summers growing up in the house. At the time, only my great uncle lived there. She liked to go into the formal parlor to read during her visits, since it was quiet because it was literally never used. She said that occasionally she would go into the parlor, only to find all of the heavy dining room furniture moved around. You could even see the indentations in the carpet from where it had been before.
One night, she also was lying in bed in her room, which was on the second floor at the end of a long hallway. She had just gotten into bed so she was wide awake when, suddenly, every hair on her body stood on end, and she had the sensation like everything in the room was getting bigger. Then, out of nowhere, she heard footsteps, starting from her bedroom door, SPRINT down the hall and down the stairs. Keep in mind the only other person in the house was my great uncle, who was well into his 70s at that time, and not really in sprinting shape. In fact, the next morning, he even said to her, "why did you run downstairs last night?" She said that wasn't her, and she guessed then it wasn't him, to which he simply replied, "Right, I guess we had a visit from our little friends last night."
Obviously living there full time, my uncle had tons of weird shit happen to him. The creepiest being this: one night around Christmas time, he was walking home from mass in the village. Now when you're walking out of the village, our house is set up on a hill, in plain view of the road. So he notices that every single light is on.
"Great!" he thinks, "someone must have come for a holiday visit." So he struts up the lane, all excited to see who was there. Except when he turns the corner to go into the yard behind the house, there are no cars. Odd, but not inexplicable.
He checks the milk can that has the spare key. It's still there.
At this point, he can still see that all the lights are on, and he can even hear music playing. But there wasn't a soul in sight.
Now, my uncle was not a foolish man, and he was not about to ruin their "spirited" party. So he sat himself down in the barn across the yard and waited, and waited, and waited for it to settle down.
Finally, all of a sudden, everything -- all the lights and the music -- just turned off at once.
And then he just went in and went to bed. Let's just say that wouldn't have been my reaction.
