Priest called in as family flees ‘ghost’ house.
From Paul Williams in Granard.
A terrified Co. Longford family told yesterday how they called in a priest in a bid to ‘exorcise’ a sinister presence from their home. The Flynn family fled their new council home in Granard last week just days after they had moved in. Since then they’ve been squatting in a condemned, fallen down shack which is due for demolition.
The four bedroomed house at Trumra Road in the town was like a dream come true for homeless, unemployed father of nine, Jimmy flynn (37). From the first night they slept in the house, he, his wife and children – have lived through a nightmare.
Drawers in the kitchen began opening and closing mysteriously after dark and a loud pounding noise could be heard in the bedroom walls. Religious pictures fell off the walls and the stairs creaked noisily. “I never even thought of ghosts before this… but it was the most terrifying experience in my life,” Jimmy told Sunday World yesterday. His wife Jackie was first to encounter the strange forces that drove her family out of their new home. The fist evening in the house she was making tea in the kitchen when she felt something.
“I went all cold and felt there was someone standing behind me. I ran out to Jimmy but he felt nothing,” Jackie Flynn told us. A few nights later the Flynns began hearing the sinister noises in their new home. “We heard the drawers in the kitchen banging opening and closing and the pounding on the walls started and would get louder if we tried to ignore it,” Jimmy Flynn explained.
The family claimed that the noises would only start at night when they were in bed. Three days later local curate Fr. Holmes visited and blessed the house to allay their fears. “The priest told us there would be no more trouble and that we could sleep easy. I put up religious pictures in every room in the house and got holy water,” a frightened Jimmy Flynn added. But the intervention of the Church made no difference according to the homeless family. “That night the noises got worse as if the forces were angry with us,” Jackie Flynn recalled.
And each night after the visit of the priest the sinister happenings got worse to the point that the Flynn’s and their children were too terrified to sleep. On the last night they slept in the house a brother and cousin came to stay to experience the macabre phenomena for themselves. “We all stayed in the bedroom and around 2 a.m. the noises started again,” recalled Jimmy. “My brother went to the bedroom door to leave and something stopped him. Then the noise got worse like there was someone big jumping up and down on the ceiling. I was sitting up on the bed and threw holy water in the direction of the noises and something chilling rushed past me,” he added.
Then his wife claims to have seen a “shadow” along the wall which seemed to grow. “We were afraid of our lives and just had to leave,” she said nervously. The next morning the Flynns left the house at Trumra Road.
Since last week’s mysterious happenings the Council Housing department have boarded up their house and say they are going to rent it to other tenants. “As far as we know there is nothing in that house and as soon as possible we will have new tenants there,” a council spokesman told Sunday World. And the local parish priest Fr. Frank Kelly last night denied that he had carried out anything like an exorcism. He did confirm that he and the local Curate had prayed in the house together since the flight of the terrified family. It was just an ordinary blessing and I wouldn’t regard it as terribly exceptional,” the parish priest told us. But while he expressed doubt that supernatural forces were at work in the house he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that something sinister had happened to the Flynns.
Fr. Frank Kelly… denies he carried out an exorcism in the house.
The house at 42 Trumra Road, Granard, that turned into a nightmare for the Flynn family.
Jimmy and Jackie Flynn with one of the pictures they used to keep the “powers” away from them.
Sunday World (Dublin), 15th May 1988.