The family of a labouring man, named James Burns, who lives at Steelstown, convenient to the race-course, have been greatly disturbed and annoyed for several weeks past, by a series of occurrences, which it is impossible to refer to natural causes. Stones and turf have been flung about the house in all directions; spoons lifted by some invisible hand and thrown upon a loft; the crook displaced before their eyes, and the bed-clothes rolled quickly and tightly up and then expanded, and this repeated a number of times.
The money has been taken from their pockets and found in parts of the premises where they would never have thought of putting it, and the man’s wife had experienced the operation of the spull [sic] even in a neighbour’s house, a huge stone having been thrown down the chimney at her.
The pot-stick, as if self-moved, came whack upon a little girl’s back, and knocked her prostrate – the effect of the blow she still complains of.
Deeply sympathising with this afflicted family, who ultimately were obliged to quit the residence, two men, who, it is alleged, knew more than it would be lawful to name, and who, it is currently reported, possess some cabalistic works which escaped the conflagration at Ephesus, repaired thither on Sunday night last, accompanied by a promising youth, an aspirant to the arcana of Masonry, resolved to have a bout with his Satanic Majesty.
Having procured a taper to chase away the tenebrosity which is so congenial to demons, they had recourse to a number of incantations, of the efficacy of which they profess to be quite confident. Time, alone, however, can determine this; but civil Paddy Barr, who lives at the race-course, positively declares that having passed the Gazebo at the very hour when the exorcists were going on with their operations, he saw something as black as a crow shoot past him, and plunge into the Ballyarnet Loch, and that immediately a dense smoke began to ascend from the water.
Our readers are, of course, at liberty to believe or disbelieve this; but we can assure them it is no fiction. Derry Paper.
Saunders’s News-Letter, 28th September 1827.
as above in many papers.
also (following ‘it is no fiction’):
We beg to correct an error in the above. It was a large piece of fir which struck the little girl. She lies at the point of death. The day before the evil spirit was laid, if laid it has been, different persons of the village who went into the house, were so buffeted that they were very glad to make their escape. – Derry Journal.
Belfast Commercial Chronicle, 22nd September 1827.