Dr Eric Mervyn Lindsay directed Armagh Observatory for 37 years, from 1937 until he retired in 1974, and built links with Harvard and NASA. He had a habit of working late into the night, a practice he kept from his student days at Harvard, and used the quiet hours for tasks such as scanning photographic plates under a binocular microscope.
According to a colleague who later recounted it, Lindsay once told him that on one of those nights he became aware of a presence in the room. The more he tried to ignore it, the stronger it became, until he had to leave. From that night he never worked in the observatory beyond 11.30 pm. The colleague described him as calm and entirely rational and said the change was out of character. Lindsay never said what it was, but wondered whether it might be the ghost of the Reverend William Davenport, an earlier director of the observatory, who is said to have died by suicide in 1823, reportedly on the grounds.
Very little is known about Davenport's life, and the link between him and the presence is Lindsay's speculation, passed on second hand. The story has stayed part of the observatory's oral tradition.
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