Vicar's Hill is one of Armagh's most elegant streets, with Georgian townhouses on one side and the Church of Ireland cathedral on the other. In 1888 a case connected to No. 6 gave it a darker name. A young woman, Bellina Prior, daughter of a late military commander of Armagh, was accused over the death of a small girl whose body was found in a kitchen boiler. Accounts say she was found pale and wet and was heard to protest and then to say she had done it. A jury returned a verdict of guilty but insane and she was committed to an asylum. The retellings say she was later released to her mother on condition that she never return to Armagh. The two sources spell the child's name differently, as Annie and as Ann Slavin.
After her death the legend says she came back. People spoke of cold on the hill, whispers, scratching at the windows and a pale face at the letterbox. Children were warned to get home before dark or the Green Lady would get them. In the 1970s one man claimed to have been chased by a woman in a green dress who vanished at the cathedral gates.
Two extra motifs are attached to the house. One window was said to have been bricked up with her spirit inside, and a green glass bottle hidden in the house was said to trap her soul, so that if it ever broke she would walk the hill again. During work in the early 1990s a workman is said to have run off when his sledgehammer hit something behind the sealed window, though nothing was found when work resumed. The family now living at the house report nothing unusual.
Comments