Hauntings

The Ghost Pact and Lady Beresford's Black Ribbon

Gill Hall (demolished), near Dromore

Legend dated October 1693; death 1713

Gill Hall stood near Dromore. It was built in the late 1600s for Captain John Magill, was occupied until about 1910, then decayed, and a fire in June 1969 destroyed what remained. The ruins were later demolished. The house's name lives on in one of Ireland's best-known ghost stories.

As a family tradition tells it, Nichola Sophia Hamilton and John Power, later Lord Tyrone, were raised together by a guardian who questioned religion, and as young adults they agreed that whichever died first would return to tell the other whether there is an afterlife. In October 1693, while staying at Gill Hall, she woke in the night to find Tyrone's ghost at her bedside. He said he had died on Tuesday at four o'clock. To prove it, he gripped her wrist, leaving a mark, and touched a cabinet, leaving a handprint. He also made predictions, including that she would die on her 47th birthday.

In the morning the mark was still on her wrist and she hid it under a black ribbon. News of Tyrone's death arrived later that day. In 1713 she held a party for what she thought was her 48th birthday, but a clergyman told her the parish records had her birth wrongly recorded and she was in fact 47. She withdrew, told her family the whole story, showed them the wrist and was found dead after they left. The tradition was kept in a family manuscript written by her granddaughter Lady Betty Cobbe. Portraits are said to show her with the ribbon. Modern accounts note she most likely died in childbirth.

The house is gone; the site is not open to the public.
Evidence
Long-standing local tradition
Access
No public access
Location
54.401, -6.130 (Parish-level only, treat as an area)

Sources: Spirited Isle, "Gill Hall" [other]; Wikipedia, "Sir Tristram Beresford, 3rd Baronet" [other]

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