James Haddock was a farmer at Malone, just south of Belfast, who held his land on lease from Lord Donegall. He died in 1657 before the lease arrangements were complete. His widow married an executor of the estate, Daniel or Jacob Davis, who tried to have his own son's name put on the lease in place of Haddock's son John.
At Michaelmas 1662 Francis Taverner, a friend of Haddock and a servant of Lord Donegall, was riding home from Hillsborough. As he approached Drum Bridge near Drumbeg his horse took fright and refused to go on, and a figure in a white coat appeared and said he was James Haddock. He asked Taverner to tell his widow not to allow her second family's name onto the lease at the expense of his son. Taverner was tormented by the ghost day and night and could neither eat nor sleep. He confided in a shoemaker and then in Lord Donegall's chaplain, who took him with Dr. Lewis Downes, the Vicar of Belfast, to confront the widow and Davis. They refused.
Bishop Jeremy Taylor summoned Taverner to an ecclesiastical court at Dromore and declared himself convinced by the account that the apparition was true and real. In the later and better-known telling, at the Carrickfergus Assizes, when Taverner called his witness, a thunderclap shook the courthouse, a hand appeared above the witness table and a voice asked, 'Is this enough?' The jury found for Haddock, and Davis is said to have fallen from his horse on the way home and broken his neck. The lease was redrawn with John Haddock's name restored. The case is told as one of Ireland's most famous 17th-century ghost stories.
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