In the best known story about the castle's decline, a section of the kitchen crumbled into the sea during a fierce storm. Servants and cooks who were preparing for a banquet died as the floor disappeared. The Spirited Isle entry calls it disputed. The popular account says that the MacDonnells left the castle after the collapse, and that only a boy who was in a corner of the kitchen survived, though this last detail is added in many retellings and has not been confirmed in the sources here.
Some say the cries of the dead can still be heard on nights when the sea is rough and the wind is high. Others call the tale nonsense. The castle was in fact abandoned in 1690, following the Battle of the Boyne, because of the MacDonnells' financial decline, according to Wikipedia.
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