Glenarm Castle has been the seat of the McDonnell family for nearly four hundred years. Built in 1636, it was burned in 1642, lay in ruin for about ninety years, and was rebuilt as a Palladian house in 1756, with later alterations and fires in 1929 and 1967.
In the nineteenth century guests spoke of a ghost in their rooms. In 1853 one guest described her: tall, with a careworn face and deep-set eyes, wearing what seemed a short petticoat of blue and brown homespun, her arms extended and holding the strings of a frilled cap such as Irish women used to wear. The same ghost is said to have been seen again in the 1990s.
Hector McDonnell said that as a child in the 1950s and 1960s the activity in the house was so intense his mother had every room exorcised except the attic. After that, terrible noises came from the loft. One day Hector went up, turned on the light and climbed the attic stairs, and the lights went out leaving him in pitch dark with the sense that something was behind him. He fled and found nobody who could have turned the light off. The noises went on for several years. A human skeleton was found on the grounds around the same time, which led to a belief that a murder may have happened there.
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