Woburn House, near Millisle, was built in 1866 for the mill owner John Gilmore Dunbar and later expanded by his nephew George Orr Dunbar into an Italianate mansion. By the 1970s it had become a reformatory school for young offenders, widely called the Borstal, and later the Lisnevin Training School for Prison Officers. During those decades it gained a reputation for paranormal activity, with talk of as many as seven spirits.
One former staff member said he took a break in the Tower Room one summer evening when the temperature dropped, invisible arms locked round his chest and a hand clamped over his mouth when he tried to shout. A night security officer saw a heavy door slam shut unaided and felt a blast of icy air, and a colleague told him he had just met the butler.
The butler of local lore was Robert Barkley, said to have had an affair with a maid who became pregnant, murdered her and put her body into the sea through a tunnel beneath the house at a place called Barkley Rocks, then killed himself in the Tower Room. There is no evidence for this. A Robert Barkley is listed as a butler in the 1901 census, with no recorded employer, and a former staff member told a BBC crew they long considered it local talk.
In a BBC investigation a medium said she sensed a young woman of about twenty who was 'in the well'. She said a sealed well and an old tunnel lay in a ground-floor room, and a staff member later confirmed both existed but had been bricked up. Later the medium said the spirit named herself Ann, was pregnant and murdered, but not by the butler. These are the medium's claims and cannot be verified.
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