During the Second World War, as air raids threatened Belfast, many city families moved to the countryside. One family took a small weather-beaten cottage on the shore at Tyrella Beach in County Down. It had no electricity or running water and was surrounded by dunes and grassy banks, and the children loved it. When the parents went back to Belfast for work, the older teenagers stayed on to enjoy the last weeks of summer.
One of the boys began to feel at night that someone was watching him from a corner of his bedroom. It was not menacing, just present, even oddly comforting. Looking more carefully he saw the outline of a young girl, small and pale, drenched, with seaweed tangled in her hair. Through conversations with locals he learned that years earlier a Sunday School outing from a nearby village had ended in tragedy when a girl drowned while swimming, and her body had been laid in the cottage overnight until arrangements could be made.
The teenagers also heard the rhythmic clicking of bicycle pedals along the path at night with no bicycle in sight, and in the mornings found wet clumps of seaweed on the doorstep, though the cottage sat twenty yards from the shore behind a wide grassy bank and no storms had come. The cottage is no longer there.
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