Hellfire Club, Montpelier Hill

The story

Montpelier Hill, also spelled Mountpelier and called Slieve Gorra, is a 383-meter (1,257-foot) summit on the Dublin edge of the Wicklow Mountains, with the whole city laid out beneath it. People were burying their dead up here thousands of years before anyone built a lodge. The summit carried a passage tomb, and excavations by the Hellfire Club Archaeological Project in October 2016, a partnership of Abarta Heritage, Coillte and South Dublin County Council, confirmed a badly damaged Neolithic tomb dating to around 3500 BC behind the ruin. The dig turned up a stone carved with megalithic art, a polished stone axe, flint and burnt bone.

Around 1725 William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, had a hunting lodge built on the summit, and its builders helped themselves to stone from the ancient cairn. The design is attributed to the architect Edward Lovett Pearce. Conolly had bought the hill from Philip, Duke of Wharton, who had founded the first Hellfire Club in London in 1719. Over time the building collected names: the Shooting Lodge, the Kennel, Conolly's Folly, the Brass Castle and, tellingly, the Haunted House.

Richard Parsons, 1st Earl of Rosse, and the painter James Worsdale set up the Irish Hell Fire Club around 1737 as one of several aristocratic drinking societies of that name in Britain and Ireland. Worsdale's group portrait of five members, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, shows men such as Henry Barry, 4th Baron Barry of Santry, who was convicted of murder in 1739. The club usually gathered in town, at the Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill, a short walk from Dublin Castle. Members were said to drink "scaltheen," a mix of whiskey and hot butter, to leave an empty chair for the Devil, and to keep a black cat as a mascot.

Whether the club ever met on the hill is unproven. Tradition says the Conollys let it the empty lodge, from 1735 according to the Dublin Mountains Partnership, until Rosse's death in 1741, which does not sit easily with the 1737 founding date. The writer Michael Fewer has pointed out that the lodge was so remote that hardly any verifiable account of events there exists. The same source records a sale to Charles Cobbe in 1749 and says he is reported to have died at the lodge two years later. At some point the building was damaged by fire, and by 1779 the antiquarian Austin Cooper found it decaying, with the cairn still visible behind it. After the 1798 Rebellion, the United Irishmen general Joseph Holt spent a night hiding in its arched room. In 1800 the Conolly family sold the estate to Luke White; it later passed to the Massy family, and after the Massys went bankrupt the state acquired them.

The legend

The stories about the lodge are folklore, and good historians say so. They spread through nineteenth-century print, notably Robert Chambers' Book of Days (1864) and The Gentleman's Magazine, and in the 1930s the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection recorded schoolchildren in the area retelling them. Joseph Holt already dismissed the "idle stories" about the place in his memoirs, so the reputation was in place by 1798.

The central figure is the Devil. In the best-known tale, a stranger caught in a storm is invited in and sits down to cards with club members. One player drops a card, ducks under the table to fetch it and sees that the guest has a cloven hoof; the stranger vanishes in flames or, in other versions, sets the lodge ablaze. Folklorists recognize this as a traveling motif: almost the same story is told of Loftus Hall in County Wexford, whose owners, the Loftus family, also had a hunting lodge on this hill. Another tradition says the Devil, furious that the builders had robbed the tomb, blew the first roof off the new lodge, and Conolly replaced it with one of stone.

Other tales involve cats and fire. A priest is said to have walked in on members sacrificing a black cat, snatched it and spoken an exorcism, freeing a demon from its body. Simon Luttrell, Lord Irnham, supposedly sold his soul to clear his debts and then gave the Devil the slip when he came to the lodge to collect. Stories of black masses, animal sacrifice and even the killing of a dwarf belong to the same repertoire. The fire has several explanations of its own, from members burning the place in revenge over a refused lease to Richard "Burn-Chapel" Whaley dousing a footman in brandy and setting him alight after a spilled drink, a version found in Padraic O'Farrell's Irish Ghost Stories. One source also mentions noises and smells reported from the ruin at night, without dates.

The most concrete haunting reports come from lower down the hill, at the Steward's House (also called Killakee House), built by the Conollys around 1765, where the club is said to have met after the fire. Two Dublin papers, the Evening Herald and the Evening Press, reported trouble there from 1968 to 1970 as a couple worked to turn it into an arts center: tradesmen quit complaining of ghosts, and the artist Tom McAssey and two workmen said they faced a ghostly figure and a large black cat with glowing red eyes, which McAssey later painted. Further reports described an "Indian gentleman," two "nuns" said to have joined black masses on the hill, ringing bells and poltergeist activity. Locals were skeptical. RTÉ filmed a documentary there in 1970 in which the clairvoyant Sheila St Clair tried automatic writing, and Dave Walsh's Haunted Dublin (2008) adds that a plumber found a small skeleton in 1971. Those last details rest on single books.

On television, Zak Bagans, Aaron Goodwin and Jay Wasley of Ghost Adventures investigated the lodge for the Halloween special "Ireland's Celtic Demons," aired October 31, 2014, which also covered the Killakee cat.

What remains today

The lodge still crowns the summit as a sturdy stone shell with no roof. Coillte, the state forestry company that owns the hill, maintains it and has added concrete steps and iron rails across the upper windows. It is listed on South Dublin's Record of Protected Structures. Behind it, the low remains of the passage tomb survive as a circular mound with a hollow where the chamber was and a few kerbstones, near a second mound topped by an Ordnance Survey pillar. According to the historian Peter J. O'Keefe, much of the cairn ended up in the Military Road in the early 1800s.

The slopes below are covered by Hell Fire Wood, a plantation of Sitka spruce, larch and beech. The remains of Killakee Estate, the Massy family's former seat, lie at the bottom of the hill. The Steward's House served as a restaurant during the 1990s until it shut in 2001, and people live there privately today.

Visiting

This is one of the few legendary haunted sites in Ireland that you can visit freely and legally. The hill is a public forest recreation area run by Coillte and lies on the Dublin Mountains Way, a popular walking route. There is no official ghost tour; Abarta Heritage's e-book Sacred Skies and Earthly Sinners covers the archaeology and history.

It is a real hill walk, so wear proper footwear, watch the weather, and leave enough daylight to come down. Treat the lodge and the tomb as the protected monuments they are: do not climb on walls, move stones or light fires. The Steward's House is a private residence and is not open, so respect the owners' privacy.

Sources

1. Robin Hood della Contea Nera Hellfire Club — Cineteca di Bologna via Europeana, 1961 · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
2. Wikimedia Commons category : Montpelier Hill — Wikimedia Commons
3. "Ghost stories of Killakee House and the Hellfire Club" (Shane O'Brien, Oct 2021, updated Oct 2025) — IrishCentral — IrishCentral
4. Hellfire Club, Killkee, Dublin — National Library of Ireland via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
5. "Hellfire Club, Mountpelier" excavation report 2016 — Excavations.ie (not read directly) — Excavations.ie (seen through search excerpt
6. "Hell Fire Club" (text by Abarta Heritage) — Dublin Mountains Partnership — Dublin Mountains Partnership
7. infamous as location of the Hellfire Club from "[The book of the Thames.]". — The British Library via Europeana, 1877 · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
8. Schools' Collection, Dundrum (B.), Vol. 0797, "The Hell Fire Club" — Dúchas / National Folklore Collection (not read directly)
9. "The Hellfire Club Archaeological Dig" — South Dublin County Council — South Dublin County Council
10. "The Hellfire Club Story in the National Folklore Collection" — Abarta Heritage (not read directly) — Abarta Heritage (seen through search excerpt; page body not readable
11. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.