Loftus Hall

The story

Loftus Hall stands on the Hook peninsula in County Wexford, Ireland. The site had a castle of the Redmond family, reported around 1350 (Wikipedia, citing a Victorian source we did not read). Wikipedia dates an attack on the hall, then held by Alexander Redmond, to 1642, the expulsion of the Redmonds to the 1650s, and the arrival of the English Loftus family between 1666 and 1684.

In the mid-18th century, according to Wikipedia, Charles Tottenham inherited through marriage and took the Loftus name; Seymour’s 1914 collection only places a Charles Tottenham at the hall at that time. The house standing today is later than the legend. Sources disagree on the rebuilding by the fourth Marquess of Ely: a regional radio report says 1870 to 1871, Wikipedia says 1872 to 1884. Seymour’s narrator says the “Tapestry Room” had already been altered by 1868 and that the hall was later “wholly rebuilt,” so the room of the story may not survive.

In 1917 the Sisters of Providence turned it into a convent and school. It later served as a hotel in the 1980s. After a 2011 purchase, guided tours began in 2012. It closed in 2020 and was put on the market, sold in 2021, and sold again in November 2025 for 3 million euro, according to South East Radio on 12 November 2025.

The legend

The famous story is of the devil at the card table. In the popular version a stranger arrives on a stormy night, is welcomed, and plays cards with the family. A daughter, Anne, stoops to pick up a dropped card and sees a cloven foot. She cries out, and the stranger vanishes in flames through the ceiling, leaving a hole. Anne goes out of her mind, is shut in her favorite room, the Tapestry Room, refuses food, and dies there; in one telling her body could not be straightened and was buried in a sitting position. Wikipedia dates this to 1775 and makes Anne the daughter of Charles Tottenham; it also gives Tottenham’s first wife the name Anne, and the date is not in the oldest source we could read.

That source is Seymour’s True Irish Ghost Stories (1914), chapter IX, the earliest written trace we found. His version differs in spirit. The anonymous narrator, a clergyman, treats the devil as “a strange legend” invented to cover Anne’s attachment to a passing stranger, which cost her her reason. In the legend he reports, the game is whist, Anne drops a ring, the stranger arrives on horseback and disappears with a clap of thunder and a smell of sulfur. There is no hole in the ceiling, no year, and no sitting burial. Seymour adds that the account was told to Queen Victoria by the Marchioness of Ely, without a date. So the vivid details people repeat today, the hole and the death in a seated position, are not in the earliest account we read; they appear in later retellings with no source given.

Seymour also reports a haunting of the older house. The witnesses in his chapter are the father of the author of the account, in 1790; a valet of the Marquess of Ely; the author himself; and the tutor Charles Dale, who stayed in the 1850s and whose letter the author dates to 1867, before his own last visit in 1868. They describe a lady in brocaded silk crossing the Tapestry Room and a growling creature that leapt onto the bed. The valet calls the lady Miss Tottenham. A parish priest, Father Broders, is said to have performed an exorcism that confined the disturbances to that one room. So the oldest dated accounts we found are Dale’s letter of 1867 and the recollection of 1790, both published in 1914.

No hoax is demonstrated, but nothing confirms the story either. We found no family record, no newspaper account and no genealogical source for Anne, and a search of US newspaper archives for the name returned nothing. A folklore collection that might help, dúchas.ie, could not be opened. Wikipedia lists a documentary (The Legend of Loftus Hall, 1993), the film The Lodgers (shot on site in 2016) and a visit by Ghost Adventures, and a book by Helena B. Scott, but we have not re-checked them.

What remains today

The mansion still stands on the peninsula, but it is private property and closed to the public. After the 2025 sale, a regional radio report said that an investor planned a luxury hotel with 22 rooms; no opening date had been given. The site at loftushall.ie now shows a general page on Ireland’s haunted castles, with no opening information for the hall. Because the present building dates from the late 19th century, much of what you might see postdates the stories themselves.

Visiting

As of November 2025 the hall is closed. It was shut in 2020 and sold in 2021, and it was reported sold again in November 2025 for 3 million euro. It is in renovation, so there are no tours or ghost events that we could verify. Do not enter the grounds or the building. For the legend itself, Seymour’s 1914 book is free online. Check local news for any future reopening.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Loftus Hall, County Wexford — Wikimedia Commons
2. Loftus Hall sells for 3 million euro — South East Radio, 2025-11-12
3. True Irish Ghost Stories (St. John D. Seymour) — Project Gutenberg, 1914
4. 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.