188 Leap Castle

Is Leap Castle in County Offaly, Ireland Haunted?

Tucked into the quiet farmland of County Offaly, just north of the small town of Roscrea, sits a castle that has been unsettling visitors for the better part of eight hundred years. Leap Castle has survived clan warfare, a brother murdering a brother mid-Mass, the discovery of a pit holding over 150 human skeletons, a civil-war burning, and decades as a roofless ruin.

This week, Rebecca dives into the legends of the Bloody Chapel, the oubliette, the Red Lady, the ghost children Emily and Charlotte, the Governess, and the bizarre entity known only as “the Elemental,” while Pat lays out the documented, true-crime-level history that makes this castle’s reputation almost too easy to believe. Is Leap Castle genuinely haunted, or is eight centuries of trauma just doing a very convincing impression of a haunting? You decide.

What We Cover in This Episode

The History

How Leap Castle got its name — and the legend of the brothers’ deadly leap that decided who got to build it

The O’Carroll succession war of 1532 and the murder of a priest at the altar of his own chapel

The 19th-century discovery of a hidden oubliette beneath the chapel floor — and the three cartloads of human remains pulled out of it

The 1922 burning of the castle during the Irish Civil War, and the fifty years it spent as a roofless ruin

How the Ryan family rebuilt Leap Castle from a ruin into the private home — and haunted-tour destination — it is today

The Hauntings

Evidence #1 — The Bloody Chapel: the apparition of the murdered priest, Thaddeus, and EVP recordings of murmured prayers