The Portadown Bridge Apparition: the Woman in the River Bann

November 1641. The Ulster rising was only weeks old. At Portadown, in County Armagh, a long wooden bridge crossed the River Bann where the water runs deep and wide. About 100 Protestant settlers were forced off it. They drowned or were shot.

Among the dead were the five children of Elizabeth Price, wife of Captain Rise Price, of Armagh. Fifteen months later, Price was a prisoner.

About Candlemas, 1643. Price and other prisoners came to Portadown bridge. It was twilight. Owen Roe O'Neill, the Confederate general in Ulster, was gathered by the water with his troops.

Then Price saw something in the river. She described "a vision or spiritt assumeing the shape of a woman waste highe vpright in the water naked." Its hands were raised and clasped, its hair "disheivelled very white." Its skin was "as white as snowe," and its eyes seemed "to twinckle in her head." It stood upright in the water and cried out, again and again, "Revenge Revenge Revenge."

O'Neill sent a priest and a friar to it. They asked questions in English and in Latin. It answered them nothing. So O'Neill sent his drummer to the English army to fetch a Protestant minister. The minister prayed. Then he asked. "In the name of the father, the sonne and the holy ghost what wouldest thou have." It answered "Revenge, Revenge," repeating the word "very many times."

After that night it fell silent. For six weeks it neither appeared nor cried. Then it appeared again, and cried as before. The Irish families who had moved into houses left empty by the English had already been frightened by it. Now they "ran quite away and forsooke the place."

Price was not alone. She repeated a story widely believed, that after the drownings there appeared "a great number of heads in the water which cried all with a lowd voice Revenge." Joane Constable, a widow of Drumade, heard rebels describe men, children and women "brest highe above the water," crying out "for vengeance and blowd." She said the blood of some of the drowned still remained on the bridge and "would not bee washed away." James Shawe, an innkeeper of Markethill, swore that those living about the bridge fled to Markethill "for feare of those cryes and spiritts."

Price swore her statement on 26 June 1643. It is one of the 1641 Depositions, collected by commissioners recording Protestant losses and now held at Trinity College Dublin. The commission made no ruling on the apparition. In 1646 Sir John Temple printed her testimony in The Irish Rebellion, framed by a verse from Ezekiel promising great vengeance. The book was reprinted at least ten times by 1812.

Naomi McAreavey calls the depositions "a rich resource for memories of the rebellion but not its 'facts'." Eamon Darcy notes the pull of reading Price as a mother traumatised at the place her children died, and the caution historians keep about diagnosing people in retrospect. He also records a version in which the ghost vanished only when English forces arrived. Joan Redmond asks whether the story undermines the rest of Price's deposition. No one has proposed a natural explanation.

Darcy writes that local people read the ghost as an expression of God's anger. Even the rebels, it was said, were frightened. People claimed to see 1641 ghosts at the same spot as recently as 2018.