The Black Cat of Killakee

Killakee lies in the hills above Rathfarnham, County Dublin, below Montpelier Hill and the ruin known as the Hellfire Club. The estate's Georgian mansion, Killakee House, was demolished in 1941. What survived was a smaller building nearby, a five-bay, two-storey former house usually described as the steward's house or dower house. IrishCentral dates it to 1765 and says the Conolly family built it as a hunting lodge.

In 1968 Margaret O'Brien and her husband Nicholas bought the derelict building. They planned to make it an arts centre, a retreat for artists and intellectuals. Renovation began. So did the stories. Workmen said the house was haunted. Locals spoke of an alarmingly large black cat living in the garden.

Margaret O'Brien hired the Dublin artist Tom McAssey to decorate the interior. One evening he and two hired hands closed up the house and shut the heavy main door. Then one of the men said something must be wrong with the lock. The heavy door was open again. All three went to look. It was open.

A figure stood outside. They could not make it out. McAssey took it for a prank and called out: "It won't work, I can see you, so get in." A low voice answered. "You cannot see me, leave the door open."

In the vestibule sat a black cat. McAssey later described it as large as a Dalmatian dog, with amber eyes. He ran, and the other two men ran with him.

McAssey gave his account to Frank Smyth, who published it in Ghosts and Poltergeists in 1976. He also painted the cat. The canvas hung in the house, later in the foyer of the Killakee House restaurant, under titles such as The Beast of Killakee or Killakee Cat. He was not the only one drawn to it. Val McGann, a sportsman turned artist, tried several times to catch the large, long-lived cat. It always proved smarter and faster than him.

The story kept growing. Margaret O'Brien is said to have had a priest exorcise the house, and things went quiet for a while. In October 1969 actors staying at the arts centre held a séance for a joke. The disturbances returned, and two ghostly nuns were reported in the gallery. In July 1970 a dwarfish skeleton was reportedly found under the kitchen floor, along with the brass statuette of a monstrous demon. Some retellings say the haunting stopped once the remains were buried.

Mysterious Britain treats the McAssey encounter as the core of the case and calls the exorcisms, the mock séance and the buried brass devil unsubstantiated rumours. The first explanations came from the witnesses themselves. A faulty lock. A practical joke by the workers. And the locals already spoke of a real cat in the garden, one that Val McGann treated as an animal he could catch.

Later versions changed the details. Amber eyes became glowing red eyes. Growls, a hazy form and a sudden drop in temperature joined the scene. The legend also absorbed older Hellfire Club folklore, including tales of a cat soaked in whiskey and set alight. No police record, scientific study or contemporaneous newspaper report has turned up.

The Black Cat of Killakee lives on in books by Frank Smyth and Daniel Cohen, in lists of places haunted by animals, and even in a geocache. Its most striking artefact is still McAssey's painting. A witness's own portrait of the thing that sat in the vestibule.