The Cooneen Poltergeist: the Murphy farmhouse haunting, County Fermanagh (1913)

The Murphy farmhouse stands in Cornarooslan townland, in the Cooneen area of County Fermanagh. The Fermanagh Herald called it an "isolated mountainland farmhouse", a few miles east of Brookeborough. Many know the place as Coonian.

On 7 November 1907, Michael Murphy died of an injury to the head. He left his widow, Bridget Murphy, and a house full of children. The 1911 census lists one son, James, and six daughters. The youngest was born after her father's death.

It began with rapping at the front door, but nobody was there. Then it came at the windows. Then came the "heavy foot steps in the loft", the loud tread of someone walking about in the roof space overhead. Knocking and scraping kept time to songs, among them "The Soldier's Song" and "The Boyne Water". It seemed to answer questions in English, Irish and Latin, and drawers closed on the children's fingers.

Then the house itself moved. Plates and dishes rose off the wooden table and hurled themselves against the walls, while pots and pans lifted off their hooks. A cast-iron bedstead rose several inches off the floor before dropping back down. Beds were lifted while the children slept in them, and pillows were pulled from beneath the girls' heads. Shadowy shapes appeared on the walls and quickly vanished, and neighbours came to sit with the family each night.

Fr Eugene Coyle, later Canon Coyle, became the chief witness and watched clothes "rising and falling on an empty bed as if someone was underneath breathing". Mass was said in the kitchen, which fell quiet, and the family slept there. Two exorcisms followed, but neither succeeded. The sheets lifted, a terrible groaning filled the room, and plates and cups went flying "as if caught in a whirlwind". On 27 March 1913 the Northern Whig ran an item headed "Cooneen Exorcism".

In 1913 Bridget Murphy sold the farm. The family sailed for America. On board, passengers complained of "continual rapping and strange sounds" from the Murphys' cabin. The captain refused to believe in a supernatural culprit and threatened to put them off the ship. Some accounts say the activity faded at sea, while others say it followed the family to America and faded over the following years. One daughter, it is said, was later committed to a mental institution.

Sources disagree on when it began. One timeline starts in 1908, soon after Michael Murphy's death. Most settle on 1913. Tarquin Blake gives autumn 1914, though his account also has the family leaving in 1913. Blake adds snakes and eels beneath the sheets, a human form that became an animal shape, and priests who later fell ill, and writes that no exorcism was ever carried out at Cooneen. His account includes a test: when Mrs Murphy lay across the bed, nothing happened, but when Annie did, a rushing sound came.

Cahir Healy later wrote about his visit in Ireland's Own and retold the story on radio. A radio dramatisation followed in 1939. Shane Leslie gave it a chapter in his Ghost Book of 1955. In 2016 Dianne Ascroft turned it into a novella, An Unbidden Visitor.

In November 2010 a BBC NI crew filmed an episode of Northern Ireland's Greatest Haunts at the house with medium Marion Goodfellow. Cameras and microphones lost battery power. One crew member felt someone blowing on his cheek. Goodfellow described a spirit called "John" holding a rock. The farmhouse was never lived in again, and it stands derelict but still very much intact.