ROOM No. 2, RHETORIC HOUSE
MAYNOOTH COLLEGE, IRELAND
1842 - 1848 (estimated)
there is nothing quite as entertaining, ghastly, and appealing as a ghost from the islands off the coast of the European mainland which make up England, Scotland, and Ireland. Such islands are soaked in a long history of both culture and bloodshed, and are nearly teeming - infested, to use a less politic term - with ghosts from nearly every time period imaginable, from before the days of King Arthur up to the present day. And, in true form, there is nothing quite like a European ghost.

Maynooth College is a seminary set near Dublin, Ireland, is has been around since 1795 in some form or another. Where it was built once stood a Middle Ages castle, and god knows what before that. Therefore, as with almost all European ghosts, just because the ghost is haunting the building doesn't mean that it's from that building's time period.

If this account seems as if it is something out of a legend, then you wouldn't be surprised to know that it is. Albeit one that has at least some grounding in fact - mysterious suicides are on record in connection with Room No. 2 of the Rhetoric House (located in the Junior Houses), and at least one psychic has picked up strange vibrations in the room.

The tale, which seems to begin with a suicide in the room around 1842, the subject being a student who was compelled to take his own life for some reason or another (accounts are not too careful about such details). The next tenant in the room was next found dead one morning, having slit his throat with a razor - the same method of death used by the tenant before him. The third tenant reported being irresistibly urged to follow suit, and saw strange black scurrying shapes in the room when nobody - or thing - could be there. one night when he was about to use the razor himself, the student leaped out the window into Rhetoric Yard. He broke several bones but the fall saved his life.

After this, the tale goes on, a priest spent the night in the room and was so terrified by whatever he saw - he refused to speak about it - that his hair turned bright white. After that several walls in the room had been removed and the building was turned into an oratory.

Regardless of what may have occurred in the room in reality, there are several documents still extant which point to some very real occurrences that happened in No. 2 sometime between 1842 and 1848. At the very least, there is a document dated October 23, 1860 which authorized the refurbishment of room 2 to an oratory for St. Joseph.

Hans Holzer, the great paranormal researcher, personally visited Maynooth in the company of a psychic and recorded impressions of a four-legged creature which felt fear and the desire to run - as well as a strong presence around the statue, where the window once was.

Based on all this evidence, one can infer that perhaps a dog from the old castle or somebody's pet met to a violent death on that spot and has clung there ever since - which may have driven one sensitive student to suicide. It is likely that the young man's spirit, perhaps having had second thoughts, has returned to drive others to suicide. And the presence at the window is, most likely, an impression of that dramatic event rather than a true ghost. Such "impressions" are common - moreso than ghosts, at any rate.