by Bob Curran
Following the death of Conolly, the lease property passed into the hands of the aristocrat Richard Parsons, 1st Earl of Rosse (although the actual ownership still remained in the hands of the Conolly family), and it is here that the dark reputation of Montpelier really begins. Parsons was a bit of a dandy, but he also considered himself to be something of a “sorcerer” and a dabbler in ancient mysteries and Black Magic. Perhaps the pagan tradition of Montpelier appealed to him, and he saw it as the focus of ancient and malign powers. He also headed a group of jaded aristocrats who shared the same dubious tastes and interests as himself. This was the notorious Dublin “Hell Fire Club” and they would certainly leave their mark on the old house and also on the surrounding area. It’s not certain whether the Club actually paid money for the actual lease—by a strange twist of fate, William Conolly had purchased Montpelier from Philip Wharton, the 1st Duke of Wharton (1698–1731), who was a notorious libertine, rake, alcoholic, and dabbler in the occult, and is credited with founding the first Hell Fire Club in England between 1719 and 1721. (Some historians dispute this and say that Wharton, although a dissolute character, was only peripherally involved in one of two aristocratic gangs in London at the time—“The Blazing Bucks” and the “Hell Fires”—namely the latter.) However, the Dublin Hell Fire Club took on an especially occult significance. The Club was founded by Parsons and Colonel Jack St. Ledger around 1735. Its members included Lord Santry (who was tried and convicted of murder in 1735); Harry Barry, who was a notorious drunk and womaniser, Colonels Richard St. George, Henry Bessborough and Colonel Clements (several of whom had been accused of bestiality with an ape); as well as Simon Luttrel, Lord Imham of Luttrelstown (described as “the most evil man in Ireland” and “King of Hell”). Although most of their meetings took place at the Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill near Dublin Castle or at Daly’s Club—a rather bohemian gentleman’s club that was often frequented by radicals and politicians—beside College Green, they used Montpelier House for their more blasphemous revels. Much of these were concerned with trying to raise the Devil or the casting of evil spells and the isolation of the building made it a perfect place for such debaucheries or for the celebration of the Black Mass, which was frequently carried out there. This was a parody of a Christian Catholic Mass, often carried out by an unfrocked priest and involving some sort of sacrifice. Blasphemous books were read in an attempt to summon up evil spirits (according to some they were successful), and there was a lot of drinking and lewd behavior. A chair was left vacant at every meeting as an invitation for the Evil One to join them, and records show that the tipple of choice was scaltheen, a sometimes flaming mixture of hot butter and whiskey. Indeed, so strongly was the connection to the Club that the building itself is still sometimes known as “The Hell Fire Club” to this day. A painting showing some of the notables of the Club by the artist James Worsdale now hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland and depicts members of the great landed families of both England and Ireland.
In 1740, the “Principle” of the Club was Richard Chapell Whaley, a man who was feared and detested by most of Dublin and by the native Irish in equal measure. He was a direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell, which of course did not endear him much to Irish hearts. Under his leadership, the Hell Fire Club began to plumb new depths. Although they had been content to sacrifice a few black cats from time to time (the black cat was the symbol of the Club, and, in one story, a priest is said to have interrupted one of their masses. Seizing the cat that had been sacrificed on the altar, he uttered an exorcism and a demon shot from the creature’s corpse and into the ceiling, bringing down plaster on the assembled throng) they now ventured into the area of human sacrifice. A number of children vanished in the area, never to be found, and there is a story that a mentally deficient dwarf was sacrificed on a makeshift High Altar at Montpelier. But the debauchery did not end there. The Hell Fire Club had an extremely strong Protestant element in it, and many of the rites that they followed mocked those of the Catholic Church. Whaley now suggested that they ride around the countryside, setting fire to the thatched roofs of Catholic chapels, burning worshippers out. This they did, considering it “great sport,” and it earned their principle the nickname of “Burn the Chapel Whaley,” a name that he held with great relish.
The notoriety of the Hellfire Club was now spreading into folklore and literature. Possibly greatly exaggerated accounts of their excesses were published in several pamphlets circulating in Dublin and eventually found their way into Robert Chambers’s Book of Days (1864), but lurid stories concerning the Club’s activities were also published in The Gentleman’s Magazine between 1731 and 1736 to the horror of respectable Dublin life. Stories concerned the heir playing cards with a wild stranger and dropping some money. When a member stooped to lift it, they glimpsed the cloven foot of the Devil under the table. Simon Luttrel Lord Imham and 1st Earl of Carhampton, a member of the club, supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the Infernal One clearing all his debts. When the Devil came to Montpelier House in order to collect his payment, Luttrel distracted him and fled. However, the same stories are told in various parts of Ireland about unpopular landlords including most notably Dr. Alexander Colville of Galgorm Castle, County Antrim. Stories of such wild excesses were having an effect on Dublin society.
So wild were these stories that pressure was put on William Conolly’s son to not renew the Club’s lease on Montpelier. When it came up for renewal, he refused and ordered the Hell Fire Club from his property. Some say that in retaliation, the Club set fire to the House, and this is actually the origin of the great fire that all but destroyed Montpelier in the mid-1700s. Others say that the club simply set fire to the building during their drunken revels in order to give the place a more hellish appearance (if this is the case, it certainly worked!).
Another story maintains that a servant in the house accidentally spilled some whiskey on a new frock coat, which Burn the Chapel Whaley was wearing, ruining the material. In a fit of anger, the principle emptied the remainder of the bottle over the unfortunate man and set him ablaze. As the blazing man ran screaming down the stairs, he clutched at a tapestry hanging by the hall door. Within moments, the fire had spread, engulfing all in its path. Some members of the club were so drunk that they couldn’t escape, but Whaley and some of his more sober companions managed to reach safety by leaping from the windows of the upper stories. Down in the city, the people watched the flames consume the building, rising against the night sky. The club relocated to a Stewards House at Killakee, several miles away, but it never enjoyed the same membership, and not long after, it broke up.
However, it was not completely the end of the Hell Fire Club. In 1771, it flourished again under a new name and with a new membership. Again, it used Montpelier House—now still mostly a burned-out ruin but with some serviceable areas—for some of its more ghastly ceremonies. It now called itself “The Holy Fathers” (or sometimes “The UnHoly Fathers” and its principal member seems to have been Thomas Whaley, widely known as “Buck Whaley,” son of Richard Chappell Whaley, a prominent Dublin politician and a man hated and despised every bit as much as his father had been. And there was a subtle change in the ethos of the group—whereas the original Club had been (in theory at least) devoted to the furtherance of the darker mystic arts, the new grouping made no pretence at mysticism or magic, but was simply involved in orgiastic debauchery. As with the Hell Fire Club, stories cropped up about both the Club and Montpelier House. One claims that they kidnapped, raped, murdered, and ate a local farmer’s daughter and that they practiced bestiality on a regular basis with local livestock. Some were said to be “vampires” drinking human blood on a regular basis within the confines of the house. It is said that Whaley eventually confessed his awful deeds and sought absolution from a Dublin clergyman before dying in 1800. After that the last incarnation of the Hell Fire Club passed away as well.
With such utter debauchery, vile behavior, and perhaps spilled human blood withi
n its walls, many people believed that the very walls of the building had absorbed some of the evil that went on there. Many people who visited the place, which was now little more than a ruin (as evidenced by the report of the antiquarian Austin Cooper in 1779) experienced a “very uneasy feeling” within its precincts. Although the United Irishmen general Joseph Holt spent a night within its walls during the Rebellion of 1798 and experienced very little, several of the volunteers of Robert Emmet’s followers also stayed there prior to a planned attack on Dublin in 1803 and were “greatly unsettled by the atmosphere within.”
In 1800, the Conolly family sold Montpelier to Luke White, a prominent Dublin bookseller and politician. He had some grandiose plans for rebuilding the house, all of which came to nothing, and he was later forced to sell to the Massy family of Duntrileague, County Limerick (the Barons Massy), who also owned lands around Killakee. The family became bankrupt in 1924 with Hamon Massy, the 8th Baron Massy (known as “the Penniless Peer” in Dublin), and the lands were bought by the Irish State. Today it’s managed by Coillte, which is a division of the Irish Forestry Commission.
Do buildings actually absorb something of the evil or misery that had unfolded within their confines? It is easy to laugh at such beliefs, but today the ruins of the house stand aloof and forbidding on their bleak summit, and from time to time people have heard screams drifting down toward Dublin or have seen strange lights flickering among their tumbled stones. Those who have struggled up the steep hill have noted that even on the calmest days, a brisk wind whistles about the summit and chills walkers to the bone. And as twilight settled over the Hills there is an unmistakable feeling that this is not a place for sane and wholesome people to be. Is it something from the distant pagan past or some lingering vestige of the infamy that was once perpetrated there by the Hell Fire Club? Who can say?
Mortemer Abbey (Normandy, France)
“A place of lost souls… the abode, so they say,
of the wand’ring dead
What sad spectres walk its cloistr’d halls?”
—Thomas Rowley, The Abbey at Sunset
Like ancient castles, great and abandoned abbeys often hold a mesmerizing and fearful attraction for us. Perhaps it is the confined nature of such places: the gloomy corridors, the encompassing silence, and the patches of darkness under shadowy archways that is so suggestive to us. Maybe it is the brooding sanctity of such places, the memories of long-vanished religieux which haunts us as we view or visit them. There is sometimes something serenely calming about such sites, but there can be something terrifying, too.
The mysterious ruins of Mortemer, the first Cistercian Abbey in Normandy, are such a place. They lie deep in a wooded valley, part of the Forest of Lyons, roughly 34 kilometres southeast of Rouen in the District of Eure. Today, only remnants of the walls are standing, but they serve as a reminder of one of the most important abbeys in France and of what was one of the largest Cistercian abbeys in the world.
Mortemer was founded in 1134 by Henry I of England (1068–1135), son of William the Conqueror, as one of the earliest holy houses of the Cistercian Order in France. It was erected on a great area of marshland around the Fouillebroc River and a nearby lake, which was known in Latin as mortuum mare, literally “The Sea of the Dead” or “Dead Pond,” which gave the abbey its name. The marshy region had pagan connotations, deemed to be the home of pre-Christian gods, and it was thought that the building of the holy house would take away these baleful associations and influences. During the 15th and early 16th centuries, the abbey was at the height of its powers, drawing much of its wealth from the nearby town of Rouen. It housed more than 200 monks and owned large swathes of land in the countryside, including farms, houses, hospices, and even a number of inns and public houses in some nearby villages. However with its increasing financial security, it had become lax in its ways and the abbots and monks had become more concerned with worldly things than their original vows of poverty, chastity, and seclusion. In fact, the abbey now operated more like a business than a place of piety.
According to legend, sometime during the 1500s, a local woman was brought to the abbey for examination by the monks. The woman was a garrache, a possessed person who had been overcome by the spirit of a wolf—in effect a female werewolf. She was chained in a room in the abbey whilst the monks tried to perform an exorcism upon her—an exorcism which, by all accounts, was only partially successful. If the unclean spirit had been driven from her, then it found shelter within the very stonework of Mortemer. Around 1884, so tradition states, a certain Roger Saboureau was poaching in the forest close to the Abbey ruins when he was certain that he was being spied upon. Turning around, he was confronted by a large female wolf that looked as if it might attack him. Badly frightened, he fired his gun, killing the beast, and then fled deep into the woods. Later, he returned to find his own wife, lying in a pool of blood with a number of wounds on her body where he’d shot her. She had come into the woods to find him, but had she, too, been overcome by the spirit of the 16th-century wolf that still lurked amongst the tumbled stones of Mortemer Abbey? Was she too a garrache, one of the possessed? Many locals certainly thought so.
In the early 1600s, Mortemer’s fortunes began to go into a slow decline due to a parliamentary dictate that non-ecclesiastical appointees would now manage the secular affairs of French holy houses. Like many others, the abbey had relied upon a steady stream of funds from their lands, and with that cut off, it gradually fell into decay. The numbers of Brothers there diminished, and by the French Revolution there were only about four or five of them living there, largely within the falling buildings. The Revolutionaries of course did not treat them kindly. They were falsely accused of a number of crimes against the state and were forced to hide in the wine cellars of the Abbey itself. There they were found and were executed without mercy, and it is said that their blood was mixed with wine from the broken casks and drunk by their murderers. Ever since then, the cellars of the place have had an excessively oppressive and claustrophobic atmosphere, and some people claim that they can still smell the stench of death there. Following the Revolution, the Abbey was sold to a wealthy local farmer, but changed hands a number of times and was recently in the hands of a certain Madam Charpentier, who created a museum there in 1985. All the same, the ghosts haven’t gone away.
Secluded within the abbey is the Spring of St. Catherine, a natural fountain and well that is said to have strange powers. It was believed that if a young, unmarried girl approached the spring on certain nights of the year and prayed hard and earnestly to God, she would see the face of her future husband looking back at her from the waters of the well. However, if the girl in question was less that virtuous or if she did not take the task seriously, something else would look back at her from the waters and she might find herself possessed. Many argued that it was better to stay away from the spring and have nothing to do with its magical waters. “Better to die an old maid than to see the Devil,” runs a local saying. There are also certain tales of a sinister guardian. One local old man told a tale of World War II when the area was under German occupation. A British parachutist from a crashed aircraft landed within the ruins of the monastery and in the vicinity of the spring. Lost in the dark of the ruin, he had no idea of the direction of a nearby farm where he hoped the French Resistance would be waiting. Something moved in the darkness, and out of the gloom came an eerie, cowled figure, dressed in long dark robes like a monk. It signalled to him as if to follow, and led him into the woods close by. Shortly after, they reached a farmhouse, a rendezvous of the Resistance, where he was welcomed and brought to safety. He told his hosts about the curious cowled figure who had guided him through the woods and they all fell silent and crossed themselves. Since the Revolution, there had been no monks at the Abbey. What the airman had seen was a ghostly guardian at St. Catherine’s Spring.
Many visitors to the museum in recent times have experienced the sounds of heavy breathing close to the ancient cloister w
alls as if someone were standing very close at hand. Others have been aware of a threatening presence somewhere close.
