Houses of the Unholy

OUR STORY begins in Wexford, one fine spring morning at the turn of the decade. As ever, I was idling around the house in a semi-permanent state of post-teenaged bewilderment, when the phone rang, piercing my foggy fugue. I answered it.
Hello?
Is Pete Murphy there please? a voice bellowed, seemingly oblivious to the fact that telephones were invented so folk wouldn t have to holler from hilltop to hilltop in order to establish long-distance communications.
Speaking, I said, holding the phone away from my ear.
Mr. Murphy, this is Bubba Ze Bel here, down at the Hook.
Oh. Howya.
I m grand, grand. Eh, are you still in the band?
I am.
Well, I m startin up some concerts down here at Loftus Hall. I have an opening in the book for Sunday, May 11th. If yez are free I d like to book yez.
Okay. I ll have to talk to the lads, but I d say we could do it.
Sound job. Eh, what s your fee?
Well, we usually charge about two hundred quid.
(Silence. No, not quite silence. Heavy breathing.)
Alright. I ll send yez a contract. Give us yer address.
Bloody hell, I thought. A contract.
The document arrived a few days later. I looked over it, but didn t sign it. I had this vague feeling of disquiet, like when you ve left the house without checking that the gas is off. Or when last night s chicken curry and chips is threatening to make a break for it. But still, I called Ze Bel back and confirmed the gig.
Da was in the kitchen, meditating over his treacle-like tay, when I asked him if he knew anything about Loftus Hall. Yeah, he replied through a cloud of Sweet Afton. It s haunted.

Beyond The Back O Beyond
If you look up the word remote in the Oxford Dictionary, chances are you ll find a picture of Loftus Hall beside it. The landmark is located on the very edge of the Hook peninsula, the dangleberry on the rump of Ireland. Here, the distant roars of the Celtic Tigerians are about as relevant as the royal family. This is the deep south-east, a pagan place veneered with a thin film of cosmetic Catholicism, a backwater characterised by generations of inbreeding and intemperance, where men behave like beasts, and the beasts sometimes double as women.
Out here in the boondocks, primitive and often barbaric carry-on is still commonplace. Cock-fighting, the ancient custom where two young men from opposing tribes must attempt to club each other to death using their reproductive organs as weapons, is rampant. The hunting of German tourists is a popular summer pursuit. There is still the odd virginal sacrifice, but this practice is rapidly dying out due to a scarcity of hymenally-unchallenged local maidens.
Myths and legends hang over the peninsula like some thick and phileous fog. Place-names evoke desolate Arcadian settlements or Tolkienesque Hamlets: Tacumshin, Tomhaggard, Shielbaggin, Baginbun. The Hook even boasts its own Atlantis, a fabled village buried beneath the leagues of Bannow Bay. It is said that, on a still night, the submerged village s spires can still be glimpsed by underwater explorers, treasure hunters and poor souls who haven t paid off their gambling debts.
Loftus Hall was built on the remains of Redmond s Hall, a castellated mansion erected sometime during the 14th century, either by Sir Robert Redmond or his son Walter. The Redmonds were descendants of the Norman invader Raymond Le Gros, whose forces captured Waterford City in 1170. These castellated mansions were places of residence for powerful and wealthy Normans, similar in structure and design to the English Halls of the area, and affording the same conveniences, but with a more severe external character.
Redmond s Hall withstood many sieges from Cromwellian forces, but finally, as a result of the Act of Settlement following the Cromwell campaign, the Hall and its townlands (the most extensive in the Peninsula, containing 305 acres, 2 roods and 6 perches) were granted to Nicholas Loftus in 1666. Loftus nephew (also called Nicholas) inherited the hall in the early 1700s. He was created Baron of Ely in 1751. Between 1870 and 1871 the old hall was levelled to the ground by the fourth Marquis of Ely, and the present Loftus Hall was built on the same sight. The new structure boasted a famous staircase (costing #5000) crafted in Italy and shipped to Wexford where it was assembled by local carpenters. It also had its own gas central heating system, and the style of architecture was far removed from the grim Redmond mansion.

The Little Green Man
Reading about Loftus Hall is one thing: seeing it in the brick and mortar is another. As our bandwagon, packed with bodies and gear, drew closer to its destination, we pressed against the windows, straining for a glimpse of this hotel from the county hell. We weren t disappointed. Even in its modern incarnation, Loftus Hall is a very eerie spectacle, and because the surrounding area is totally un-landscaped and treeless, it can be seen for miles.
Good Jesus, exclaimed Newt, the bass-player. It s The Overlook Hotel out of The Shining.
He was exaggerating, but not much. The Hall doesn t exactly boast gargoyles on its cornices, but with three storeys worth of silent windows and impassive walls, it is still a stark monument to creepy seclusion. One field away from the hotel, the sea laps against the jagged rocks, and then there s Waterford, clear across the sound. You could go mad out here. And like it.
We drove around to the rear entrance, where we were admitted by a humpy-backed albino with an Hungarian accent (actually, it was a scruffy-looking chap in a wax jacket, but let s not allow the facts to intrude on a colourful yarn).
The venue was a huge ballroom capable of holding about eight or nine hundred people, even the stage was as big as a basketball court. It must ve measured a furlong from the rear of the hall to the lip of the stage, and the ceiling was as high as a cathedral s. We were in awe, but Paddy, our sound engineer, had the air of a troubled man. Echoey auditoriums like these are an acoustical nightmare.
I had to take a leak. The toilets were clean, but painted in such a garish colour and design that one would think the decorators had wheeled in the vomiting kid with the revolving head from The Exorcist, and simply let her go at it, pebble-dashing the walls.
When I emerged, I was confronted by the sight of this . . . apparition entering the ballroom, picking its way through the band bric a brac. A stench preceded it, a noxious cocktail of cologne and stale sweat. Then there was the suit. By some freakish twist of design or coincidence, the creature s day-glo two-piece perfectly matched the paint-job in the toilets. It was a ghastly garment, gang-green in colour, with trousers that weren t so much flared as paralleled three feet wide all the way down the leg, and a two-button jacket, too tight across the shoulders and short at the cuffs. The ensemble was offset by a greasy, off-white shirt, with collars as wide and extravagantly tapered as pterodactyl s wings, and the most ignorant-looking pair of brogues I d ever seen.
The body that occupied this rig-out was only marginally less grotesque. A model of disproportion, its stout trunk was appendaged by surprisingly skinny arms and legs. The outsized head sported two bulbous eyes that jutted hysterically from their sockets, a veined snout sprouting fecund tufts of hair, and a maw-mouth that seemed perpetually damp at the corners. The complexion was a sickly contradiction of pasty pale and ruddy red; indeed, the poor wretch s entire countenance seemed to be the result of nature playing some paradoxical endgame with itself.
Good afternoon, gentlemen, the apparition boomed, proffering a chubby paw. I m Bubba Ze Bel. Welcome to Loftus Hall.
We shook hands. It was like clutching raw liver.
I trust everything s okay, eh, lads? Bubba continued. Grand. I ll let you get on with it, so.
Then, as abruptly as he had appeared, Ze Bel vanished into the bowels of the main building. We all gaped at each other.
To our surprise, and despite the high ceiling, the ballroom s acoustics were magnificent. After an hour or so, we ceased bothering about balancing the sound anymore and just rehearsed for the hell of it. Paddy was delighted. This wasn t work, it was aural sculpture. Now all we needed was an audience.

God Is Dead
After the soundcheck, the seven of us spent an hour roaming the grounds of Loftus Hall, frolicking importantly along the rocky beach in the portentous manner of musicians who never quite got over the mid- 80s. As the light failed, we returned to the hotel itself, hungry for drink. However, this time we entered through a different door, and spent an age wandering through a labyrinth of hallways, passages and adjuncts that seemed to have neither sense not meaning.
As the lot of us turned down yet another hall that looked eight feet high as we entered it, and two as we exited, our jokey bravado became nervous irritation. But then, our cellist Theo, a man with a nose for alcohol that could locate brandy in a Buddhist retreat, beckoned us out of peril and into the warmth of the bar.
I usually love hotel bars. They offer seemingly interminable asylum from reality: entering them is like boarding a drunken ship bound for the far-off dawn, and the only sure thing you can count on is that by the time you disembark you ll be as pissed, lost and poor as any ancient mariner. But although our band had drank in some interesting kips, this particular hostelry was the strangest of the lot.
It wasn t anything I can pinpoint now, so much as an intangible atmosphere. It truly was the bar that time forgot. Our only companions were the staff, a clutch of regulars who eyed us as if we had come to slaughter their daughters and rape the livestock, and a couple of musty old blokes propping up the counter. Romancing into their porter, these two pickled old salts looked like they hadn t budged in decades. Our party commandeered a table, ordered some beer and grub, and prepared to wait out the couple of hours until showtime.
I can t quite identify the vague malaise that somehow infected us as we idled in the bar that night. Nothing blood-curdling happened. The temperature didn t plummet. Nobody saw the face of Jesus in their stout. Sacred heart lamps did not explode. It was more as if, mulling over beer after beer, time seemed to abandon us, reneging on its regular pulse-like passage, stretching and slowing to an evil crawl.
When I think of it now, I see seven hazy, shadowy figures, obscured by a languorous disorientation, as if trapped in an opium den. As the clock seemed to slowly lose heart, our little troupe began to regard each other with the hooded suspicion of absinthe-minded gamblers. Somebody mentioned that this place had once been a novitiate for an order of Rosminian nuns, the Sisters of Providence. Talk turned to the subject of God. Next thing, Theo and Joey began hectoring each other like a pair of hens:
There has to be something behind it all, Joey was holding forth. How else do you explain creation?
It s a scientific loophole in the universe that allows us to believe whatever we want, Theo replied irritably. There s no God.
So, you don t believe in a higher power.
I think that this fluke, this big bang that created the universe, allows us to believe whatever we want. You put it down to God. I think it s a happy accident.
Jaysus, it must be great to be so sure of yourself, Theo.
Ah lads, lads, interjected Newt. Leave it, will yez? Yer like an ould married couple.
With a fuckin theology degree, added Stephen.
The two ignored the interruptions and carried on.
But you are talkin shite, Theo.
Ah c mon, Joey. I m only expressing an opinion.
Yeah. A shite opinion.
You can believe what you want, Joey. That s all I m saying. There s no need to get ratty about it.
Joey shook his head, breathed out through his nose, and took a mouthful of coffee.
Theo looked around for support, got none, and lit a cigarette. All jocularity had gone out of the room. Paddy excused himself, saying he wanted to keep an eye on the mixing desk. Stephen leaned over to me and said disgustedly, This is bullshit. Politics and religion. You should fuckin leave em at home.
I didn t argue. I looked at Theo and Joey, fuming at each other, and I didn t feel like playing music with these people anymore. There were devils in our midst, alright. The remaining hour crawled by. We got ready to play, sour-pussed and lacklustre.
But there was more.

The Visitor
Anne Tottenham came to live in Loftus Hall with her father Charles some time in the mid-to-late 18th century. Life in the Hall at the time was dull for a young lady, especially in the dead of winter. It had no pretensions to beauty. There were passages that led to nowhere, purposeless nooks and crannies, panelled or wainscoted walls and a tapestry room. Anne spent long hours in the latter, whiling away the hours, waiting for some excitement to enliven the long nights.
One stormy evening, as the family sat by the fire listening to the wind whistling through the corridors, there was a loud knocking at the outer gate. Presently, a servant announced that there was a young gentleman on horseback outside who had lost his way in the storm and was seeking admission. He had been guided to their door by the glow of their windows. Charles Tottenham was a hospitable man, and, after offering the stranger refreshments, invited him to stay at the Hall. The stranger was a well-bred young man with good manners, and he charmed all, especially Anne.
Now that there was a party of four Charles, his wife, Anne and the stranger they were in a position to play a game of cards each night. Anne partnered the newcomer, and the two, being an adept team, won night after night.
During one particular game, Anne had an exceptional hand, and became so excited she dropped her cards on the floor. On bending to retrieve them, she saw, to her horror, that her partner had a cloven hoof. She screamed, and the stranger, on realising what had happened, shot through the ceiling in a ball of fire, leaving a trail of brimstone behind him. Anne fainted and was carried to the tapestry room, where she fell ill. She never left the room again.
According to tradition, until the hall was demolished and rebuilt a century later, the hole in the ceiling through which the stranger had vanished resisted all attempts at repair, and was left agape. Many tales are told of the cloven-footed gentleman s coming back to disturb the house, and also of Anne Tottenham s ghost, dressed in stiff brocade and carrying a fan, walking nightly through the baronial manor, always re-entering the tapestry room before dawn.
Such paranormal activities annoyed the Loftus family so much that they invited Father Thomas Broaders, the parish priest of the Hook from 1724 to 1773, to exorcise the malignant spirit, an unheard of measure to be taken by such staunch Protestant ascendancy. But as a result of the priest s intervention, he became persona grata with the family, and was able to obtain many concessions for the Catholic families and tenants of the Hall at the time, as well as land on which to build a church. Father Broaders is buried in Horetown Cemetery, and the epitaph on his tomb reads:
Here lies the body of Thomas Broaders
Who did good and prayed for all
And banished the Devil from Loftus Hall.
When the new hall was being designed in the early 1870s, it was ordered that all windows be arranged in configurations of three banks of nine, all divine numbers, designed to counterpoint combinations of 666. This was an unusually superstitious move for the time.
Loftus Hall presently functions as an hotel and tourist attraction. Which is where we came in.

Me And The Devil Blues
When we all traipsed back into the ballroom, Paddy, our sound engineer, was sitting at the mixing desk, looking puzzled. What s wrong? inquired Joey, glad to speak to somebody from outside the band.
I can t understand it, Paddy answered, indicating the faders. The levels are all screwed up. I had the desk set up exactly the way I wanted it when I left, and now they re all at random. Look. We looked. They just seemed like faders set at different levels to me, but I was no engineer.
By now the doors were open and there were about thirty punters scattered around the back of the hall, mostly red-necked young bucks in Guns N Roses T-shirts, all peering at us with squinty curiosity.
Has anybody been tampering with it?
No. I ve been here since well before the doors were opened. Besides, none of the other gear s been disturbed. It s just that the levels are all different. The soundcheck was a waste of time. I m going to have to sort it all out during the first couple of songs.
We took to the stage and got ready to play. All the instruments seemed to be in order, but Paddy was right. As soon as we started playing, it became apparent that the glorious wash of sound we d enjoyed earlier had deteriorated into a clattery cacophony. Plus, other stuff started happening. Joey was breaking so many guitar strings he might as well have been using a razorblade for a pick. He had to re-string several times during the set. I can t understand it, he muttered between songs, rooting for spares. I never break this many. I put a new set on yesterday.
The show was a disaster. In the middle of one tune, the bottom skin of my snare drum, the one you don t hit, spontaneously burst. The guitar tuners seemed to be operating with no regard for the laws of physics. And finally, as the band struck up a gospel tune entitled Jesus Drives A Train , Joey s mike stand keeled over of its own accord, as if committing some bizarre act of hara-kari. Joey saw it happen too, and he turned around to me, still strumming, gob agog, eyebrows raised.
We hared through the rest of the set like all of Robert Johnson s hellhounds were on our trail. The applause was ragged and perfunctory. No encores.
Later, as our crestfallen company were packing the gear away, a rabble of locals sat watching from the back of the hall, silent and blank-eyed, like some mutant tribe of inbreeds checking out fresh human bones to munch on. Stephen nodded in their direction and hissed to me, Watch yer back. It s fuckin Deliverance.
Joey and I went looking for Bubba Ze Bel. He was in a back office, counting receipts, a pained look on his face. He looked up.
Howya, lads.
Howya.
Eh, it was a bad night.
Joey looked at me and rolled his eyes. Great. The return of the showbiz mafia.
Let s say we call it a hundred and twenty, Bubba ventured, looking at his fingernails. Joey s brow darkened. I took this as my cue to go an fetch reinforcements. When Paddy and I returned to the office, Joey and the promoter were locked in intense negotiation. We hung back, blocking off the door.
We only had 34 people on the door, a fiver a head, Ze Bel was explaining to Joey. Let s split our losses and call it one-twenty.
It s not our concern how many paid in or not, Joey pointed out. We re not promoting the gig. If a thousand people came, you would ve cleaned up. Now pay us so we can go home, will ye?
Ah c mon now. Maybe we can sort something out agreeable to both parties, that way we can all do business again.
It said two hundred in the contract.
Do you have it with you?
We didn t. I had left the cursed thing at home. Ze Bel seemed to take this as a personal insult. After more haggling, we settled for #160. Classic showband mafioso tactics. They poormouth you until you d pay to get out of the blasted venue.
Later, from the back window of the van, I watched the lights of Loftus Hall receding into the night. Haunted or not, I was glad to see the back of it.
And I never did find that contract. n