The Legend of Loftus Hall

While I was in Ireland I was taken to go on the tour of Loftus Hall with some of my Irish friends who had never seen it before. Little did we know we were about to scared out of our minds. As we entered the building before the tour started the staff gave us our tickets in the form of a playing card. Shortly after we began the tour. It was cold, overcast, and windy that day and the beginning of the whole experience was us standing outside listening to the history of the owners of the mansion. We had two tour guides who pointed out the horrible owners of the home and how no one was able to keep it long, even Cromwell had come and taken over the home at some point. I was not paying much attention thinking that the whole tour was going to be a history lesson. Then we entered into the huge mansion. The lighting was only whatever natural light came in through the mostly boarded up windows. After viewing a few rooms and being told how families would use this room as a sitting room, or this room as a dining room, we reconvened in the foyer.
This was when our tour guides asked everyone to get out their tickets/playing cards. They split us up sending those who had black number cards out into the main entrance and those with red number cards into a very dark room we had yet to go into. I had a face card and they told me to go join the people in the main entrance. There was a total of four of us now at the entrance. The guide took us into the dark room where the rest of the group was. We were told that we were going to act out the legend and the guide shut the door, leaving the room pitch black except for the dim lamp on the table.
 He had my group sit down in certain seats pretending to be the family who owned the mansion. I think because I was the only American there they decided to play with me and make me Anne, the daughter of the family. The guide began talking about the legend now, having us introduce ourselves to the other group (who ended up being servants and standing around the table). The guide said that on a particularly stormy night a ship landed at the mansion and a stranger came in to seek shelter for the night. This was when a knock on the door happened and the other tour guide came in dressed up as the stranger. It was funny because the man described to us by legend was "tall, dark, and handsome" and the guide was the typical pale Irish man. Apparently he hit it off with Anne immediately according to the legend and the guide kept making flirtatious looks at me which just made me and my friends laugh.

 According to legend the family eventually began to play a game of cards and the dressed up guide then dealt out cards to the four of us playing the family. The other guide asked us to double check that each of us got five cards. I only had four so I told him this and just casually said to check and make sure it didn't fall off the table. I bent down to look under the table and saw a hoof instead of a foot of the stranger. I screamed, a recorded scream happened, the light went out, sound effects went off and I immediately jumped up to my seat just in time for the guide to jump across the table wearing a demon mask at me then disappear. We were all terrified. It was then that the guide illuminated a hole in the ceiling and told us that apparently the stranger was supposed to have flown out through the ceiling, making a hole in it that to this day no one has been able to repair.
After this traumatizing event we went on to tour the rest of the home. The guide offhandedly mentioned that the girl Anne went insane and was locked up in the tapestry room where she died. When she died she was stuck in the form of her chair because she had been bound there so long. To this day she is supposed to

haunt the tapestry room. No lights work in this room, photos have shown ghostly figures on camera, and the guard dogs who are with the guards as they lock up the mansion for the night will not enter the room. All of these are true facts. The rest of the tour was just explaining weird things that happened until the guides took us into another dark room. They had moved back to the door as we filed into the room and quickly said, "this is the tapestry room, we will leave you here for five minutes to look around." Then shut the door. My friends and I basically wet our pants. Eventually the guides came back to get us and we were able to leave the haunted mansion.
Visit these sites for more information: https://www.facebook.com/LoftusHook
                                                         http://www.loftushall.com/