Disembowelments, flaming pigs and explosive poo: these are the curious tales behind the ghostly ghouls of King John’s Castle in Ireland, writes Derek Cheng The scream erupted from nowhere and shattered the silence of the ancient room on the castle’s first floor, as if someone was being disemboweled. We’d just learned the fate of the room’s former occupant, Captain George Courtenay, who was hung from his own intestines in his quarters in King John’s Castle, Ireland, in the 17th century after the derailing of his evil plan to kill his own soldiers. To avoid paying them, as our castle guide Mike Casey explained, the English military leader had written a note telling his Irish foes where the soldiers would be at a certain time, and to please kill them.
As if to tempt fate, he decided it would be deliciously devilish to pass the note to the soldiers so they could deliver themselves to their own fate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they opened the letter, didn’t particularly like what it said, and decided not only to slice open the captain and hang him from the ceiling by his own intestines, but to leave him rotting in elevated humiliation. His daughter found what was left of him six days later.
Distraught with grief and traumatised by the sight, she flung herself into the River Shannon below. This is one of the frightful fables etched into the walls of the countless medieval relics of Ireland, a country similar to New Zealand with an oversized love of rugby, a huge expat popu.
