Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the Loire valley, in the department of Maine-et-Loire, there is a castle that the French call the Giant. It has seven stories, which no other château in France has, and two hundred and four rooms, and it rises out of its park with a peculiar lopsided grandeur, because it is in fact two buildings that never quite became one: a fifteenth-century fortress with round medieval towers, and a seventeenth-century palace that was supposed to replace it and never got finished. The old castle is still standing there beside the new one, half-swallowed, like a snake that stopped mid-meal. The Château de Brissac has belonged to the same family since 1502. The Cossé-Brissac line has held it for more than five hundred years and thirteen generations, and the current duke lives there now. You can go and see it. You can, if you like, stay the night — the family lets rooms, and they will serve you the estate's own wine at dinner. And if you ask them about the Green Lady, they will not deny her. ...

In the middle of Ireland, in County Offaly, on a rise of ground that commands the old pass between the Slieve Bloom Mountains and the plain, there is a gray tower house that has been standing there in one form or another since the fifteenth century. It is not large as castles go. It is not beautiful. It sits at the end of a lane with fields around it, and there is no moat and no fairy-tale turret, and if you drove past it without knowing you would take it for what it mostly is: an old Irish keep, half-ruined, patched, lived in. It is also, by a fairly wide margin, the most frightening building in Ireland, and the reason has nothing to do with atmosphere. It has to do with what was found under the floor. The Pass and the Family Leap Castle was built by the O'Bannons, and then it came to the O'Carrolls, and it is the O'Carrolls who matter. The castle sits on a strategic pass, and whoever held it held the road. The O'Carroll clan held it through the bloodiest centurie...