Leap Castle: The Elemental, the Bloody Chapel, and the Oubliette Full of Bones
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...