Official Blog of p.m.terrell

This is the second part in the true stories behind the book, April in the Back of Beyond. Part 1 can be found here: https://pmterrell.blogspot.com/2019/08/behind-book-part-1-april-in-back-of.html

 Watch the video below for the inside story, or skip below to read it. The video can also be viewed on YouTube at https://youtu.be/-jsmYf4osR8.

Throughout April in the Back of Beyond is another story inspired by fact. The main character, Hayley Hunter, is a writer that is researching her family’s history, beginning with her ancestor’s migration to Ulster from Scotland who became involved in O’Doherty’s Rebellion. 

These scenes are based on my creative nonfiction book, Checkmate: Clans and Castles, which was released in 2017 by Drake Valley Press. In Checkmate, my own ancestor, William Neely, arrived in Ulster with William Stewart. Their land bordered on Cahir O’Doherty’s Inishowen Peninsula, separated only by the lough. When Cahir set fire to Derry and began O’Doherty’s Rebellion, it would require my ancestor to make a choice: whether to fight for King James against the uprising or side with the Irish that had lived and ruled that region for over a thousand years. Checkmate was the result of years of painstaking research and I attempted to remain faithful to the facts.

Though the battle of Derry depicted in Checkmate occurred in 1608, it would not be the first and far from the last. The city was rebuilt through London private donations and renamed Londonderry. Today, more than 400 years later, it continues to be a city divided between those loyal to Britain and largely Protestant (unionists or loyalists) versus those fighting for a united Ireland that are largely Catholic (republicans or nationalists). The ideological war between the two factions was originally those loyal to Britain versus those loyal to Ireland, but it became a religious war as well, fueled by zealous ministers and priests. The city is often referred to as the “slash city” Londonderry/Derry because the republican/nationalist Irish do not recognize the name “London” in their city, it having been named Derry centuries earlier, prior to England’s invasion.

During the writing of this book, tensions increased in Ulster—most notably Derry and Belfast. A journalist was killed covering a violent uprising in Derry and several Catholic churches were burned. The increase in violence was attributed to Brexit, which could possibly lead to checkpoints and guard posts between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which had unfairly targeted Catholics in decades before the Good Friday Agreement and the removal of those border walls.

Check out the book trailers below for April in the Back of Beyond and Checkmate: Clans and Castles:

Writer Hayley Hunter has arrived in Ireland to complete a book on Irish history. When she discovers the old carriage house she is renting is haunted, she is determined to uncover the truth behind the burned ruins of a nearby manor house and the abandoned British barracks it overlooks. 

With the assistance of Shay Macgregor, an Irish historian, her quest will take her to 1919 and the Irish War for Independence, exposing the murders of two young men and why their mother, April Crutchley, refuses to leave the back of beyond even in death. 

With a budding romance and the opportunity to begin life anew, Hayley finds her own life is now in jeopardy as she gets closer to a truth the villagers have long sought to bury.

In The Forgotten Secret by Kathleen McGurl, Clare Farrell is approaching her 50^th birthday. For half of her life she has been married to a narcissistic man who has systematically cut her off from everything and everyone that did not center around him. So when Clare inherits her uncle’s home in Ireland along with a monetary inheritance, she decides to take the leap and separate from her husband and begin life anew. The house holds secrets, including a stash of guns and weapons under a floor in the barn and a birth certificate and communion medallion from two separate people tucked away in the stuffing of an old armchair.

Watch the video below or skip beneath it for the rest of the book review.

I rooted for Clare. I cheered for her, cried with her and laughed with her. Breaking away would not be easy and she encounters events such as wrecking her automobile on an Irish country road to renovating a centuries-old home that has fallen into disrepair. But she makes friends in the nearby village and she exhibits a lot of grit, determination and courage.

In between Clare’s chapters, we learn of a woman connected to the house a century earlier during the Irish War for Independence. Ellen O’Brien lives with her crotchety father in a modest home but she’s dating Jimmy Gallagher, a young man she’s known an entire lifetime. They were best friends in school and now they’ve become lovers as well as clandestine members of the Irish underground volunteers fighting for independence from Great Britain. It is Jimmy who grew up in the house that Clare inherits and it’s both Jimmy’s story and Ellen’s that rolls out through the book.

The author, Kathleen McGurl, describes the countryside so well that I could see the village in my mind’s eye, both as it was in 1920 as well as present day. I came to respect the danger that Ellen, Jimmy and others willingly undertook to fight for their cause—a cause that would cost some their lives. And when Ellen discovers she is pregnant yet she is still unmarried, I felt her anguish at being sent to one of the Magdalene Laundries, a convent for unwed mothers and their babies that turned into an unsaintly prison.

We also see the contrasts in what women could accomplish within a brief hundred years—at Ellen’s dependency on her father and the kindness of strangers to Clare’s struggle for independence.

Like all of McGurl’s books, there are multiple threads that seem unrelated but all blend together into a seamless mosaic of love and war, endings and new beginnings. I highly recommend The Forgotten Secret by Kathleen McGurl.

I love a great ghost story, and Secrets of the Lighthouse by Santa Montefiore is a unique one. The first page instantly drew me in as I pictured a young wife and mother looking at a lighthouse in the beautiful Connemara region of Ireland and a tiny chapel by the sea where family was gathering for a funeral. As the chapter drew to a close and I discovered the narrator, a woman whose shoes I'd set myself into, was actually a ghost watching her own funeral, I was completely intrigued. I had to find out what happened in the charred remains of the abandoned lighthouse.

In between the ghost’s chapters, we follow the story of Ellen Trawton, who has decided to run away from her family’s home in England and visit her mother’s sister Peg, whom she has never met. In fact, Ellen’s mother had been adamant that her family never visit Ireland so when Ellen arrives, she is shocked to discover that she not only has an aunt but a number of uncles and cousins. Ellen is running away from an arranged marriage she never wanted to a man she doesn’t love, as well as the pretentious trappings of her mother’s life—a life she wants her daughters to emulate. Aunt Peg’s home sits along the same coastline as the abandoned lighthouse and Ellen is intrigued with the rumors of what happened there, each piece of gossip more salacious than the last.

The author causes the village to come alive. I could feel the Wild Atlantic Way as the ocean’s spray reached Ireland's west coast, could smell the salt on the air and taste the rain that is ever present. Within the pages, I witnessed a large group of characters spring to life and yet I never felt overwhelmed by them all, and each was easy to remember. Each, in fact, carried a story of their own, a small piece of the larger puzzle that brought the mystery to life.

Secrets of the Lighthouse is a story of decisions made, often in haste and without regard for the consequences. In turn, they placed each character on a particular path, some by their own choice and others as collateral damage.

Ellen discovers secrets that were hidden for thirty years, secrets that impacted both her past and her future. Her mother’s story unravels to reveal the lies that were told, the life that was chosen—and that life which she left behind, the consequences of which reared up when least expected.

When Ellen falls for Conor, the ghost’s widower, she must decide whether to believe the tales told in the village pub or discover what really happened that fateful night at the lighthouse. As she grows ever closer to Conor, his dead wife must decide what she will do, where she will go, and whether to leave this life behind or continue haunting it.

If you enjoy stories set in Ireland, a ghost story, romance, mystery and adventure, you will enjoy Secrets of the Lighthouse. I am looking forward to reading more from this author.

There are many good books but only occasional great ones, and The Girl from Ballymor definitely is one of the great ones. It has reminded me many times over how it was books like this one that caused me to fall in love with reading, which later led to a lifelong love of writing as well. Because of that, I have decided to create a new playlist on YouTube containing book reviews as well as post reviews on my blogs. I am a notoriously slow reader; I prefer to read a scene and allow it to marinate, rolling it around in my mind until I can truly feel like I am there as one of the characters, allowing their circumstances to settle into my consciousness. For that reason, I will not be publishing many reviews each year, but those I do are definitely ones I recommend.

The Girl from Ballymor is told in two time periods as our contemporary Maria travels to Ireland to research her family history and specifically Kitty McCarthy, a grandmother several generations back. The plot grabbed my attention from the start because those that follow my blogs and writing know that I began a quest many years ago to find my ancestors in Ireland. Though my father and grandfather had amassed quite a bit of information, it was concentrated on ancestors in America and I wanted to go further back, partly to find out why I was so drawn to the Emerald Isle.

We discover Maria’s ancestor Kitty after she married and had six children, though her earlier years are told in vivid flashbacks. To say she did not have an easy life is a vast understatement. Her husband Patrick has died in a copper mine accident and several of her children have perished during the potato famine of the 1840s, which drastically reduced the population from eight million to lower than three million, between starvation-related deaths and survivors fleeing the island. The three survivors—Kitty, her eldest son Michael and her daughter Gracie—are slowly starving.

Maria is there to discover what happened because Michael survived, immigrating first to America and then returning on his own quest to find his mother. He had become a famous artist, and many of his portraits featured the same young woman, his mother, often wearing a Celtic brooch; yet there are no records of her death.

This is a book with so many layers that it's worth reading again and again, a classic for the ages. There's the realization that both then and now, a person’s existence is often determined by where they live, the social class they were born into, and how they handle problems and challenges, some of which are life threatening, that ultimately will decide their fate. In a time that has become increasingly more complex, the reader steps into a completely different world as we travel back to the 1840’s when the only goal was to find work to survive just one more day, even if that work is breaking rocks by hand in the Irish rain, hour after hour, for a cup of warm broth or a bite of cheese or bread.

Kathleen McGurl is a fabulous writer, her style reminiscent of authors I fell in love with so many decades ago, authors that expanded my horizons, broadened my understanding of the world, and have always caused me to want to be a better person. McGurl deserves to be listed among the greatest of them, her words carrying weight, the characters alive in my soul, long after reading that last page.

Watch my video review of The Girl from Ballymor here, or on YouTube at https://youtu.be/KUGCxgE_xIM

Those of us in the United States don’t often associate hurricanes with Ireland. We think of them as tropical storms, the warm waters off our southern shores fueling their intensity. Yet on October 16, 2017, Hurricane Ophelia slammed ashore in Ireland with winds exceeding 90mph and storm surges impacting the coastal regions. Trees were overturned, massive root balls uprooted. Falling trees resulted in two deaths as of this writing, and a third when an Irishman in County Tipperary attempted to remove a downed tree. 360,000 electric customers were without power, roughly 1/6 of the population in Ireland and Northern Ireland combined.

Still, hurricanes of such significant intensity are rare in Ireland. When Ophelia reached Category 3 status, it was the farthest east that any major Atlantic hurricane had reached on record. It was so far northeast that weather maps designed to predict wind speeds could not even process it—their software was not programmed for a major hurricane in that vicinity.

Ophelia had an intriguing path. It formed off the coast of Africa, its winds already so vicious that it literally kicked up the Sahara Desert and transported the Saharan dust into Ireland and the UK. Dusk is particularly affected, as the dust particles block the blue light from the sun, turning the skies red.

Ophelia reached Ireland exactly 30 years after The Great Storm struck Ireland in 1987, killing 22 people. It was that storm that inspired Dylan’s Song, the fourth book in the Black Swamp Mysteries Series. As Dylan and Vicki travel to Ireland to locate and rescue an abducted CIA operative, Dylan is forced to confront what happened during the storm that caused massive flooding, cutting him off from help as he encountered a life-or-death situation.

Another storm, The Night of the Big Wind, inspired The Tempest Murders. It occurred on January 6, 1839, at a time before hurricanes were tracked and the population of Ireland was caught by surprise. The storm literally swept the Atlantic Ocean across the island to the Irish Sea, devastating whole villages. At the height of the storm, Rian Kelly is fighting to return to his beloved from Dublin, arriving only after her home was swept away. It is the beginning of a love story that spans centuries.

Below is an excerpt from The Tempest Murders as Claire is explaining to Ryan O'Clery, named after his ancestor Rian Kelly, the story of Rian and his lover:

The winds were so strong with Ophelia that one town, Cleveleys, on the Fylde Coast of Lancashire, England, was entirely covered in foam. Yes, foam—the ocean was whipped into foam, which sprayed roads, buildings and people. For video and pictures, follow this link. This was after it had already reached Ireland and tracked northward across the island and the Irish Sea.

Nine miles off the western coast of Ireland lies a tiny island known as Toraigh, better known as Tory Island. Only three miles long and about half a mile wide, winds off the Atlantic buffet the cliffs that extend from the ocean’s surface to more than 245 feet high, creating a natural defense against invaders. This is a land forged from mythology and still connected to distant pagan rites and religions even as it blends into the 21^st century.

In Irish mythology, Balor was the king of the Fomorians, an ancient supernatural race that rose from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. He had one eye in the middle of his forehead that was covered by seven cloaks. With each cloak that was removed, increasing levels of destruction were unleashed. He lived on Tory Island in a castle that included a high tower.

One day a seer prophesied that Balor’s own grandson would rise up to kill him. When his beautiful daughter Ethniu married and became pregnant, he imprisoned her in the high tower, where she gave birth to triplets—all sons. He ordered them drowned immediately, their infant bodies cast off the cliffs to the craggy rocks below—but one, Lugh, survived and when he grew to adulthood, he returned to Tory Island and killed Balor, fulfilling the seer’s tale.

Today Balor is known as the God of Death in Celtic mythology. After his death, the Fomorians returned to the waters off the coast of Ireland. It is said on days of gloom when black clouds are roiling and tumbling against unsettled skies and the winds roll in from the Atlantic in fury, the Fomorians rise from their watery depths and prey upon ships off the coast of tiny Tory Island. It is then that mothers herd their children indoors to wait out the storm’s rage lest they fall into the hands of these evil monsters.

From the 11^th of January, 1974 and continuing for two months straight, the island was cut off from the mainland by massive Atlantic storms. Perhaps 280 inhabitants huddled in their homes waiting for the storms to pass. When the skies finally cleared, 130 of them left Tory Island never to return and made their homes on the mainland.

In the 6^th century, Saint Columba (Colm Cille in Irish) landed on Tory Island in order to spread Christianity. At the time, pirates were descending upon the vulnerable island as it laid cut off from the mainland, plundering and destroying their homes and often abducting the women. Saint Columba built a monastery there and prophesied that when the people, led by a man named Duggan, rose up against the pirates, they would leave and never come back. The inhabitants rose up, the pirates departed, and with the ensuing peace, they converted in droves to Christianity. It is a religion unlike others, however, as they adopted Catholic ways as well as held onto their pagan beliefs.

In 1595, the English under the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I invaded Tory Island, killing many of its inhabitants and almost completely destroying the Catholic monastery.

In my book, Clans and Castles, the first in the Checkmate series, William Neely arrives at Tory Island in 1608 during O’Doherty’s Rebellion. Mulmory MacSweeney, one of the MacSweeney clan leaders, and Shane McManus O’Donnell of the O’Donnell clan, escaped to Tory Island during the rebellion, taking up residence in the ruins of the castle and monastery. The English and Scottish, William among them, surrounded the island in their boats, laying siege to it and cutting off all means of escape. In this scene from the book, several weeks have passed before one man rowed from the island to one of the ships with a note in hand:

It was midafternoon when a rowboat left Tory Island. One man carried it out of the rampart in full view of the ships. It was the first time they had seen movement outside the stockade and a silence fell on the ships as men positioned themselves along the decks to watch.

As the boat was placed into the water in front of Wills’ ship, he watched the parapets once more before moving back to the lone man. Everything grew deadly silent as he approached.

“Bring him aboard,” Wills ordered. He watched as men dropped netting over the side of the ship. One man scurried down to secure the rowboat as their visitor climbed up the netting. He noticed that Stewart, still at anchor in the ship next to his, was preparing to board as well.

“Bring him to the cabin,” Wills instructed Fergus and Tomas. As his friends moved out to offer a somber greeting, they ushered him toward the cabin. He noticed the man’s clothing was so loose he was having some difficulty keeping his breeches from falling and as he moved past the cooking fire, he almost appeared as if he would bolt directly for it.

When Stewart joined him, they made their way into the cabin where they found the man seated at the table, Fergus and Tomas guarding the door. “Back to work,” Wills said to the others gawking. As they cleared out, only Fergus, Tomas, Stewart, Archie and Wills were left in the room with the man.

“I am Captain William Stewart,” Stewart said.

“William Neely,” Wills added.

“James MacDowell,” the man answered. With a trembling hand, he held up a note.

Stewart stepped forward to receive it. He read it silently and then handed it to Wills, who read it through once and then, unable to fathom its contents, read it again. When he was through, he locked eyes with Stewart. Then they both looked at James MacDowell.

“Have you read this note?” Wills asked him.

“I was there when The MacSweeney wrote it.”

“That would be Sir Mulmory MacSweeney?”

The man averted his eyes. “Aye.”

“Is this true?” Stewart asked. “Has MacSweeney begun killing his own men?”

The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “Aye, sir. He is requesting a Pelham’s Pardon, sir.”

Wills glanced at Stewart. “I am not familiar with this Pelham’s Pardon.”

“Sir William Pelham,” Stewart answered. “Ruthless man; he conquered much of Ireland in the mid fifteen hundreds and became Lord Justice of Ireland. A Pelham’s Pardon is the refusal to grant any Irish rebel surrender unless he had killed another rebel of equal or higher rank.”

A chorus of voices sounded on the deck and Wills stepped to the portal to peer toward the island. As he watched, three heads were raised on pikes set along the keep’s pinnacle. He turned back to MacDowell. “Have you seen this?” he asked, stepping away from the window so the man could view the island.

MacDowell remained seated, however, and did not look toward the portal. “I have seen them already,” he answered.

And so it was that MacSweeney continued to murder his men, hoping for a Pelham’s Pardon which never came. His men finally rose against him and murdered their own leader before each of them was killed and his head was delivered in a sack to the English.

Many more true stories that took place during O’Doherty’s Rebellion play out through my ancestor, William Neely, in Clans and Castles.

On September 22, 1884, the English gunboat HMS Wasp sank off the coast of Tory Island and 50 sailors were drowned. Only 6 of the crew survived and were rescued by inhabitants of the island. The ship, along with others, was responsible for bringing officials to the outlying islands to evict the native Irish. This was during the Land Wars in which many absentee owners lived well in other countries off the labor of their tenants in Ireland but did little or nothing to improve their tenants' lot. When crops were spoiled (as in the infamous Potato Famines) and tenants could not pay their rent, the ships brought officials to the islands to evict the tenants and then destroy their homes so they could not come back. During the inquiry into the sinking, there was some speculation that the lighthouse was left dark intentionally in order to draw the ship closer to the rocks where it splintered and sank but no one was ever charged.

Today there are approximately 150 residents still living on Tory Island. During calmer weather, you can catch the ferry to the island where you can still see the ruins of the castle’s high tower and the monastery. The Tau Cross is one of only two in all of Ireland. They speak Irish Gaelic similar to the Scottish Highlands Gaelic, and some speak varying degrees of English. The King of Tory Island, elected by the inhabitants, greets every boat personally.

And if you are there as the sun departs and the winds roll in, you may hear Balor’s daughter Ethniu wailing, her cries and her curses carrying across the island, pleading for the lives of her three infant sons. But if the storm clouds gather over the ocean, the clouds puckering like a fist intent on Tory Island, you’d best flee to the mainland. The channel—your escape route—will begin to churn with rising cross tides while the gale-force winds will set upon you, threatening you with a watery grave amidst the remnants of the race that once called the God of Death their king.

The Inishowen Peninsula rests at the northwestern corner of Ireland, a wild, untamed landscape with craggy rocks upon which the Atlantic Ocean whips and the winds pummel. It lies within County Donegal, one of the nine counties of the ancient Irish province known as Ulster and the location of my historical book, Clans and Castles, the first of the Checkmate series.

Two royal proclamations—one in 1606 and the other in 1611—sought to abolish the Catholic Church of which most native Irish belonged, and ordered that all Mass priests be banished from Ireland. The priests went underground, living in caves or harbored by parishioners; discovery could mean imprisonment or death.

One brave Catholic Friar, Friar Hegarty, remained on the Inishowen Peninsula, tending to parishioners from Fahan—near the site of one of Cahir O’Doherty’s castles at Inch Island—to Desertegney, a combined area of more than 32,000 acres. At one point, he lived in a hut secluded in the heavily wooded area of Lisnakelly on the River Foyle; at other times, he found isolated caves in which to live. His congregation and his family provided him with food and necessities until 1632, when his own brother-in-law is said to have betrayed him to the Protestant authorities, English and Scotsmen that immigrated to Ulster during The Plantation Era of King James I.

As word traveled to Friar Hegarty that arrest was imminent, he was given a white horse to make his escape. If he could make it to Rathmullen by traveling the southern edge of Drongawn Lough before turning northward, a boat was awaiting him there that would take him to safety—perhaps to Scotland or to another Irish province where he could hide. But as he galloped away, the British soldiers spotted him and gave pursuit along the footpath above the craggy rocks. As he was passing over a hill, he was struck down from his horse, where he was quickly captured.

The soldiers dragged him to a nearby rock, forced him to the ground and beheaded him.

On the footpath where his white horse traveled, there lies the image of a horse’s hoof embedded in the rock, and on the rock where Friar Hegarty was beheaded, the sign of the cross formed. It was said that his head bounced nine times after his beheading, and each spot in which it landed remains bare to this day, unable to grow any vegetation, wild or planted. The rock itself is known as Friar Hegarty’s Rock.

Over the centuries, a white horse has been spotted galloping over the footpath, sometimes alone and other times with the ghost of Friar Hegarty atop it. The color of the horse is said to be otherworldly, illuminated even on the darkest of nights.

In the early 1990’s, some 360 years after Friar Hegarty’s murder, four teenage boys were quad biking dangerously close to the cliff’s 40-foot drop to the sea below. As they rounded the wild coastal route in the dark of night, a white horse suddenly appeared in front of them as if out of nowhere, rising high on its hind legs, its forelegs pawing the skies as its ethereal white coat illuminated the path in front of them. It so startled the lads that they pulled their four-wheeled motorcycle to an abrupt stop. And there, as they watched, the white horse leapt off the cliff’s edge but as they rushed to see whether it had landed on the craggy, deadly rocks below, the horse simply vanished into thin air.

Had the boys not stopped, they most certainly would have careened off the cliffs themselves to become impaled on the rocks below as they jutted upward from the sea.

And so it is that the white horse sent to save Friar Hegarty continues its mission today in saving others from certain death; unable to save the Friar, it is forever connected to him on his final day.

 I love ghost stories. They have inspired ghosts in many of my books, including A Thin Slice of Heaven, Vicki's Key, The Pendulum Files and Dylan's Song. The area in which Friar Hegarty lived is the location in which my historical book, Clans and Castles, takes place. Read more about my writing at www.pmterrell.com. 

p.m.terrell is the internationally acclaimed author of more than 21 books, including the award-winning River Passage, award-winning series Black Swamp Mysteries and award-winning Ryan O’Clery Mystery Series. She is the Founder of Book ‘Em North Carolina Writers Conference and Book Fair and the Founder of The Novel Business. She has been a full-time author since 2002. Prior to that, she founded and operated two computer companies in the Washington, DC area with specialties in defense and intelligence. Her clients included the CIA, Secret Service and Department of Defense. For more information, visit www.pmterrell.com.

Burt Castle was built during the 16^th century in Ulster at the southern edge of the Inishowen Peninsula. Inishowen had been in the hands of the O’Doherty Clan for more than a thousand years and Burt Castle was only one of several castles that dotted the peninsula. It has seen its share of conflicts, intrigue… and murder. And throughout the centuries there have been numerous ghostly sightings, even today among the ruins.

Here is how I describe the castle in Clans and Castles, the first book in the historical Checkmate series—then keep reading for the stories behind the ghostly sightings:

Burt Castle rested at the southern edge of the Inishowen Peninsula like a silent sentinel keeping watch over the O’Doherty landholdings. It was constructed during the reign of Henry VIII and was considered a more contemporary style than earlier Irish castles. Built of the same limestone and rock that was found in abundance throughout Ulster, it rose three stories above the ground and at two of its four corners stood towers that reached another two stories before giving way to parapets that afforded a spectacular view of the Irish countryside—and even Derry, which was a only a few miles away.

Each wall was between four and five feet thick, the towers dotted with perforations for dozens of harkbus, along with larger openings for cannons.

There were two more stories below ground, comprised of dungeons, an armory and soldiers’ barracks and offices, eventually giving way to a stone wall that surrounded the castle and grounds, which was in turn encircled by a mote. With Ireland’s violent history of invasion ranging from the Vikings and Normans to the Spaniards and English—not to mention battles between clans—it was a formidable fortress built to withstand assault.

During the 16^th century when Burt Castle one of the O’Doherty men seduced a young girl from the neighboring area—quite possibly Derry, which was only a short distance away. The lovers met as lovers do, and the girl gave up her heart and her body to the nobleman. Soon after, she discovered she was pregnant but when she informed her lover, he absolved himself from all responsibility.

She wanted marriage and all it meant for her unborn child: legitimacy, protection and a place in the O’Doherty clan. When he refused to marry her and turned his back on her, she became increasingly distraught. Over the preceding century, Ireland had turned from its original pagan religions to Catholicism and a bastard child would create a lifetime of hell for both the mother and the child.

So on one night as the moon shone full and bright, she walked along the shore of the Lough Swilly, eventually wading in and drowning herself and her unborn child in its frigid waters.

Her father made a vow to avenge his daughter’s death and her undoing by the O’Doherty kinsman and he discovered through workers at Burt Castle exactly where her lover slept: in the vaulted, mural chamber on the first floor near the southwest tower. On one dark, lonely night when the clouds roiled and tumbled overhead, he tricked his way into the castle at the southwest tower and climbed from the ground floor to the first elevated story by way of the spiraled turnpike staircase and into the lover’s chamber where he slept.

There, the father withdrew his long knife, sharpened for the occasion of avenging his daughter’s death, and stabbed the O’Doherty kinsman repeatedly. To ensure that he was beyond resuscitation, he then dragged his body to the narrow window. Pushing it through, he tried to aim it for the craggy rocks at the base of the castle but it fell instead on a patch of grass close to the cold stone wall.

From that time forward, each time the moon is full, the ghost of a young girl is seen walking the shoreline of the Lough Swilly, her distraught wails caught on the winds and carried for miles, only fading when the figure wades into the water and disappears under the waves.

And on those nights, the swans rise up from their positions along the banks and fly to Burt Castle, where they begin wailing at the base of the old southwest tower where her lover was plunged to his death, a patch that even today grass will not grow…

Burt Castle figures prominently in Clans and Castles, the first book in the Checkmate series, and is haunted by more than one ghost… The book is a three-time award nominee: 2018 International Book Awards, 2017 USA Best Book Awards and 2017 Readers Choice Awards. Click here to read more and purchase the book with a free autograph or buy from amazon. It is also available in all fine bookstores around the world.

 

p.m.terrell is the internationally acclaimed author of more than 21 books, including the award-winning River Passage, award-winning series Black Swamp Mysteries and award-winning Ryan O’Clery Mystery Series. She is the Founder of Book ‘Em North Carolina Writers Conference and Book Fair and the Founder of The Novel Business. She has been a full-time author since 2002. Prior to that, she founded and operated two computer companies in the Washington, DC area with specialties in defense and intelligence. Her clients included the CIA, Secret Service and Department of Defense. For more information, visit www.pmterrell.com.