A recent article by Vickie Maye in The Irish Independent featured various haunted houses around Ireland. The Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin is featured but the photograph on the haunted Leap Castle near Birr caught my attention.The musician that now owns the castle is aware of the ghosts that roam his home and even his daughters play with them. It appears that at one time forty members of an Irish clan were thrown down a long shaft in the chapel,its sides lined with spikes. The opening was bricked up and the prisoners forgotten for 400 years.It was excavated in the 1920s and four cartloads of human remains were taken away. Then there were the dungeons where men were left to starve in lightless tombs. Visit Leap Castle or find out more in A Haunted Land: Ireland's Ghosts by Bob Curran or Irish Ghost Stories by Padraic O'Farrell.