The Cooneen Poltergeist is one of those stories that has never really disappeared.
11 minutes ago
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For decades, people have repeated the strange tale of a family living in a remote farmhouse in County Fermanagh, where unexplained noises, knocking, movement and other disturbing incidents were said to have taken place.
The story was first brought to a wider audience through a magazine article published in the 1970s, and from there it began to take on a life of its own.
Over the years it has been retold in books, articles, paranormal discussions and local folklore. Details have changed, some parts have been embellished, and other parts have simply been repeated so often that it can be difficult to separate what was originally recorded from what was added later.
That, for me, is what makes stories like this so interesting.
I’m always more interested in what sits behind the legend.
Who were the people involved? Where did they live? What became of them? Were there other buildings, families or locations connected to the story that have been forgotten?
Over the past while I’ve been digging much deeper into the Cooneen case and I’ve uncovered new links to the story that I haven’t seen explored before.
I’ve also managed to photograph buildings connected to the wider story places that, as far as I’m aware, have never previously been shown in relation to the Cooneen Poltergeist.
Some of those discoveries have opened up even more questions.
And that is the strange thing about old stories like this. Even when the people involved are long gone, traces remain in old buildings, newspaper reports, family connections, local memories and fragments of information that have survived almost by accident.
At the end of October I’ll be telling more of the story of Cooneen, showing some of these photographs and sharing the new links I’ve uncovered in a talk on the 22nd of October in the Boundary Brewery, Newtownards Rd Belfast.
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