Kildare town's ghostly history

MY grandparents and family were evacuated from the Curragh during WWII and lived in the tower house at the back of what is now the Silken Thomas.

According to an article by Tadhg Hayden in the 1985/86 journal of the County Kildare Archaeological Society (CKAS), the tower house, known as ‘Kildare Castle’, was probably built from the remains of an earlier 13th-century, curtain-walled castle.

Another article in a CKAS journal gives a possible date of 1223 for construction of that castle.

The tower house may also have been a remodelled gatehouse from the Norman castle.

I remember my father telling me that skeletons were discovered when foundations were being dug for the cinema, the latter now forming part of the Silken Thomas premises. When we were young, we heard stories about poltergeist activity and paranormal events in the castle.

According to my father, they had two terrier dogs, which used to bark at blank walls. Beds supposedly also used to move and eventually they had to get the place blessed/exorcised, or so the story goes.

I visited Kildare Cathedral during the summer of 2024 and struck up a conversation with someone who was checking that there were no people remaining on the grounds before the gates were locked at closing time.

The cathedral was almost completely reconstructed in the 1860s, only fragments of medieval walls remain as evidenced by photos in the Stereo Pairs Photograph Collection in the National Library of Ireland and in The Royal Collection.

Anyway, this person said she had also heard stories about supernatural happenings (although these could have been due to my stories which I had been posting on social media over the years and had just done the rounds!) I'm sceptical about the paranormal. I think a lot of these types of experiences can be put down to pareidolia (seeing faces in places) which can either be visual or auditory.

Other causes could be hallucinations due to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, hypnotic suggestion or optical illusions.

Pareidolia is believed to be due to the way our brains are "hardwired" to pick out faces (similar to how a smartphone camera app can put a square around a person’s face) and which in primeval times would have given us an advantage in spotting predators lurking in the undergrowth. I don't believe people necessarily tell lies.

They see and experience things they think are supernatural, but those things aren't necessarily real. The human mind also creates what we perceive, based on input from our senses. It also interpolates, or "joins the dots", filling in what's not there and the creation in our heads isn't necessarily what's actually "out there". So, it can take shortcuts or make guesses.

Maybe my father made up the stories to entertain us? My grandfather served in the British Army in WWI and although he didn't experience trench warfare (he was in the army service corps or ASC), he had vertigo and it's possible he was also shell-shocked. Maybe that was responsible for the seeming movement of beds or other furniture. All those involved are dead now, so we'll never know. The castle was last occupied in 1996.

You can read an ACO Protected Structure Evaluation of ‘Kildare Castle Gatehouse’ on the Kildare County Council website. It detailed the state of the building in 2017.

https://consult.kildarecoco.ie/ga/system/files/materials/135/Kildare%20Castle%20Gatehouse.pdf