Once known as Islandmore Castle, this evocative and atmospheric stone tower, with its narrow, time-worn stairs was a virtual ruin when the poet W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) purchased it in 1917 for the nominal sum of £35. Yeats renamed it Thoor (Irish for tower) Ballylee, commenting that, "I think that the harsh sound of Thoor amends the softness of the rest". Following considerable restoration, the property was finally habitable in 1919, when it became his summer residence and, thereafter, a central symbol of his poetry. Yeats was a devotee of the occult, once observing that, "The mystical life is the centre of all I do and all that I think and all that I write". He believed implicitly in the existence of ghosts, and was convinced that the tower was haunted by an Anglo-Norman soldier. A later curator was also convinced that a spectral form wandered the worn stairway of the tower, and was reluctant to ascend it as the day turned into night. This feeling was evidently shared by her pet dog, which would show signs of terror at something it could apparently see in the downstairs rooms. In 1989, an English family touring Co. Galway arrived at the tower one summer's afternoon as it was closing. Since they wished to photograph Yeat's sitting room, the curator obligingly reopened the window shutters so that a picture could be taken. David Blinkthorne stayed alone in the room to take photographs whilst his family went off to explore the rest of the building. When the film was developed, Mr Blinkthorne was astonished to see on one of the prints, the ghostly figure of a short-haired young boy standing in front of the camera. No one else had been in the room when the photograph was taken, and none of the other prints showed the strange and inexplicable apparition. The ghostly boy's identity still remains a mystery, although some have suggested that it may have been Yeat's own son.


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