Read all about 'The Black Pig of Kiltrustan'

This Halloween, enter a world of haunted houses, haunted castles, and even, haunted shopping centres in a new book of ghost stories for children called ‘Haunted Ireland: an Atlas of Ghost Stories from Every County’. Within its pages, you will encounter ghosts, banshees, witches and monsters of every sort, including phantom pigs from Kiltrustan, Strokestown.

The following is an extract from ‘The Black Pig of Kiltrustan’, which was based on an article published in the Roscommon Messenger on May 4th, 1918.

 “One Wednesday, a group of residents from Kiltrustan turned up in Strokestown with strange news from their village. A large crowd gathered to hear their tale.

On 18 April, a 12-year-old girl called Mary Kate Dowd saw a black pig emerge from a crack in the ground near the schoolhouse in Kiltrustan. She watched it walk around the stump of a tree that had recently been cut down. The girl said it neither looked nor moved like a normal pig, so she ran into the school to fetch the teacher, Mr Beirne. When he arrived, he couldn’t see the animal.

‘But it’s right there,’ said the girl. ‘At your feet.’ The teacher looked down but couldn’t see anything. He wondered if the girl was playing a trick on him, though she wasn’t the sort of child to do such a thing.

‘Can’t you see it?’ she said, earnestly, staring at the teacher’s feet. ‘Look, it’s walking across your boots.’ The teacher thought she must be playing a trick on him, or else he was losing his mind. Determined to rule out both possibilities, he called over a group of children who were playing nearby. As they approached, their eyes were all fixed on the teacher’s feet.

‘Ah, look,’ said one of the children.

‘Where did you get the pig, sir?’ asked another.

The teacher looked at the children in disbelief as they followed the apparent movements of the pig, which to his eyes was invisible, over to a patch of grass.

‘She’s eating grass!’ exclaimed one child in delight.

Another child laughed. ‘Now she’s spitting it out.’ If the teacher hadn’t known the children, he might have said the whole thing was an elaborate hoax, but these children were not prone to flights of fancy.

Am I the only one that can’t see this pig? he thought to himself.

He spotted two women and a man coming up the street and he called them over. He was relieved when they couldn’t see the pig either. Word spread through the village, and soon a large crowd turned up. All the children present claimed they could see the pig, but the adults could not. It was all very strange.

The following morning, there was a knock on Mary Kate’s door. Her father opened it to two priests. Behind them, the street was jammed with motor cars, horses and traps, and many people looking in their direction.

‘Could you ask your daughter to show us the pig?’ said one of the priests.

As Mary Kate got dressed, the visitors asked to see the other children in the village too. The group of children led the crowd to the place where they’d last seen the pig. The adults still couldn’t see anything except an old tree stump, but as soon as the children got near, it was clear that they could see something.

‘Look!’ said one of them. ‘She’s got bonhams.’ ‘Yes!’ cried another. ‘Aren’t her piglets cute?’ One of the children bent down to stroke a piglet, but all the adults saw was a child stroking the air.

The adults couldn’t understand why the children could see the pigs and they could not.

‘Could it be possible that these children have concocted this whole story between them as a joke?’ suggested one woman.

‘Only one way to find out,’ replied a man. ‘We ask a child who doesn’t live here and who knows nothing about these goings-on if he can see the animals.’ Another man suggested they use his nephew, who lived a few miles away.” 

Read the rest of the story in “Haunted Ireland: an Atlas of Ghost Stories from Every County” by Kieran Fanning. It is published by Gill and illustrated by Mark Hill. The book also contains a map of all the featured spooky locations so that you can do your own ghost tour of Ireland.