Warned about a fire by ghosts?

Naomi
Islandmagee

For those of you who know Islandmagee and the tiny hamlet of Millbay, you will know that it is one of the most remote places on earth. For those of you who are not familar with this area, it is a peninsula, with tiny twisting roads that take you deep into the countryside and close to the rugged shoreline that lines its exterior. The beeches are uninhabited. It is a lonely place where only the wind blows through. As a child this territory was my playground, I knew the beaches and fields like the back of my hand. I explored every inch of this landscape. The old quarry, the limestone harbour and the many rundown farms plotted throughout the neighboring fields. I don’t know if it was because I was an open and very curious child, but I had the ability to ‘see’. I have a haven of tales to share with you. There have been times I have been so close to the wondering spirits of this place I could have reached out and touched them. I have tasted fear like you never will and I have witnessed many events that I often wish I could forget. I have met many a lost soul along my journeys in the wild places in Millbay where nobody goes. I will share one of these events with you……On one of many excursions my elder brother and I had come across an old burnt down house, it still had its shell, tattered windows and door frames and traces of a skeletal roof remained, but everything else was charred black and unrecognizable. The house boasted many outhouses and a grand old barn. The barn was quite big it had high rafters, crooked doors and a few windows that the light strained to get through, along with the birds that hoped to find shelter. This was a great find and soon became our den, we tied ropes to the high rafters and made swings, we used the old hay bales to build a hut with lots of tunnels spy holes and separate rooms. This dusty old hideout was held together only by rusty corrugated iron and unstable bales of straw, keep this in mind as I reveal the mystery that was to unfold before us only a few weeks later. One morning when my brother and I were inside the hut making new additions to the tunnels and air holes to reduce the dust, we heard horses galloping up the field behind the barn. We froze. No one ever came into the field, there were never any cattle led there to graze. We knew we were trespassing, and we were afraid we would be found. As we crouched our bodies and sat without a breath, we heard the horses clamber into the barn, accompanied by that deep breathing the horses make, that low fluttering, snorting sound. The place fell cold as ice, we sat like two stone sculptures, the horses walked around the barn and up over the top of our fragile hut, up above our heads we could hear them plod. Then a human voice….. “Come on Jamie they're not here”. With that the horses and their riders turned on hoof and left as quickly as they came galloping into the distance, into the unknown? As you can imagine we emerged with caution and then ran as fast as our feet would carry us! Later that day we took our story to an elderly lady called Bet. Bet had lived in Millbay most, if not all of her life. We went to her often to share our tales and she would sometimes bring light to the situation. In this case it was revealed to us that, before the fire in the old house a young man named Jamie had lived there and the fire had taken his life. This had been quite a chilling experience as you can imagine. But the most shocking thing of all was that the old hay barn went up in flames only a week later and the fire engines had to come to tame the flames! So I often wonder was it a warning for us children, did he save us from some unfortunate event? We didn’t play in the barn after that, and would you blame us? The house and barn are now gone and a new house was built on the ruins, sad sometimes how history is erased. I often wonder if the residents of that house ever hear the horses or smell the faint order of sulfur?

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If you're tempted to dabble in the occult read the transcript of our live chat with an exorcist first.