There are those who say that Squire O’Hara’s last rest in Ballymarlow graveyard is disturbed. They say that at midnight on Christmas Eve the squire, on his favourite white mare, rides the road from the graveyard to the Kennel Bridge, jumps the white gates and disappears into the water below.

Henry Hamilton O’Hara was the last squire of Craigbilly [or Crebilly] Castle near Ballymena. For six hundred years the O’Haras had been established as landed gentry in the county. By accommodating their convictions to circumstances and by suitable marriages, they had come to own fourteen townlands.

Throughout their history a wild riotous spirit was contained, but only just. Theirs was the spirit of Gerald O’Hara and his remarkable daughter, Scarlett, in “Gone With The Wind”.

Squire O'Hara's - the Craigbilly ghost

The last squire was the son of John Francis O’Hara, himself a blackguard and rake. In 1786 John Francis had replied to an advertisement in a Dublin newspaper in which a young French girl, Mademoiselle Madeline Collet, sought a position as companion or governess in a gentleman’s family. After correspondence, she was given an appointment at Craigbilly Castle.

On her arrival, she was horrified to find neither lady nor children, for O’Hara was a young bachelor. The French girl could speak little English and, in her dilemma, she fled the house and sought refuge with the parish priest.

The priest set off to see the squire. O’Hara would put matters right immediately, he said, he would marry the girl. In due course, the marriage was solemnized in the drawing room of the castle by the parish priest and, to legalise it, O’Hara took his wife over to Scotland by boat from Donaghadee to Port Patrick and re-married her under Scottish Law by declaration in the presence of witnesses.

The first child, a son, was born in 1788 but even then the squire began to weary of his wife who was known in the countryside as Madame O’Hara, because of her French origins.

One day he announced that they should go on a visit to London. She would travel from Port Patrick and by stage coach to London. He had some business to do in Dublin. He would go there first and join her. But he never did, nor would he send her money for her sustenance. A few weeks after Madame O’Hara got to London, her second child, Claude, was born. She maintained herself by dressmaking.

In time, some of his Irish friends prevailed upon him to contribute to her support. He went to London and gave her money, but on condition that she sign a promissory note for the amount and give up the elder boy, to which she agreed. She signed the note, the contents of which she didn’t understand. It was made out in her maiden name of Madeleine Collet. When it became due O’Hara had her arrested and she lay for eight months in Newgate Prison.

Eventually, he himself paid the debt with the accumulated costs, but a few years later, by a similar trick, he had her imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison.

With Madame O’Hara out of the way, he married a niece of the Lord O’Neill of the day but that didn’t prosper either and they separated. Then he married Eliza Duffin, 18, good-looking, and a daughter of the yardman. On the wedding night there was a feast for all, drink, dancing to fiddles, and a bonfire on Pigeon Hill.

The last squire, Henry Hamilton O’Hara, and his sister May were the children of that [third] marriage. The father died while he was still a boy and the estate, worth £40,000 – a significant sum in those days [well over £1.5 million today] – and bringing in an annual rent of more than £4,000, was left in trust until he was of age.

The young O’Hara ran up vast gambling debts while at Cambridge and, on his return to Craigbilly, the estate had to be mortgaged, but this in no way curtailed his pleasures. He rebuilt the castle and the stables, and established a small stud and his pack of hounds. To this day the old blackstone bridge near my home is known as Kennel Bridge.

One night he arrived home very late to his wife with a number of his drunken friends from Ballymena. Mrs. O’Hara remained seated before the drawing room fire and refused to get up to greet the squire’s cronies, some of whom had game cocks tucked under one arm.

O’Hara was insulted. He went over to the blazing fire, filled a shovel with red-hot coals and poured them into his wife’s lap as she sat. “Maybe you’ll get up now,” said he. She did, and left him for good.

Year by year the finances of the estate worsened. Eventually the place was taken over by a John Wardlow who had married O’Hara’s sister. The squire disappeared from Craigbilly to work in London as a groom. On Christmas Eve 1875 he died of a big liver and too much whiskey and was buried here in the churchyard at Ballymarlow, the next townland to Craigbilly. There is an impressive monument to him.

Since childhood I have known the story of the O’Haras and the Craigbilly ghost, of the white mare and the squire on Christmas Eve as they jump the white gates.

“Is it true about the ghost?” people keep asking ad I tell them that when my time comes, I shall be laid within fifteen feet of the squire in the dark churchyard at Ballymarlow and I wouldn’t want to say anything now that I would be forced to regret at a later date.

Author notes:

This article by Dr. Robert Simpson, Ballymena doctor and one-time Minister of Health in the old Stormont Government, originally appeared in the Belfast News Letter some time during the 1960s. Dr. Simpson passed away at a ripe old age a few years ago, and as he predicted above, was laid to rest in the very same churchyard at Ballymarlow as Henry Hamilton O’Hara, the last squire of Craigbilly. After this article appeared - and Ulster Television ran a programme about the Squire’s ghost that (presented by Dr. Robert Simpson - to the dismay of the Anglican rector), Ballymarlow churchyard was inundated by a large crowd of curious onlookers on Christmas Eve, seeking a thrill from a glimpse of the ghostly squire galloping off from the churchyard towards the white gates at the back of the old O’Hara estate a mile away down a straight road.

 

Note by Joe Simpson who submitted the article:

My late grandfather, who was Dr. Robert Simpson’s uncle, and who died in 1987, used to tell the tale of how as a young Crebilly (Craigbilly) farmer during the later 1920s he was offered the chance to buy the O’Hara Estate and its fine old house with Georgian furniture, for a relatively modest sum. On the way home to talk it over with his wife, my grandmother, he encountered an acquaintance in Ballymena, another local man, and in casual conversation told him about the offer. Next day Grandpa Simpson went to the bank to borrow the purchase money, only to find out that the acquaintance had beaten him to it, and bought the O’Hara Estate literally under his nose! Soon afterwards the Depression hit, and – mysteriously – “Irish Lightning” struck the O’Hara mansion not once, but twice, the insurer paid up, but the old house and all its antique contents were gone forever, reduced to ashes.