Any regular listeners of this show will have gathered that unexplained is rather fond

of a good old haunted house story. Such stories often have the magical ability to conjure

a sense of unique and specific places while at the same time leave us feeling as though

the hauntings are in fact occurring wherever we happen to be as if the story itself were

the portal through which distant ghoulish spectres can see into our lives. The story

of the Kunian ghost house of Ireland is just one such tale. A strange and troubling thing

owing mostly to the fact that, despite it often being regarded as one of the most compelling

supposed true life hauntings, there is so little on record with which to support this

claim. Much like the apparent ghost or spirit of the heart of it, the story is a slippery

and amorphous one, seemingly rooted in real tangible things but existing mostly as

fable. Told and retold over the years passed from one generation to the next, never quite

keeping still, the facts never quite staying fixed. What we do know is the Murphy family,

the owners of the home at the time and apparent focus of the phenomena were very much real,

appearing in a census recorded in 1911. The house too very much existed and in fact still

stands, in the county of Furmana located today just to the north of the border in Northern

Ireland. But we have anything of record about it at all, is due largely to the work of

Sir Sean Leslie, a writer with many broad and varied interests and avid chaser of supposed

true life ghost stories. Born John Randolph in 1885, the son of wealthy

socialite Leoni Jerome and aristocrat John Leslie II. Sean Leslie grew up within the

palatial walls of the family stately home. Castle Leslie, in county Monahan, just 20 miles

to the east of Kunian. The castle is said by many to itself be haunted, though it isn't

known whether Leslie, who changed his name to the Irish Sean out of affection for his

...