Wildgoose Lodge Murders
Coordinates: 53°55′37″N 6°37′26″W / 53.9268793°N 6.6239075°W The Burning of Wildgoose Lodge was an arson and murder attack on Wildgoose Lodge, County Louth on the night of 29–30 October 1816, in which eight occupants were killed, including an infant aged five months. The house was near the County Monaghan border, in the townland of Reaghstown, civil parish of Philipstown, barony of Ardee. Eighteen men were executed for the crime, many of them innocent. The event inspired an 1830 short story by William Carleton (1794–1869) and the circumstances have been the subject of historical and political debate.
In 1817 William Carleton went to Killanny, Co. Louth, and for six months acted as tutor in the family of a farmer, Piers Murphy. He then stayed with a parish priest. During this period he came upon the gibbeted corpse of Patrick Devan, the leader of the murderers, a fact that so shocked him that he determined in later life to write an account of the Wildgoose Lodge murders. William Carleton's account of this incident is important in that it received widespread readership, having been published a number of times, and became the "standard" account of the affair, even among many of those living in the vicinity. Many accepted it as being a true account of the atrocity, although Carleton wrote that it was fiction, based on a true event.
In Carleton's account the murders were perpetrated by an oath-bound rural secret society, the Ribbonmen, the leaders of which were portrayed as evil and demonic. The perpetrators were avenging the execution of three of their comrades hanged for an earlier raid on Wildgoose Lodge the previous April, following information given to the authorities by the owner of the house, Edward Lynch. According to Carleton's account, they showed no mercy in setting the house ablaze and preventing the inmates of the house from escaping the flames, and piked any would-be escapers, including a child, back into the flames.
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