Ireland's best haunts to walk with ghosts

John Daly retraces the tracks of Irish ‘ghost tourism’, a niche market for those with an appetite for the macabre

Loftus Hall, Hook Peninsula, Co Wexford, globally famous as Ireland’s most haunted house.

In some parts of the country, anguished shrieks of an unearthly kind can still be heard in the dead of night, chilling the listener to the bone.

Everybody knows the word ‘banshee’ now, after the huge success of the Martin McDonagh film, but it remains a cry linked to our dim distant Celtic past — a netherworld where spirits, demons and spectres haunt those eerie places where terror lurks.