Hidden among the fields and quiet lanes of south Longford stands Abbeyshrule Abbey, a Cistercian ruin founded around 1150 and one of the earliest Cistercian houses in Ireland. Its monks came from Mellifont Abbey, and for more than four centuries they lived, worked, and prayed beside the River Inny. The monastery was dissolved in the late 1500s and slowly fell into decay. Today, only the roofless church and faint traces of the cloister survive – an atmospheric shell rich with folklore and local tradition.

One of the best-known stories linked to Abbeyshrule appears in St. John D. Seymour and Harry L. Neligan’s 1914 collection, True Irish Ghost Stories. The account was given by a man identified only as G. H. Millar of Edgeworthstown. Late one frosty winter’s night in 1875, Millar was riding home at around half-past eleven. Moonlight lit the abbey ruins, and frost glimmered across the stones and graveyard. As he passed the burial ground, he noticed a man ahead of him – a tall figure in a long overcoat, walking quietly through the churchyard. Millar assumed he was a policeman from the local barracks and expected their paths to cross near the bend in the road.

But before he reached the corner, the figure vanished without a trace.

Though unsettled, Millar continued his journey and soon met another man who had been at the same gathering earlier that evening. Millar mentioned what he had seen. The other man immediately stiffened and admitted he had taken a longer route home specifically to avoid passing the abbey. His reason was simple: he didn’t want to see the monk.

He explained that many locals had reported a solitary, monk-like figure walking through the old churchyard at night, and that people deliberately avoided the area after dark.

Modern researchers believe the witness was George Henry Miller of Tully, a Justice of the Peace, a Freemason (with the Ballymahon lodge named in his honour), and a former Parliamentary candidate for South Longford. He was not a man prone to invention or superstition, making the account all the more intriguing. Whether Millar himself truly believed he had seen a ghost is unclear, but the incident stayed with him long enough to be recorded decades later.

Another tale claims that, in the 19th century, workers uncovered a large quantity of bones and skulls beneath the east window of the church. Some speculated that the monks had been massacred, though this dramatic idea has no supporting evidence in the historical record.

In the 1930s, children contributing to the Schools’ Folklore Collection wrote that the graveyard was “haunted by a witch every night” – a very different figure, yet another indication that Abbeyshrule carried a reputation for the uncanny long before the modern era.

Today, the abbey sits peacefully beside the river, its graveyard still tended and visited. There are no modern reports of sightings or unusual experiences.