In the summer of 1967, two friends walking past Drumalla House, a fine old residence near Garron Point on the Antrim coast, reported a strange sight. At the back of the property stood a walled vegetable garden, its gate kept locked and the key held only by the gardener. Yet the friends swore they saw two nuns moving quietly within the enclosure, figures in habit and veil where no visitor could possibly have entered.

Puzzled, they spoke to the lady of the house, who insisted that no nuns had been in the garden. Days later, the story grew stranger still — for one of the same spectral women was said to have appeared inside the house itself, gliding silently through a room before vanishing from sight.

Local tradition ties these apparitions to Garron Tower, a grand baronial residence built in 1850 for the Marchioness of Londonderry, and later converted into St MacNissi’s College, a Catholic boys’ boarding school. The Tower had a chapel and strong religious associations, and some storytellers suggest that echoes of its Catholic past may have drifted outward, attaching themselves to neighbouring houses.

Whether the ghosts at Drumalla were truly nuns from Garron Tower, or spirits born of older memories in the land itself, no one can say. What is certain is that for those who saw them, the vision of veiled women in a locked garden — and later within the walls of the house — left an impression not easily forgotten.