In the spring of 1908, the area around Killough – a small rural district between Killucan and Delvin in north Westmeath – became the unlikely centre of a story that made its way from the local press to the Irish Times and eventually into the London newspapers, where G.K. Chesterton saw fit to weigh in.

It began with the children. Several pupils from the local school reported seeing a small figure in the area – a little man of dwarfish proportions, dressed in a red jacket, matching the traditional description of a leprechaun closely enough that the Irish Times said so directly in print. The sightings themselves had an unusual quality: when one child pointed the figure out to another, the child who had originally seen it would cease to see it, while the newly informed child could observe it clearly. This particular detail – the figure visible to some but not to others, even standing side by side – was reported faithfully and without editorial explanation.

A school teacher questioned the children at length. They held to their accounts and described the figure’s appearance in consistent detail. On one occasion, the creature was seen sitting under a hedge dressed entirely in white rather than red, playing a small harp.

The local press proposed that what the children had seen was an escaped monkey from a travelling circus that had recently been in the area – a blue baboon was specifically suggested. Others were less certain. The sightings continued through April and May, attracting enough attention that they were deemed worthy of sustained coverage.

On 13th August 1908, news came from Mullingar that the matter had been resolved. Two policemen had found a creature of dwarfish proportions in a farmyard near the town and brought him to Mullingar Workhouse, where he was now an inmate. He ate greedily, but all attempts to communicate with him failed – his only response being what was described as a peculiar sound between a growl and a squeal. The workhouse inmates regarded him, it was reported, with interest mixed with awe.

Whether this captured figure was the same one the children of Killough had been seeing for months was never definitively established. A court case in Tullamore in 1913 added a final surreal coda – a tenant farmer appearing before the courts was identified in testimony as the leprechaun’s father, and accused of having sold his son for £10.

What the children of Killough actually saw in the fields around Delvin in 1908 was never explained to anyone’s satisfaction. The Irish Times reported it. G.K. Chesterton wrote about it. The policemen caught something. And nobody, at any point, seemed entirely sure what was going on.