One winter’s afternoon, a young woman was walking the quiet road leading down toward Fintra Beach, just outside Killybegs, when she heard something that stopped her in her tracks. From within the old, shuttered Fintra House Hotel – which had long been closed for the season – came the unmistakable sound of a baby crying.

At first she thought she must have imagined it, but the crying continued: soft, pitiful, and echoing faintly through the cold air. She stepped closer, pressing her ear to the hotel’s main door, and heard it as clear as day, as though an infant were trapped somewhere inside.

She circled the building, searching for a way in, but every entrance was locked and bolted. Eventually, with no sign of life and the crying fading away, she turned back toward home, shaken and unsettled by what she had heard.

When she told her mother what had happened, her mother phoned a friend who managed the holiday cottages beside the hotel, asking whether anyone might have been staying there. The reply was immediate: no one had been in the hotel for weeks.