Built in 1901 as a carpet factory for Scottish manufacturer Alexander Morton — whose Donegal carpets found their way into Áras an Uachtaráin, Buckingham Palace, and the White House – the building at the heart of Crolly village has had several lives. Carpet factory, British Army barracks, home of the famous Crolly Dolls, electronics workshop, and now Donegal’s first licensed whiskey distillery in 180 years. The bullet marks still visible on the original stone walls are a reminder that not all of its history was benign.

Between 1916 and 1922 the building served as a barracks. One of the soldiers stationed here was Private Charles Harsant – a young man from Hackney in London who had signed up in May 1916 at fifteen, lied about his age, been discharged when found out, and re-enlisted when he turned eighteen. He was sent to Donegal, which was one of the most dangerous postings available to a British soldier at the time. The local flying column was active and the barracks at Crolly was under regular attack.

In May 1921 there was a lull in hostilities. The soldiers took the opportunity to relax and a group of them spent an evening at the Fisherman’s Inn in the village. On the way back, Harsant lagged behind. The sentries on duty were nervous – stretched and on edge from weeks of siege conditions. When Harsant, drunk and having forgotten the password, slipped past the guards and climbed the wall to the bunk room window, the men inside thought he was a rebel. They shot him. He bled to death by the window. He was buried in Bunbeg Church of Ireland graveyard, where a simple stone marks his grave. He was twenty-one years old.

The spot where he died did not settle. A blood stain appeared on the floor where he had fallen and refused to go away. It was scrubbed. It came back. When the building became a carpet factory storeroom, it was still there. A manager eventually laid linoleum over the entire floor in an attempt to cover it. Workers arrived the following morning to find a dark red patch seeping through the new surface. The room was eventually repurposed as a staff canteen – but the canteen was relocated not long after. The footsteps on the stairs and the persistent stain made it an uncomfortable place to eat lunch.

Activity continued through every subsequent chapter of the building’s life. During the Crolly Dolls era, workers and visitors regularly reported a figure at the window – the same window through which Harsant had climbed on the night he was killed. When the building became an electronics factory in 1980, staff reported interactions with a presence they found more reassuring than threatening. One employee going through a particularly difficult period in their personal life reported feeling a hand on their shoulder and hearing a voice tell them they would be alright. Nobody was behind them.

In 2021, on the centenary of Harsant’s death, the distillery’s burglar alarm was triggered at 1.16am. The manager attended. There was nothing on the cameras, no sign of any intrusion. It was the exact night, one hundred years later, to the day.

In 2023 a young girl reported seeing the ghost standing beside her in the female toilets of the new distillery. A medium who visited the building told the family that she felt Harsant’s presence throughout the entire site – not concentrated in one room, but spread across the whole building, as though it belongs to him as much as it belongs to anyone.

The distillery is open to the public and offers tours. Many visitors report a chill when they enter the room where Charles Harsant died – a chill, as one local put it, that even whiskey cannot cure.