In March 1904, a young housemaid named Sarah O’Hare retired to her room at the Waverley Hotel on Tomb Street, Belfast. After lighting her oil lamp and preparing for bed, she lay down for a short while to “heat up.” A few moments later, as she reached to extinguish the lamp, she was startled by the sudden appearance of a young girl who materialised at her bedside. The figure vanished as quickly as it had come, but Sarah screamed and fled in terror.

Her cries roused several guests, who rushed to the room but found nothing unusual. Later, in the hotel’s common room, Sarah calmed enough to describe what had happened. Two male guests, curious about her story, returned to the bedroom to inspect the lamp. When one of them moved to turn it off, he quickly called the other over. After a brief examination, they concluded that the lamp was dangerously faulty and would almost certainly have exploded had Sarah extinguished it herself. They returned to the common room and told her that, in a strange twist of fate, the apparition may well have saved her life.

At the turn of the century, accidents with oil lamps were tragically common—cheap, impure fuel often caused explosions, and in Belfast alone, dozens of people died each year in such incidents. One particularly harrowing case occurred just a few doors away at 43 Tomb Street in 1895. A girl named Jane Wilson had been called to bed shortly after midnight. As she reached to put out her lamp, it exploded violently, setting her clothing alight. A police constable on patrol nearby heard her screams and rushed into the house, finding Jane’s mother desperately trying to smother the flames with blankets, which themselves caught fire. The constable eventually extinguished the blaze, but Jane was terribly burned. She was carried to the Royal Hospital on Frederick Street, where she died shortly afterwards. Hers was the sixth death in Belfast that week alone caused by oil-lamp explosions.

Stories like these lend a chilling edge to Sarah O’Hare’s experience in the Waverley Hotel. Whether coincidence or something stranger, her encounter with the ghostly girl spared her from a fate that had already claimed so many others in the city.

As for the Waverley itself, its fate remains uncertain. Tomb Street lay in the heart of Belfast’s city centre, and during the Belfast Blitz of April–May 1941 the surrounding district was heavily bombed. Many buildings around Custom House Square and the docks were either obliterated or condemned and demolished in the decades that followed. During this period of destruction and redevelopment, the old Waverley Hotel appears to have vanished from the landscape, leaving behind only its stories—and perhaps its ghosts.