The Hellfire Club, Montpelier Hill

On the summit of Montpelier Hill, at the northern edge of the Dublin Mountains, stands the roofless shell of a stone hunting lodge that can be seen for miles across the city. It was built around 1725 for William “Speaker” Conolly, the hugely wealthy Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, who had bought the hill with the Rathfarnham estate from the Duke of Wharton. His workmen took stone from a Neolithic passage tomb on the summit to build it. An excavation in 2016 confirmed the story, finding the badly damaged remains of a passage tomb dating to around 3500 BC, with flint tools, megalithic art and a polished stone axehead; a second, smaller tomb lies nearby.

Local belief held that disturbing the ancient cairn brought bad luck: soon after the lodge was finished, a storm tore off its slate roof, which was blamed on the Devil, and Conolly replaced it with the vaulted stone roof that survives. After Conolly’s death, tradition says the lodge was rented by members of the Irish Hell Fire Club, founded in the 1730s by Richard Parsons, Earl of Rosse — one of several aristocratic clubs of the era notorious for drinking, blasphemy and scandal. A painting of five members by James Worsdale hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. How much the club actually used the remote lodge is unknown; most of its documented meetings were in a Dublin tavern. The building was derelict by 1779.

Folklore filled the gap. In the best-known tale, a stranger joins the members at cards on a stormy night; a player who stoops to pick up a dropped card sees a cloven hoof, and the visitor vanishes in flame — the same story told of Loftus Hall in Wexford. Another, collected from schoolchildren for the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1930s, has a lost priest find masked men playing cards around a black cat that will not move until he exorcises it, releasing a demon. Other stories tell of black masses, animal sacrifices, a servant set on fire, and a pact with the Devil by the rake Simon Luttrell. Below the hill, the Stewards House at Killakee has its own legend of a huge phantom black cat.

Today the hill and its forest belong to the state forestry company Coillte, and the ruin is a popular walk with sweeping views over Dublin. Ghost hunters and late-night visitors still report figures, voices and an oppressive atmosphere in the dark rooms, but the land is also an archaeological monument and a prehistoric burial place that deserves respect.

Shadowy figures and voices in the ruined rooms, a sense of dread, a giant black cat (especially around Killakee), and the folklore Devil who played cards with the club — reported by night visitors, ghost hunters and in local tradition.

The ruined lodge on the summit, especially its vaulted upper rooms and kitchen; the forest paths of Hell Fire Wood; and the Stewards House at Killakee at the foot of the hill.

The Hellfire Club is one of Dublin’s favorite ghost stories, retold in the Schools’ Collection, in books and podcasts, and in the archaeology and heritage material of the Dublin Mountains Partnership.