Springhill House Ghost: Olivia and the Colonel’s Last Year

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 25, 2026 · How we verify

Ask anyone in mid-Ulster about the Springhill House ghost and one name comes back: Olivia Lenox-Conyngham, second wife of a colonel who took his own life in 1816. The house she is said to walk stands in the townland of Ballindrum near Moneymore, County Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, a whitewashed 17th-century plantation house that has belonged to the National Trust since 1957. What follows separates the documented family history, which is unusually complete, from the story that has attached itself to one of the bedrooms.

Ballindrum Before the Whitewash

The Conynghams came over from Ayrshire in Scotland in about 1609 and were granted land under the Plantation of Ulster. Mina Lenox-Conyngham, who wrote the family history, claimed that a document once held in the Public Records Office in Dublin placed the lands at Ballindrum in Conyngham hands as early as 1609, though she believed the record had been destroyed in the shelling of the Four Courts during the Battle of Dublin. Some kind of farm dwelling is thought to have stood on the estate by the second quarter of the 17th century, probably where the car park now sits. It was destroyed during the Irish Rebellion of 1641.

The present house is an unfortified one, built about 1680 to 1695 and originally ringed by a defensive bawn. Family tradition credits it to the marriage articles of William Conyngham II, known as “Good Will”, which obliged him “to build a convenient house of lime and stone, two stories high… with necessary office houses” for his intended bride. It is a good story, and it may well be true, but dendrochronological examination of the roof timbers over the central block dates the beams to after 1690. Around 1765 Colonel William Conyngham of the 7th Dragoon Guards added the two single-storey wings, one a nursery and one a ballroom, and reworked the entrance front into the seven-window arrangement visitors see today.

The Colonel Who Resigned in Disgrace

The haunting, such as it is, hangs on one man’s collapse. Colonel George Lenox-Conyngham inherited Springhill through the female line and adopted the Conyngham name. He served under Castlereagh in the Irish Volunteers and, after being betrayed by Castlereagh, resigned his commission in disgrace in 1816. That humiliation, set against what the family recorded as a depressive nature, ended with his suicide later the same year.

His second wife was Olivia, fourth daughter of William Irvine of Castle Irvine in County Fermanagh. She is the figure said to haunt Springhill to this day, and she carries the striking local reputation of being the best documented ghost in Ireland. That phrase deserves a note of caution. It is a claim about how thoroughly the sightings were recorded by the family and their guests over the generations, not evidence that anything supernatural occurred. The Ghost Club took an interest in the house in the early 2000s, but the primary record here is a domestic one: a family that stayed in the same building for three centuries and wrote things down.

What Visitors Say They See

The reported phenomenon at Springhill is singular rather than varied. There is no catalogue of poltergeist activity, no long list of unexplained noises in the sources. What there is, repeated across generations of Lenox-Conynghams and their visitors, is the appearance of a woman taken to be Olivia, still in the house her husband died in. Treat it as a persistent tradition attached to a real, dateable bereavement, and judge it accordingly.

Three Hundred Years in One Building

The reason to come is not the ghost. Springhill holds an almost complete record of a single family’s occupation across three centuries. The Gun Room carries one of the largest surviving 18th-century wallpaper schemes in the UK, Chinese paper from the 1720s, together with a “long gun” of about 1680 presented to Alderman James Lenox after the Siege of Derry. The library runs to some 3,000 volumes and is among the most important collections of 17th and 18th-century books in Ireland; its oldest item is a small Latin psalter of 1541. The dining room added in the 19th century has a 17th-century Italian chimneypiece salvaged from the Earl of Bristol’s Ballyscullion House near Bellaghy, demolished in about 1825. The old laundry houses the largest costume collection in Northern Ireland, established by Viscount Clanwilliam in 1960.

The family’s later story is one of steady contraction. The estate was largely sold off under the land purchase acts of 1885 and 1903 and shrank to around three hundred acres. Lieutenant Colonel John Staples Molesworth Lenox-Conyngham was killed at Guillemont on the Somme on 3 September 1916, leading the 6th Battalion Connaught Rangers over the top armed with an ancient revolver. Members of the family travelled on the Titanic. Captain William Lowry Lenox-Conyngham signed the will bequeathing the house to the National Trust only three days before his death in 1957. Mina Lenox-Conyngham stayed on in the house until her own death in 1961.

Planning a Visit to Springhill

Springhill opens from March to June and in September at weekends, and seven days a week through July and August. The Trust’s restoration in the late 1950s was thorough and of its period: the Victorian smoking room was demolished, sections of the house were stripped back to stone and rooms were rearranged to suggest their original appearance, so what you walk through is a curated version of the 17th-century house rather than an untouched one. Wellbrook Beetling Mill, also National Trust, is a sister property nearby. Screen-watchers may recognise the house as Billy Winters’s home in the three-part adaptation of Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales, first broadcast in November 2018.

Address: Ballindrum, near Moneymore, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland

See Springhill House for Yourself

Sources

• Springhill House and Costume Collection Derry. Find and Reserve your Homes Historical in Derry,Ireland
• Department of the Taoiseach
• ghostclub.org.uk
• Radware Page
• Wikipedia: Springhill House

Ghost Tours Nearby

Ghost and Paranormal Walking Tour of Belfast City Centre★ 5.0 (1)from $35Haunted Belfast Exploration Game and Tour★ 3.5 (6)from $8Victorian Murders and Paranormal Walking Tour in Belfast★ 5.0 (1)from $35

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