It was more than 100 years ago now, on a beautiful Sunday in June, when a woman from Dripsey set off in her pony-and-trap to a farm near the city to purchase a horse, accompanied by her 16-year-old son.

The business completed, they started to head home just as evening shadows were falling, and reached the bridge that spans the Lee at Inniscarra at twilight.

Suddenly, the woman recalled many years later, the pony stopped dead, refusing to budge. A flick of the whip and a command had no effect

“Leave him be,” she told her son. “He is probably afraid of the monks. Let them go around the bend.”

Her son’s reply chilled her to the bones. “What monks? Don’t be daft, mother. There is nothing on the road. Go on.”

The woman swore she saw about 20 cowled figures - “I felt a slight chill as they were passing” - and now they were indeed gone without a trace.

Later, she related her story to a priest, and he told her: “You are not the first to meet the monks on that road. They are from Kilcrea Abbey travelling down to Inniscarra. From Elizabethan times they’ve been doing it.”

Do you believe in ghosts?

Since the darker evenings are now upon us, and Halloween is at hand, I decided to trawl through the archives to uncover the spookiest stories of Cork’s past.

And, as befitting a city and county with so much history, so much tragedy, and - some might add - so much imagination, there are plenty of them to share...

Take the ghost known as the Foxy Lady, who once haunted a place not far from where I’m sitting in our Blackpool office, writing this by candlelight (relax, health and safety, it’s actually a lightbulb - ed).

Generations of the workers at Sunbeam were convinced that the Foxy Lady was a young redhead who had been killed........

© Evening Echo