The House by the Churchyard was set around here. While there he is confronted by the ghosts of Captain Devereux and his young love, asking him to find their “treasure” and bring it to the churchyard. “The Spectre Lovers” tells the tale of how Peter Brien is suddenly swept back in time during a drunken walk back to Chapelizod from Palmerstown. In “The Sexton’s Adventure”, Bob Martin, a former drunkard, is returning home late from a funeral when he is pursued by the spectre of his diseased friend Phil Slaney, who tries to persuade him into having a drink and consequently drag him back to the pits of hell. In “The Village Bully”, Bully Larkin is walking home through the park one night only to be chased and have the right side of his body paralyzed by the ghost of Ned Moran, a man who died following a fight with Bully.

But they all take rather different turns from there. All start off as traditional ghost stories often do: with a man walking home alone at night. The three stories, “The Village Bully”, “The Sexton’s Adventure” and “The Spectre Lovers”, are all set in and around Chapelizod. The first literary work that proves the Phoenix Park never left Joseph’s heart is “Ghost Stories of Chapelizod”, a collection of three short-stories published in Dublin University Magazine in 1851. Though he had to leave the park for the remote town of Abington, county Limerick, in 1826 when his father assumed a chaplaincy there, the park would appear to never have left Joseph.Ī modern day street of Chapelizod. Undoubtedly, this period of Joseph’s life had a great impression on his literary works. The Le Fanu family came to stay in the Phoenix Park for the first twelve years of Joseph’s life, giving him and his brother plenty of time to explore both the vastness of the park and the quaint nearby village of Chapelizod. These little drawings proved to be the first glimpse of the creative mind of a boy who would grow up to write twelve novels and several short stories during his lifetime.

The moral below read: “See the effects of trying to go to heaven” (McCormack, 1980, p. Two aeronauts had fallen out of its basket and were tumbling to the ground. One picture in particular portrayed a balloon floating through the air. In Seventy Years of Irish Life, William Le Fanu, Joseph’s younger brother, recounts how Joseph liked to draw pictures and write morals below them. At an early age, Joseph displayed signs of being quite the child prodigy. Within a year of his birth, his family moved to the Royal Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park, where Joseph’s father, Thomas, had been appointed chaplain. A sign commemorating the old Hibernian Military School.

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