Inside the gruesome history of Mark Zuckerbergs Irish castle where people were tortured and hung down a murder hole

Mark Zuckerberg just bought himself a piece of Irish history that comes with a body count.The Meta mogul and his wife, Priscilla Chan, quietly closed on Strancally Castle, a 440-acre Gothic-revival estate in County Waterford, Ireland, in an off-market deal valued between $23 and $35 million, according to the Irish Times, which broke the story.But long before the Facebook founder set his sights on the riverside pile, the ground it sits on was the stuff of nightmares. The original Strancally Castle, situated about 2 miles from the current structure, was reportedly the site of a medieval killing floor known as the “murder hole,” where unsuspecting guests were said to be trapped, bound and dropped to their deaths.Legend has it the original castle was once seized by Spanish occupiers who lured local landowners inside under the guise of a banquet, only to drop them through a hidden trapdoor into a flooded cave below.Word of the slaughter eventually got out, and the occupiers were driven off and the castle torn down.English writer William Howitt immortalized the legend nearly two centuries ago in his 1847 book “Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets,” describing how victims met their grisly end.“The unwary, when decoyed within the castle, were tied hand and foot, and hung down the murder-hole,” Howitt wrote.

“The rapid river hurried by, and soon carried away their gasping shrieks, and the dead told no tales.”Howitt himself was skeptical of the lore, chalking it up to local legend, but not before adding his own eerie caveat.The castle standing today bears no resemblance to that blood-soaked ruin.It was built around 1830 for John Keily, a Tory member of parliament, and designed by brothers James and George Richard Pain, the same architects behind Dromoland Castle in County Clare and Blackrock Castle in Cork. The three-story, 16,000-square-foot mansion was constructed on such an extravagant scale that it reportedly took a 4.5-minute walk just ...