The villain had enticed his victim to Rathfriland fair, on pretence of getting the wedding ring. He had there attempted to strangle her, but she had escaped from his grasp, and was making her way home to her mother, through fields and byways, when, according to one of Patrick Brontë’s unpublished songs:
“Over hedges and ditches he took the near way,
Until he got before her on that dismal day.”
He waylaid her in the lonely glen, and murdered her under circumstances of great atrocity. On that night the ghost of the murdered woman rushed upon the assassin, and, with a wild scream, dragged him from his bed and through the window of his cabin, and down, down, down, with unearthly yells, to the bottomless pit. The whole story was told in verse, I believe, by Patrick Brontë, and sung to a sad air at local gatherings. It ran partly thus:
“This young man he went to his bed all in a dreadful fright.
And Kitty’s ghost appeared to him, it was an awful sight.
She clasped her a-rums round him, saying, You’re a false young man,
But now I’ll be avenged of you, so do the best you can.”
The punishment was, according to local sentiment, well deserved; but both were doomed to walk the earth for a thousand years. They had made their abode in the glen, hence the doleful and dismal voices.
Another circumstance added to the horror with which the glen was regarded at night. It was said that, at a remote period, a man who had been robbed committed suicide, at a crossing of the brook. He was still living when found with his throat cut, and up to his last breath he continued to moan, with a gurgling sound, “There were ten tenpennies in my pocket at the river.”