Springhill House is a 17th-century Plantation house near the village of Moneymore in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Home to the Lenox-Conyngham family for nearly 300 years, the whitewashed manor sits amid mature beech trees and rolling Tyrone farmland. It is a place of understated elegance — and, according to generations of the family and subsequent visitors, a place where the past refuses to remain past.
The most frequently reported ghosts at Springhill are children. Members of the Lenox-Conyngham family, as well as National Trust staff who now manage the property, have described seeing small figures in period dress running through the corridors and peering around doorways. The children are most often seen in the upstairs nursery wing and in the garden. They appear briefly — laughing, playing, darting out of sight — before vanishing. The identity of these child ghosts is uncertain, though several children of the Lenox-Conyngham family died young in the house over the centuries.
The house is also associated with a more tragic haunting. Olivia Lenox-Conyngham is said to have been found dead in the Blue Room under mysterious circumstances — the family story involved a gunshot, possibly self-inflicted. Her ghost, a woman in dark clothing, has been reported in the Blue Room and the adjacent corridor. Staff have described a heaviness in the atmosphere of this part of the house that is absent elsewhere. Other phenomena include doors that unlatch themselves, the sound of footsteps on the wooden stairs when no one is present, and the smell of lavender — which was cultivated extensively in the estate gardens during the family's residence. Springhill is one of the few haunted properties managed by the National Trust, which acknowledges the house's supernatural reputation as part of its interpretive history.