The Imperial Hotel: The Lover’s Last Breath

Grand and central, the Imperial Hotel has hosted travellers since the coaching days when horse-drawn carriages ran between Galway, Dublin, Sligo, Limerick and Clifden. But one guest never left. In the early 1884 a young man shot his fiancée in a jealous rage in a hotel bedroom two floors above the main doorway. He was swiftly arrested, tried and convicted, and executed in 1885 for murdering his fickle fiance. The fatal disagreement between the two young lovers at the hotel and his execution, made front-page headlines at the time. Hotel guests still speak of footsteps pacing the corridor above, of a door that clicks shut when no one is near, and of one upstairs window that never fully closes no matter how often it is repaired. Some staff refuse to clean that room alone. Others simply nod when asked which one it is.