Youghal's Dark Past - Nellie Fleming

Nellie Fleming is the name of a ship which sank and it is also the name of a young girl – she had two sisters – Kathleen and May and their father used to bring coal to Youghal by boat - they lived in a big house at the bottom of Cork Hill. Anyway Thomas Fleming had three daughters – Nellie, Kathleen and May. So he bought one big ship and called her the Nellie Fleming , and then he bought another big ship and called her the Kathleen and May. The two ships were big sailing ships, with three masts. The Kathleen and May is still sailing around the ocean, she visits Youghal every now and then. If you don’t get to see her in real life, go to the Credit Union building over there and inside the front door there is an excellent fully scaled model of the Kathleen and May. But you won’t get a chance to go on board the Nellie Fleming – because the poor old Nellie Fleming sank. Another ship was bought and christened Nellie Fleming but she sank as well. There is a very strange story about the Nellie Fleming – we think the ghost of the Nellie Fleming ship was seen when she sank and that is the story we are going to hear about now … so let us start with the first Nellie Fleming – She was a boat which was built to carry about 250 tons of coal - that is about 5000 bags of coal. The boat was a sailing boat and one stormy night in December 1913 she came into Ardmore Bay by mistake instead of Youghal Bay and right in the middle of Ardmore Bay there is a sandbank and she hit smack on! And she got stuck. Now usually when a ship gets stuck on a sandbank they just wait until the tide rises and the ship floats off. But poor old Nellie Fleming could not float off – there was too much coal on board and the ship was stuck hard. So they called out the lifeboat and the tug boats but they could not budge the boat either. When is ship is stuck so hard it cannot be moved it is called a shipwreck and one local man bought it. He arranged all sorts of little boats to row out and back, out and back and they got all the coal off the boat. And there was great fun in Ardmore selling all the coal. People came from Youghal and Dungarvan and all over to buy cheap coal from the ship wreck. Then they took the masts, and the furniture, then they took the ropes and anything they could take off the boat and then slowly, slowly what was left of the Nellie Fleming began to move, slowly off the sandbank and began to drift towards the beach in Ardmore – where she is still to-day, or what is left of her, under the sand. But her ghost lives on trying to sail back to Youghal. Now you’d think that would be end of the Nellie Fleming …. Martin Fleming bought another boat which he called the Nellie Fleming also and it was doing the same job but ….. one night in 1936 just outside Waterford there was a terrible storm and the second Nellie Fleming sank and all on board were drowned. And this is where the story gets a bit weird. In Ardmore there were people out in a small boat and they saw the Nellie Fleming coming toward them! When you are rowing you are facing backward and they could see the Nellie Fleming bearing down on them, heading straight towards the rocks. The two men in the little rowing boat climbed onto the rocks in Ardmore screaming that the Nellie Fleming was coming again into the bay ….. and then they looked around and the boat had vanished! Completely into thin air as if it was never there! They were astonished but they knew it was bad news. One of them got on a horse and rode all the way over to Youghal. There by the Credit Union building there were a few people waitingfor the Nellie Fleming, she was due in about then. When they heard the news suddenly the whole town knew and people came out of their houses and knelt down by the quay wall to pray. They didn’t know then that everyone had died on the ship but they prayed and prayed. They lit little candles in jam jars, they took out Rosary beads and they prayed.