Twelve Months to Midnight

Nazis and Witches and Vampires, oh my. Ireland was already earning a reputation in the international community as a producer and exporter of practitioners in post-war Europe, and the Department’s laissez-faire attitude to those that embraced the magical arts was certainly contributing to our image of a land running amok with witches and sorcerers of every stripe. Skorzeny bought a large farm in Kildare, just a few miles up the road from the Magistrate’s, though Sir Arthur didn’t yet own the property. You can visit Skorzeny’s old farm today. It also hosts weddings and has a lovely little tea shop and it doesn’t mention the Nazi Commando that owned it even once on its website. At the time, ownership of the Magistrate’s farm was disputed between descendants of its original owner and a trust that had once been established to care for the school and its students. The trust had been without a board for a very long time, but it still owned the property on paper and the great-great-nephews of...

Otto Skorzeny was a Nazi. One of Hitler’s favourites, and hand-picked for his personal bodyguard. He was an imposing figure, standing at six-feet-and-four-inches, with a vicious scar on one cheek from a fencing duel. During the war, he led a number of high-profile raids and saw action just about everywhere the Axis did. Towards the end of the war, when Hitler’s paranoia had him seeing enemies everywhere, he made Skorzeny his chief Hexenjäger. He was r esponsible for hunting down any practitioners of magic in the Reich who were not loyal to the cause, which by that time was pretty much all of them. After the war, he was interned, tried, acquitted and detained, before he escaped and fled to Franco’s Spain, but he never gave up his Witch Hunting mission. For the rest of his life, he moved between Europe, North Africa, the Middle-East and South America in pursuit of this cause, working for, at various and overlapping times, the Egyptian government, Juan Peron, the CIA and even Mossad. And...

The Magistrate’s country estate has a long history, though not one you’ll find in the history books. The main house was built in the mid-seventeenth century as a hunting lodge for a young earl living in Dublin. On his first hunt from the property, he was thrown over the pommel of his saddle and died when his horse continued right on over him. His family kept the property as a farm, though they had problems finding additional tenants after the first died of an unknown wasting disease and the second was found drowned in a mill-pond that he could have stood up in without the water reaching his waist. Soon, local lore said the place was cursed, and when the earl’s widow moved into the house at the turn of the eighteenth century, accusations of witchcraft were soon to follow. She turned the farmhouse into a school for young ladies of noble breeding; a place for them to learn away from the distractions of the city. If the records are correct, she lived to be almost a hundred, which certainly...