Return to Glennascaul

When Orson Welles offers a stranger with car trouble a lift, his passenger recalls a haunting event which spooks and intrigues the driver.

The film opens as Orson Welles interrupts his filming of Othello (in which he performed alongside his old friends Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards) to present a ‘short story from the haunted land of Ireland’. At a crossroads in the foothills of the Dublin mountains, Welles picks up a stranger who is having car trouble. The stranger tells of an encounter a year earlier at that very same spot with a young woman and her mother who signalled for him to stop. He offered to drive them home to their house, Glennascaul, and upon arrival was invited in for a glass of whiskey. After a pleasant visit he left but upon return later that night he found the house deserted. The next day he learns that his crossroads encounter had been a ghostly one.

Return to Glennascaul is part of The Oscar® Collection: A Selection of Irish Academy Award® Nominated Short Films. It was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Short Subject in 1953. To view more from this collection, click here.