Petticoat Loose is among the most feared of Irish ghosts, a malevolent spirit known across the south from Waterford into Tipperary — called Moll Shaughnessy in Cork and Sprid na Bearnan in Limerick. In life, the stories say, she was a woman who murdered an unbaptised child, and for that crime her soul was denied rest.
The story
The best-known tale tells of a man riding by night to fetch a priest, set upon along the road by the ghost until holy words drive her off. A priest is needed to lay her, and he banishes her — in some versions to the Red Sea, in others to the dark mountain tarn of Bay Lough in the Knockmealdown Mountains — condemned to an impossible, endless task: to twist ropes of sand, or empty the lough with a thimble, so that she can never finish and return.
Her name became a household warning. From Cork to Waterford parents still tell wilful children to behave or 'Petticoat Loose will get you', and the lonely waters of Bay Lough keep their reputation as a haunted place where her restless spirit is said to linger yet.