The House That Vanished
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
My second thought was about insurance. The house is gone, it's up to their investigator to determine the cause. In the worst case, they say, too bad. thanks for the premiums.
My first thought was to build a big ass fence at the property line. Generally be an ass, using my property in the least helpful way possible.
given the dearth of information about the story I'm still a bit befuddled. given the timeframe 1994, it's understandable there isn't much available on the internet. I doubt an island of 120 had a local paper, I doubt even more that the archives would be online. Apparently no records were found for the court case.
There's a temptation to victim blame, there's a temptation to think Presho and Digger cooked up a scheme to get a little attention for the island and Presho's career. I think there's more information, but it seems unattainable.
He won the court case, but got a pittance. There are no answers from the trial.
In the end, I suspect this is a story that will end up much like "where is the other sock" it will vaguely nag at me for a few days, then fall out of mind.
Interesting situation, possibly worth a listen, but clearly no satisfactory resolution is possible (for me anyway). Another fabulously unimportant unanswerable question to irritate my psyche for a few days.
Outsider buys property on tiny island community, then disappears for 8 years. Islander gets annoyed about the vacant property blocking their view so decides to remove it. Other islanders refuse to rat them out due to being a tight community
End of mystery
Could well have been a vacant ruin after 8 years without any maintenance - we live in an exposed site half way up a hill in Scotland and I wouldn't leave our house for 8 weeks without arranging for someone to keep and eye on it and potentially getting repairs done.
Photos from Tory Island: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tory+Island,+Co.+Donegal,+...
Outsider visits island for a few months and enjoys their time there, makes some great friends. Outsider's friend has a hotel, and wants to attract more clients. Outsider has a knack for storytelling, but hasn't been successful for a few years.
Outsider spins yarn, friend fills up his hotel, both walk away happy.
End of mystery.
There are a million ways to fill in the blanks. We can't know _the truth_. I find this upsetting, and it'll bug me for days. but then I'll forget and it's ok.
Your pat story is fine too. I REALLY want to know the truth, which is a fantastic hook. so I'm stuck with this story longer than you are.
Even if the house disappeared he would still own the land. Given that it was a very basic house it's likely the land was worth at least as much as the building.
Don't underestimate the cost of building stuff on an island like that. Everything needs to be brought in by boat, including labor.
Not always. So-called Ground Leases are common in many parts. The tenant owns the house but the landlord owns the land and collects rent from the building owner. I'm not clear of exactly what type of ownership rights this person had over the house let alone the underlying property.
There’s plenty of angles here in a meta way beyond the sum of the real story itself.
But I do agree this is most likely going to be an unrewarding investment with a likely simple explanation like the hotel wanting views + very old basically vacant building in the way.
Why do you care if your house is "worth" $50k or $1m?
Maybe you don't have kids to inherit it. Maybe you consider yourself at home where you're living, so you wouldn't want to sell it anyway.
In those cases the cost of the property is more academic as the real value is the community and any sentimental elements (eg "my grandfather built this"/"5 generations of kids were born in this house", etc)
Maybe the real reason why nobody spoke out was the fact that the guy flattening the house was Tory’s biggest employer. The hotel Óstan Thóraigh has been at the centre of island life since the late 1800s. The hotel and general store was supplying everything from salted fish to marine chandlery to the island.
The hotel is for sale now. It didn't survived Covid. See https://www.irishpost.com/news/irelands-stunning-tory-island...
"The House that got partially knocked down by someone with small regard for abstract property rights".
Digger isn't the name of the neighbour, he owned a "digger" AKA brit-speak for excavator.
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5da053ed4653d07dedfd58...
It was a big case locally in the region, there's also a book and online articles.
"..the defendants commenced the construction of a hotel ... at the rear of the property"
and
"The ... defendant employed John McGinty as contractor ... (who) .. occupied house without consent of the plaintiff while the hotel was being built."
Then they interact with the doofus caretaker, conclude he is a lame duck and arson ensues.
The caretaker allows the workman to inhabit the property without the owners consent. Mind. Blowing. Negligence. "Thanks for that".
Makes so much more sense that Presho was "of unsound mind" I feel sorta shitty for my other claims.
but the court evidence and findings are great. Thank you.
Why would he become so startled(and obsessed) by a house he never visited for 8 years? To the point that a marriage had to collapse, nevertheless.
My guess is that Neville probably had schizophrenia, and thats unique thing about this story; I've heard a lot of stories of closed rural communities treating newcomer as pests.
As a example from my life, as a teenager I went to help a family-friend that had newly switched to agricultural lifestyle in Japan, over the summer holiday. I remember arriving at the rice field for the first time, noticing that the field was dried up and there was cracks in the soil. I asked the friend if this is how it is supposed to be, and he replied "no, probably some of the old farmers clogged the water channel". I asked why they would do that, and he said that the old farmers here didn't like newcomers, and would in the night go out and sabotage his farm.
I took a look around the farmland, and noticed a rotting hut, rusting tools, and how most of the rice field was now filled with bushes and weed and in no condition of agriculture. I again asked why, and he told me that because the old people can't take care of the land, and because they bully away any newcomer, most of the farmland have been taken back by the nature, pointing to a forest telling me that it used to be farmland. It baffled me how these old people would rather see their entire village, way of life die out than letting any new person in.
Someone that just bought a house and left it unattended 8 years in such community, is to me not surprising at all that someone there took an ire. Maybe Neville just didn't catch that in his documentary about the island, and couldn't process the deeds done to him
In short, the court found that Presho's bipolar disorder likely preceded the disappearance of the house, but that it was a factor in Presho's inability to protect his legal rights at the time.
As far as I interpret the ruling, the sequence of events was roughly:
* Persho left for New Zealand for 8 years, leaving the house boarded up and in the care of a local. During that time, a hotel was constructed next door, and its builder used the house illegally for lodging.
* Around that time, the house fell into disrepair (if you read between the lines, they may also have stripped it for scraps) and suffered serious fire damage (highly likely arson).
* At some unknown point in time, the house was demolished, probably by the owner of the hotel with the help of a local contractor (who was in possession of the only digger on the island) in order to clear the view.
* The local garda did not find any evidence suggesting (or refuting) any criminal acts. However, the court appears to recognize the existence of a conspiracy among the locals.
* When Persho returned in 1994, he responded to erratically to the loss of his house, and due to his bipolar disorder was not able to follow through with legal proceedings until the 2000s.
[1] https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5da053ed4653d07dedfd58...
I was thinking that perhaps original film material or personal belongings were lost. Or additionally perhaps the island symbolized something important to him and that the island, or it's inhabitants rejected him in this way hurt more than we can imagine. Or perhaps it was just a lot of money and he and his wife were financially ruined.
I am also reminded of people whose friend or family member goes missing for years and people don't know if the person dead or alive so they can't give it rest, perhaps it's similar. I never lost my house and my belongings, so I wouldn't know. I suppose I would make the best of it and accept the situation and try to move on.
Once I was scammed by a bank for a lot of money, I spent half the amount of money on a lawyer to get justice. I am normally quite stoic, but was quite upset. After a few years the government arranged a (poor) deal I took, this meant closure to me and a lot of people.
I don't know about schizophrenia, but my guess is that the mental illness had nothing to do with the house, it's just a convenient narrative. Being gaslit about the previous existence of your house certainly wouldn't help though.
I'm not sure, but I think I can understand it. A few years ago my girlfriend had her bike stolen and for at least a few weeks I would look at almost every bike I saw to see if it was hers. More recently I had my bike stolen and even months later, on holiday hundreds of miles from home, I still look at bikes wondering if I'll see my bike.
These things can hurt you. Do you have any experiences that compare?
But what I find remarkable is how strong the "don't snitch" spirit was in that community. I mean the deed was obviously done and surely people knew who did what. It almost appears as if most people in that community did not like Neville Presho that much ...
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0070917/
Ah this is great: The *police in Wicker Man is played by the same actor as the old neighbourhood watch guy in Hot Fuzz!
Edit: He would have been about 42 at the time of filming Wicker Man
I can actually see that in a moderately short time span of 8 years a lot of decay can happen naturally after which 'hands-on' neighbours might have just not felt too bad to tear down the remains.
Just say it burned down, and you tore down the remains.
To my reading the house was destroyed in “mysterious” fire, and then demolished for use as a car park by the adjacent hotel. The court ruled that the hotel owner must pay replacement cost for the house.
I checked it on Google and it looks like the house was near the pier so it makes sense that residents might park their cars there to head to the mainland.
Google Earth link: https://earth.google.com/web/search/Tory+Island,+County+Done...
> The ruins of the house https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1008xn/p09n3zd7.jpg
So which one is it?
The islanders faced with his reappearance decided not to incriminate anyone and keep quiet.
The only question I have is how did it burn down? I imagine it was in quite a state of disrepair after almost a decade of low to no maintenance. Part of it may have been falling down already and the islanders may have assumed he'd simply abandoned his house and the island.
The hotel is actually for sale currently, for €400,000. It didn't survive Covid. See https://www.irishpost.com/news/irelands-stunning-tory-island...
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aTLr7-...
I've lived in both, I'm happier in a city...
Just for context, Tory Islanders have a certain reputation dating back many centuries. The word Tory comes from the old Irish word for bandit.
But people on those small islands are a different type altogether.
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5da053ed4653d07dedfd58...
Corvo is a small island in the Azores archipelago, which is home to less than 500 habitants.
Every time a police officer, joins the island, it usually has a bit of a tough time, as it tries to write fines and issue warnings to the small population. The small population, not only disregard its orders, but they actually shut them out.
Since there's very few establishments, the police officer, eventually, has to comply with the population.
To be honest, I don't know how much truth there is, in this story, but I don't find it hard to believe.
but a group of say 500? that know each other on sight? Sure.
I grew up in a small town in the US southwest. There's a reason Texas has successful defenses for murder that were "he needed killing". It can be terrifying to be on the wrong side of a popularity contest.
(I would note that one of the great American novels, To Kill A Mockingbird, deals precisely with the loneliness of trying to administer justice without community support)
Then there's horror classic The Wicker Man, about a police officer sent to a remote island to investigate a vanished girl and wall of silence ...
You can do anything with your own house as long as it is legal and you pay your taxes each year. Even not visit your beach house for a while if you don't feel in the mood to do that or are working in a different place, or are being treated in an hospital.
If he has paid the taxes, and was paying insurance, and water and electricity bills each year, the house is not marooned.
The idea of my neighbors being allowed to burn my house, destroy my souvenirs, art and stuff, and use my property as a private parking and say that they can because I'm not here to stop they is returning to law-of-the-jungle. Is horrible and unaceptable.
If the building would be in danger of collapse or refuse to pay taxes the government should fine him first, ask for repairs and/or notify officially its demolition if necessary.
The destruction came awhile after the building was burnt down - look at the photo, if you owned a hotel, would you want burnt out rubble next door? would you spend time tracking down the owner you haven't seen in 6 years or would you get a friend to knock it down, so it wasn't an eyesore for the community?
> The destruction came awhile after the building was burnt down
If the house was burnt down, then it was an arson crime scenery. Crime scenes -must be- left, 'in its current state', until the investigation ends (or a jury allows to restore it again). Even if it takes some years.
To deliberately destroy proofs of a crime is obstruction of justice, a typified crime, and justice has always priority over touristic activities.
That's the case you see "red" and grab the old but trusty 12-gauge shotgun.
These were his childhood friends and 'friendly neighbors'. Because of sea view? That's one fucked up small community.
Defending such behavior takes some serious moral twisting or plain absence to make it look OK.
Thirty years later Wales has some coastal villages where more than 50% of the houses are exclusive holiday homes owned by outsiders. The new tactics to try to discourage this - a bit late - are punitive taxation and restrictive covenants on new builds.
No, he was an outsider who moved to the island.
As with a lot of comments on crime, there is a difference between "explaining" and "exculpating". I agree that "explaining" usually makes it look like the victim's fault.
In most rural areas in the world if you don't like what your neighbours house looks like you can go pound sand. People generally like the fact that noone can tell them what they do on their own property.
Interesting story, but doesn't look like it evaporated into thin air if you look at the photo.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1008xn/p09n3zd7.jpg
Either I'm missing something, or the intro is very badly (and sensationally - silly season!) written, possibly by someone who didn't listen to the actual program.
Clearly since the people on the island are human beings they too would hate with a passion anyone who did this.
So, there's a huge part of the story missing.
No one wants to lose property rights either. If you leave the island, people might destroy your stuff would scare anyone.
Ownership only appears when people tell each other consistent stories, and it becomes a social norm in some society that if you follow some rituals then you can do things like having a say on how a particular pile of bricks is used that others may respect.
On occasion, different people will tell different stories about things and there will be disagreement. Here it seems the islanders do not consider such an outsider can "buy" and "own" a house according to the law and rituals of the mainland. The mainland is like a colonial power they resist. They just have they own laws in effect, that they can enforce (to a degree, someone still got a fine) through the community united in not collaborating with mainland agents. It's neat.
Social norms vary, and elevating your norms above everyone else's is very ugly indeed. The islanders are as human as you, they just have a moral code that's not the same as yours.
Ownership is something a government does for you, and encompasses whatever arbitrary rules that government imposes and is willing to enforce. That's why this is a discussion about what courts should do.
If you're suggesting there's a valid moral code where murder is ok (for humans), well, I guess that's a matter of opinion, but I expect many people will disagree with you.
They probably prefer their got-your-back arrangement because they trust their neighbours more than they trust people outside the community. In addition it tips the scales in their favour because their law doesn't need to protect everyone equally. In this case outsiders are not afforded the same benefits as islanders.
They just need a reasonable belief that they won't be steamrolled by the actual law, which comes from having a tight knit community where people don't run to the police.
You see the same pattern amongst cops, the mob, remote communities, etc.
Other way round: since they're human beings they have loyalty among each other, and a relationship structure they're unwilling to compromise. Destroying the house of a resident obviously wouldn't stand, but who's going to be a snitch for the benefit of the outsider?
This happens a lot in abuse situations. You will find out afterwards that a lot of people knew to some extent what was happening, but were unwilling to have the confrontation that would result from speaking out about it, or to put up with the long term social consequences of being the person who spoke up.
I would, but I also have something of an antagonistic streak and a finely tuned sense of justice. I imagine there are many people out there, even in a small community of 120, who would have no problem sticking it to the establishment out of spite. It doesn’t take a big community to sow a faction of dissidents.
The police do occasional helicopter overflights, but there's an endless number of "brick thieves."
Items like aluminum doors go for $5 a piece at the local bar, and you can do "custom orders."
Good for him, this is spiritually healthy. But if this happened to me, and I knew exactly who it was, and justice would fail me, I'm pretty certain I'd choose a very different path.
The concept, phrase and idiom has its origin in the Sermon on the Mount in Chapter 5 of the Gospel of Matthew, a sermon ostensibly given by a Cynic and rebel Jew between 28AD-33AD, neatly proving your suspicion correct.
Liberal, democratic governments are supposed to maintain our various social contracts by dint of a granted monopoly on the use of violence or force. Laws and justice systems are there as tools for governments to exercise justified and escalating force to elicit compliance with social contracts, e.g. social order.
When enforcement fails, the social contract is broken, and an individual may find that they are left with no better course of action than to exercise the force that was inappropriately withheld.
This guy could be justified in disappearing those who disappeared his house, if left with no better recourse and his property remains under threat. Basic tit for tat game theory overrides morality when social order breaks down.
And no, murder is not an appropriate response to someone demolishing a house, bloody hell.
Disappearing their house, surely? Not them personally.
Edit: he was contacted but it wasn't particularly honest :)
Did they mention anything about this one way or the other? Maybe they didn't know who the owner was or how to get a hold of him? Or maybe they did try to contact but didn't get a response? Unless I missed some part of the passage.
> The reason Neville had returned to the island in the first place was a letter from the local council warning this house had been damaged by a storm, but an engineer’s report found that the house was most likely brought down by mechanical means.
So he was contacted, by the local council, and they lied to him.
Sounds to me like the island as a whole decided he wasn't going to come live in his house anymore and it was in the way, but they had to keep that secret of course.
There's a high chance both are true. 8 years left untended on a very weather-exposed coast - I'm a little further down the same coast, and I can only imagine the state it'd be in.
I don't want this to sound like victim-blaming, but perhaps trying to imagine how things would progress to a point where anyone thought demolishing it was the right thing to do. Imagine getting your neighbours car towed off their own property simply because you don't like it - I think that's what most of us are picturing. Now imagine it's a rusting shell sat on four rotting, flat tyres. Perhaps burnt out, perhaps a few windows missing, perhaps bits of roof missing - we do get the odd hurricane. This is not an unrealistic picture of a house that's been left to weather the full fury of the Atlantic for 8 years. All it takes is to lose a bit of roof or a bit of glass, and the damage will snowball quickly.
I'm not saying the owner deserved it. But there's a good possibility the house itself deserved it. And part of the self-reliance of isolated islands is that the community as a whole tends to take care of what needs to be done. I dare say if he'd been resident they would have banded together to help with repairs - that tight-knit community goes both ways.
Based on being the only hotel on the island, this[0] appears to be the hotel in question. I read the space the house was in was being used as parking for the hotel, and the buildings either side of it don't look new - so I'm assuming the space is the turn-around between the hotel and the shore. You can see[1] it's a very prominent place in 'town' to be left dilapidated. Again, not trying to excuse anyone, but just trying to wrap my head around their motivations.
[0] https://www.derryjournal.com/business/pictures-one-most-remo...
Enhance
Enhance
Of course, there's also publicly available US offerings like
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Being a good neighbor is how you solve this problem.
Your proposed solution implies that the victim was somehow to blame for this crime, by not being a good neighbour.
We don’t know that he was a bad neighbor and even if he was, that’s not a reason to demolish someone’s house.