This bloody but non-speculative story is an account (based on an actual incident) of a revenge-murder carried out by a secret society, in which an entire family is slaughtered. It was first published in the Dublin Literary Gazette, Jan 23 & Jan 30, 1830. When it was included in the second series of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1833), under the title "Wildgoose Lodge," Carleton made only one significant change: in the first version, he had stated that the murdered family were the only Protestants in the region, adding an element of religious factional conflict to the story, whereas in the historical incident, they had been Catholics. He removed this element in the revised version.
