The story goes that a man named Burke built the house directly over a blessed well whose waters had cured the blind and the lame. Burke lost his mind and died for the transgression, the house became haunted by some unseen presence, and the well itself, rather than simply disappearing, broke through the bank of the River Shannon nearby. The tradition holds that its waters flow through the river without mingling with it, remaining distinct enough to be drawn out pure from the middle of the Shannon. It is a vivid piece of folklore, the kind that tends to cluster around sites where the sacred and the domestic have collided uncomfortably.

The Ordnance Survey Letters for Stradbally parish, compiled in 1840, are the source for this account, and they place the vanished well beneath what was then known as Cloon House. The house sits on Cloon Island, a low rise overlooking the Shannon, and the surrounding ground is dense with early medieval and medieval remains. Church ruins on the property, marked simply as 'Friary' on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, may represent a Franciscan friary or an earlier Christian monastery. Two early Christian cross-slabs, flat stones carved with cross motifs that typically date from the early medieval period, are built into the west gable of that ruined church. The Anglo-Norman castle of Castleconnell stands roughly 300 metres to the south, and a medieval parish church lies 830 metres further in the same direction, which suggests this stretch of the Shannon was an unusually busy node of settlement across several centuries.

The site is not formally managed as a visitor destination, and the well itself has no visible presence on the ground. What a visitor can do is locate the general area around Cloon Island near Castleconnell, a village on the Clare-Limerick border not far from Limerick city, and observe the cumulative strangeness of the landscape: the ruined church with its repurposed cross-slabs, the proximity of the castle, and the Shannon moving steadily past the low ground where the well supposedly broke through. The cross-slabs in the west gable are the most tangible detail to look for, assuming access to the church ruins is possible. The folklore surrounding the well is best understood as part of a wider Irish tradition in which holy wells resisted interference, often punishing those who obstructed them with madness, death, or persistent supernatural unease.