Former Dundee United player Jordan Moore on surviving cancer, IRA threats and being haunted by a nun in Ireland

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For a 22-year-old lad who has successfully fought skin cancer over the last two years – the disease has gone but the scars remain – you would think Moore had already banked his best life story. But not a bit of it.

A three-month stay in the province of Munster – it sounded like The Munsters – will live with him forever. He laughs about it now but, my word, he was put through it.

Moore is currently without a club but hopes to get something sorted for next season. Where that will be he is unsure. Where it won’t be is an absolute certainty.

“The accommodation I stayed in wasn’t the best. It was a hostel kind of thing, and a few strange guys were kicking about the place, so I just decided that enough was enough,” said Moore as began his sorry tale. “I left last week.

“Limerick is known as Stab City. I stayed in a village called Bruff, about 30k from the city, and on every second lamppost there is a horse tied up. There must be 20 horses in every street you walk down. But if you tried to cut the horses loose they would kill you – supposedly.

“One day the police came and moved all the horses away. The next day it turned out the guys who owned the horses had smashed up every shop and put all their cows in the actual shops and the schools as well. This is true. It was crazy.

“The farmers who had cows in their fields also put them in the shops, the Spars and supermarkets, for revenge. The police gave them all the horses back and told them to watch what they were doing.”

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Hold on a minute. So there are horses everywhere? Did he travel back in time and stay in the 18th century?

“Bruff is the weirdest village ever,” said Moore. “The locals would jump on the backs of horses and just ride along. There were no cars. Or at least there was more horses than cars.

I think they were gypsy horses. They actually looked terrible. That wasn’t nice. It was crazy, a good laugh, but a bit dodgy.”

So let’s now seemlessly move from horses to ghosts, bumps in the night and some mystery Oriental children.

“I stayed in an old convent,” explained Moore. “The front garden was a graveyard. The other boys were all local and so I lived there myself. I just had a room in an old chapel, the room was at the side of it, and it was scary at night because of all the ghost stories.

“A nun had committed suicide in my room and her gravestone, and this was in the garden, was overturned. One of the things it said was ‘room 106’ and that was the room I was in!

“I did hear stuff all the time. There was the sound of scraping on the walls inside the room every night. I swear this is true. My team-mates couldn’t believe I was living there but to rent somewhere was going to be £800 a month and because I didn’t know how long I was going to be there, I decided to stay where I was.

“One time 20 Chinese kids arrived from nowhere. I was thinking ‘what is happening here?’ We had one little living room, the one place where there was Wi-Fi, and there were these Chinese all in there. They then put cameras up because they were kids. Crazy!”

Where do you go from here? Turns out you can go down.

Yes, it actually got worse for Moore.

Read more: From beating skin cancer to winning football games . . .

“There was one pub there but the guy who ran it was a big-time gangster or something,” he said. “So it was a case of if you went in once, you didn’t go back in again. So I just stayed in the place.

“There was all sorts of things going on, including drug deals.

"I remember there was one room that was locked. This guy would go in and look like a different person when he came out.

"He was definitely on something. He had 40 locks on the door.

"Was I scared? 100 per cent I was. I would lock my door and window before going to bed.”

And just to make things more interesting, Moore found himself caught up in a mixture of running and rebellion.

He said: “I do remember a guy getting a treadmill in the place – supposedly he was in the IRA – and he said to me; ‘If that gets broken you are going back in a f****** box.’ I was kind of laughing as I looked at him but he was being deadly serious!”

You will have to take it from me that all of this was said with a stoney-faced expression. Moore is not the kind to puts arms and legs on such tales. But at least the football was good. Wasn’t it?

“I felt that I wasn’t treated so well because I was there on my own.” he said.

“I felt they tried to take a loan on me a bit. I found getting my money a lot harder than the rest of the guys. I’d ask where the money was and they would say ‘ah, you’ll get it next week after the game.’

“Then after the game I would be taken to the burger van and they would whip out the coins and say; ‘take that now and we’ll count it later.’”

It was his former team-mate at Dundee United Jon Daly who put him on to Limerick “he’s not returning my calls” and by the end he was sick of being a substitute, not being paid on time and staying in somewhere Vincent Price would think was a touch on the creepy side.

“Honestly, you would need to go to believe it,” Moore said is safe in the knowledge nobody was going to take him up on that offer.

Moore joins up with Raith Rovers this Monday for pre-season training in the hope he will win a contract and a way back into full-time football. Considering everything the man has went through he could do with a break. And compared to Bruff, Kirkcaldy on a cold day will feel like Malibu in June.

Moore will take part in the PFA Scotland Showcase Exit Trials on Saturday at Broadwood (kick-off 3.30pm). The coaches are all young players who have done their A and B Licences and are looking to get into coaching. This way it is about members helping members and the PFA are helping their members at both ends of the spectrum.

PFA Scotland said: “We have had fantastic support from Todd Lumsden and his staff at New College Lanarkshire who give us the run of their complex at Broadwood, Alan Macartney TotalTeamWearScotland who gave us the training kit FREE, AG Barr who supplied the water and Breathing Space who supplied water bottles.”