It Happened to Me…

Further strange episodes

y mother’s family came from Mullingar in southern Ireland, and in the late 1950s she used to take my sister and me for three to four weeks in the summer. My father would follow on later. My grandparents had a farmhouse just outside the town. One evening when I was aged about six we had gone to visit my aunt who lived a 10-minute walk from my grandparents. I decided to walk back to the farmhouse. I crossed a vast field and reached the driveway to the farmhouse. The driveway was quite long, 80 to 100 feet (24-30m). There was a solid high hedge to my left and farm buildings to my right. I must have walked half way down when something stepped out from the hedge and stood in front of me. It had a human shape, but I recall large fox-like ears and bright yellow eyes. We seemed to look at each other for ages. Then it moved towards me. I screamed and ran. When I got back to the farmhouse, I was hysterical with fear. Many years later I saw illustrations of an entity called a Pooka in a book on Irish folklore. Some of these