Irish Ghost Stories

Irish Ghost Stories

With an introduction by Maura McHugh

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FLAME TREE 451

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Introduction

Ireland is a haunted country.

Long before the first missionaries arrived on the furthermost isle of Europe, to convert its querulous, quixotic people from their animist, polytheistic beliefs, even longer before the great invasion of the Normans, the Noble Isle (as it was once known) was previously inhabited by a mysterious people who left crooked burial tombs – etched with ziz-zags and spirals – studded on the hills and the high places where the mists clung to their pitted stone crags and hinted at deep ancestor worship.

Aligned to the sun, moon and the stars, these homes for the dead were inherited by later tribes who sensed they remained occupied by troops of spirits operating by unknown rules and were dangerous spaces if meddled with by disrespectful fools. Those people developed a mythology of Gods and heroes who were connected to the fields, the rivers, and the skies; they were dreadful battle-makers, mighty spell-wielders, wise leaders and argumentative kinsfolk who loved, warred and died for the honour of their families.

This mythic race never truly died, it is said, but stepped sideways into an adjacent realm, to watch over their green jewel with jealous eyes, and who would foray from their secret places to threaten and inspire the living from time to time.

Above all, the Irish loved to tell stories and sing songs around the hearths in their halls and meeting places. Their bards and poets held esteemed positions in the tribal council, on a par with the spiritual and legal advisors, feared for their ability to cut a person down with a stinging critique, and honoured for their phenomenal memory, able to recount the genealogy of hundreds of years of leaders. They thrummed with the wonder tales of the esteemed dead and repeated them to entertain and terrify, to teach and control.

When new invasions arrived – the Christians, the Vikings, and the English – the Irish fought and married them, always infecting newcomers with tales of spectral observers, lurking in the darkness between encampments, pointing to the stone bones of their ancient homes jutting out of the land.

There are many ways to rebel against conquest, and one is to make the interlopers wary of old temples… where canny fighters could hide out in between battles. For hundreds of years people resisted subjection, fought in every town and field, and the dead piled up.

It became a deeply wounded landscape, carved up and resettled, rent across artificial lines that pitted families against each other. Religion became the differentiation between power and poverty. The rulers would be termed the Protestant ascendancy, allied with the English crown that tried to rule an unwilling majority of Catholics. Yet, Protestant or Catholic, they all grew up on the same land, heard the same stories, be it from their mother, their nanny or their retainers.

It was the perfect environment to breed stories seething with fear and anxiety from minds primed to the fantastic. Especially after the tumultuous period from 1798 to 1803, which saw two bloody rebellions, an Act of Union removing the Irish parliament, and the crushing of Irish Protestant and Catholic leaders by agents appointed by faraway London. What began to emerge in the nineteenth century – an era of education, new technology and industry – was a slow grudging consensus among those who saw Ireland as their home, irrespective of religion, that this remote rule was intolerable.

But tragedy continued, as millions died during an unprecedented famine. Starving skeletons shambled to the ports to leave their homeland, while those who remained buried the dead, which heaped up again.

Ghosts multiplied in the ravaged landscape, now dotted with stumps of abandoned stone cottages, the new memorial to the absent. Never had Ireland been so drenched in horror or riven by internal conflict.

And in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Irish writers responded to this pervasive anguish and sundered loyalties by writing their fears onto the page. They established a rich and varied tradition of fantastic stories during an era when cheaper printing and faster travel allowed Irish writers access to international attention. Whether they remained at home or travelled beyond it, Irish writers proved to be influential producers of eerie fiction.

As Ireland moved towards a final revolution to achieve independence, and some semblance of peace, there gradually arose a pride in the Irish legacy of storytelling. These authors tapped into their darkest fears, the horrors they witnessed, and the friction inside them caused by a convulsed heritage, to conjure up ghosts and fantasies that continue to haunt the imagination of a new generation of readers.

Charles Robert Maturin, a clergyman more suited to parties than prayers, channelled his divisions into his operatic Gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). William Carleton rejected his faith, converted to Protestantism and set out to depict complex Irish characters in his fiction. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu dropped a sensible career in law to become an editor and writer of extraordinary stories. Fitz-James O’Brien drained his family inheritance in his twenties and emigrated to work as a jobbing writer in New York. Mrs J.H. Riddell, orphaned and alone as a young woman in London, forged a career as a writer out of desire and necessity despite society’s disapproval. Rosa Mulholland, who published early and often, was not afraid to write ghost stories when the art form was in its infancy. Oscar Wilde, convinced of his genius, set about proving it to London through his sparkling plays, poetry, and fiction. Katharine Tynan, a productive writer and committed suffragette, supported her family thanks to her writing. Douglas Hyde wrote ghost stories in Irish and in English and advocated for the literary strength of Irish culture. Lord Dunsany was a prolific and influential fantasy writer when weird and speculative tales flourished in the early twentieth century.

Irish writers such as those in this volume were finely attuned to stranger possibilities and discordant realties since they lived through a period of rapid change. And underneath it all was the murmuring whispers of Ireland’s mythological legacy, its landscape of ruins and headstones, and its passion for a good yarn, well told. It permeates everything, and remains part of the Irish character, irrespective of ancestry.

For to live in Ireland is to become acquainted with ghosts.

It develops slowly, until one evening you find yourself on your doorstep, watching shadows in the mist, certain one has called your name.

Maura McHugh

The Fate of Frank McKenna

William Carleton

There lived a man named M’Kenna at the hip of one of the mountainous hills which divide the county of Tyrone from that of Monaghan. This M’Kenna had two sons, one of whom was in the habit of tracing hares of a Sunday whenever there happened to be a fall of snow. His father, it seems, had frequently remonstrated with him upon what he considered to be a violation of the Lord’s day, as well as for his general neglect of mass. The young man, however, though otherwise harmless and inoffensive, was in this matter quite insensible to paternal reproof, and continued to trace whenever the avocations of labour would allow him. It so happened that upon a Christmas morning, I think in the year 1814, there was a deep fall of snow, and young M’Kenna, instead of going to mass, got down his cock-stick – which is a staff much thicker and heavier at one end than at the other – and prepared to set out on his favourite amusement. His father, seeing this, reproved him seriously, and insisted that he should attend prayers. His enthusiasm for the sport, however, was stronger than his love of religion, and he refused to be guided by his father’s advice. The old man during the altercation got warm; and on finding that the son obstinately scorned his authority, he knelt down and prayed that if the boy persisted in following his own will, he might never return from the mountains unless as a corpse. The imprecation, which was certainly as harsh as it was impious and senseless, might have startled many a mind from a purpose that was, to say the least of it, at variance with religion and the respect due to a father. It had no effect, however, upon the son, who is said to have replied, that whether he ever returned or not, he was determined on going; and go accordingly he did. He was not, however, alone, for it appears that three or four of the neighbouring young men accompanied him. Whether their sport was good or otherwise, is not to the purpose, neither am I able to say; but the story goes that towards the latter part of the day they started a larger and darker hare than any they had ever seen, and that she kept dodging on before them bit by bit, leading them to suppose that every succeeding cast of the cock-stick would bring her down. It was observed afterwards that she also led them into the recesses of the mountains, and that although they tried to turn her course homewards, they could not succeed in doing so. As evening advanced, the companions of M’Kenna began to feel the folly of pursuing her farther, and to perceive the danger of losing their way in the mountains should night or a snow-storm come upon them. They therefore proposed to give over the chase and return home; but M’Kenna would not hear of it.

If you wish to go home, you may, said he; as for me, I’ll never leave the hills till I have her with me. They begged and entreated of him to desist and return, but all to no purpose: he appeared to be what the Scotch call fey – that is, to act as if he were moved by some impulse that leads to death, and from the influence of which a man cannot withdraw himself. At length, on finding him invincibly obstinate, they left him pursuing the hare directly into the heart of the mountains, and returned to their respective homes.

In the meantime one of the most terrible snow-storms ever remembered in that part of the country came on, and the consequence was, that the self-willed young man, who had equally trampled on the sanctities of religion and parental authority, was given over for lost. As soon as the tempest became still, the neighbours assembled in a body and proceeded to look for him. The snow, however, had fallen so heavily that not a single mark of a footstep could be seen. Nothing but one wide waste of white undulating hills met the eye wherever it turned, and of M’Kenna no trace whatever was visible or could be found. His father, now remembering the unnatural character of his imprecation, was nearly distracted; for although the body had not yet been found, still by everyone who witnessed the sudden rage of the storm and who knew the mountains, escape or survival was felt to be impossible. Every day for about a week large parties were out among the hill-ranges seeking him, but to no purpose. At length there came a thaw, and his body was found on a snow-wreath, lying in a supine posture within a circle which he had drawn around him with his cock-stick. His prayer-book lay opened upon his mouth, and his hat was pulled down so as to cover it and his face. It is unnecessary to say that the rumour of his death, and of the circumstances under which he left home, created a most extraordinary sensation in the country – a sensation that was the greater in proportion to the uncertainty occasioned by his not having been found either alive or dead. Some affirmed that he had crossed the mountains, and was seen in Monaghan; others, that he had been seen in Clones, in Emyvale, in Five-mile-town; but despite of all these agreeable reports, the melancholy truth was at length made clear by the appearance of the body as just stated.

Now, it so happened that the house nearest the spot where he lay was inhabited by a man named Daly, I think – but of the name I am not certain – who was a herd or care-taker to Dr. Porter, then Bishop of Clogher. The situation of this house was the most lonely and desolate-looking that could be imagined. It was at least two miles distant from any human habitation, being surrounded by one wide and dreary waste of dark moor. By this house lay the route of those who had found the corpse, and I believe the door of it was borrowed for the purpose of conveying it home. Be this as it may, the family witnessed the melancholy procession as it passed slowly through the mountains, and when the place and circumstances are all considered, we may admit that to ignorant and superstitious people, whose minds, even upon ordinary occasions, were strongly affected by such matters, it was a sight calculated to leave behind it a deep, if not a terrible impression. Time soon proved that it did so.

An incident is said to have occurred at the funeral in fine keeping with the wild spirit of the whole melancholy event. When the procession had advanced to a place called Mullaghtinny, a large dark-coloured hare, which was instantly recognised, by those who had been out with him on the hills, as the identical one that led him to his fate, is said to have crossed the roads about twenty yards or so before the coffin. The story goes, that a man struck it on the side with a stone, and that the blow, which would have killed any ordinary hare, not only did it no injury, but occasioned a sound to proceed from the body resembling the hollow one emitted by an empty barrel when struck.

In the meantime the interment took place, and the sensation began, like every other, to die away in the natural progress of time, when, behold, a report ran abroad like wild-fire that, to use the language of the people, "Frank M’Kenna was appearing!"

One night, about a fortnight after his funeral, the daughter of Daly, the herd, a girl about fourteen, while lying in bed saw what appeared to be the likeness of M’Kenna, who had been lost. She screamed out, and covering her head with the bed-clothes, told her father and mother that Frank M’Kenna was in the house. This alarming intelligence naturally produced great terror; still, Daly, who, notwithstanding his belief in such matters, possessed a good deal of moral courage, was cool enough to rise and examine the house, which consisted of only one apartment. This gave the daughter some courage, who, on finding that her father could not see him, ventured to look out, and she then could see nothing of him herself. She very soon fell asleep, and her father attributed what she saw to fear, or some accidental combination of shadows proceeding from the furniture, for it was a clear moonlight night. The light of the following day dispelled a great deal of their apprehensions, and comparatively little was thought of it until evening again advanced, when the fears of the daughter began to return. They appeared to be prophetic, for she said when night came that she knew he would appear again; and accordingly at the same hour he did so. This was repeated for several successive nights, until the girl, from the very hardihood of terror, began to become so far familiarised to the spectre as to venture to address it.

In the name of God! she asked, what is troubling you, or why do you appear to me instead of to some of your own family or relations?

The ghost’s answer alone might settle the question involved in the authenticity of its appearance, being, as it was, an account of one of the most ludicrous missions that ever a spirit was despatched upon.

I’m not allowed, said he, to spake to any of my friends, for I parted wid them in anger; but I’m come to tell you that they are quarrelin’ about my breeches – a new pair that I got made for Christmas day; an’ as I was comin’ up to thrace in the mountains, I thought the ould one ’ud do betther, an’ of coorse I didn’t put the new pair an me. My raison for appearin’, he added, is, that you may tell my friends that none of them is to wear them – they must be given in charity.

This serious and solemn intimation from the ghost was duly communicated to the family, and it was found that the circumstances were exactly as it had represented them. This, of course, was considered as sufficient proof of the truth of its mission. Their conversations now became not only frequent, but quite friendly and familiar. The girl became a favourite with the spectre, and the spectre, on the other hand, soon lost all his terrors in her eyes. He told her that whilst his friends were bearing home his body, the handspikes or poles on which they carried him had cut his back, and occasioned him great pain! The cutting of the back also was known to be true, and strengthened, of course, the truth and authenticity of their dialogues. The whole neighbourhood was now in a commotion with this story of the apparition, and persons incited by curiosity began to visit the girl in order to satisfy themselves of the truth of what they had heard. Everything, however, was corroborated, and the child herself, without any symptoms of anxiety or terror, artlessly related her conversations with the spirit. Hitherto their interviews had been all nocturnal, but now that the ghost found his footing made good, he put a hardy face on, and ventured to appear by daylight. The girl also fell into states of syncope, and while the fits lasted, long conversations with him upon the subject of God, the blessed Virgin, and Heaven, took place between them. He was certainly an excellent moralist, and gave the best advice. Swearing, drunkenness, theft, and every evil propensity of our nature, were declaimed against with a degree of spectral eloquence quite surprising. Common fame had now a topic dear to her heart, and never was a ghost made more of by his best friends than she made of him. The whole country was in a tumult, and I well remember the crowds which flocked to the lonely little cabin in the mountains, now the scene of matters so interesting and important. Not a single day passed in which I should think from ten to twenty, thirty, or fifty persons, were not present at these singular interviews. Nothing else was talked of, thought of, and, as I can well testify, dreamt of. I would myself have gone to Daly’s were it not for a confounded misgiving I had, that perhaps the ghost might take such a fancy of appearing to me, as he had taken to cultivate an intimacy with the girl; and it so happens, that when I see the face of an individual nailed down in the coffin – chilling and gloomy operation! – I experience no particular wish to look upon it again.

The spot where the body of M’Kenna was found is now marked by a little heap of stones, which has been collected since the melancholy event of his death. Every person who passes it throws a stone upon the heap; but why this old custom is practised, or what it means, I do not know, unless it be simply to mark the spot as a visible means of preserving the memory of the occurrence.

Daly’s house, the scene of the supposed apparition, is now a shapeless ruin, which could scarcely be seen were it not for the green spot that once was a garden, and which now shines at a distance like an emerald, but with no agreeable or pleasing associations. It is a spot which no solitary schoolboy will ever visit, nor indeed would the unflinching believer in the popular nonsense of ghosts wish to pass it without a companion. It is, under any circumstances, a gloomy and barren place; but when looked upon in connection with what we have just recited, it is lonely, desolate, and awful.

The Sword of Welleran

Lord Dunsany

Where the great plain of Tarphet runs up, as the sea in estuaries, among the Cyresian mountains, there stood long since the city of Merimna well-nigh among the shadows of the crags. I have never seen a city in the world so beautiful as Merimna seemed to me when first I dreamed of it. It was a marvel of spires and figures of bronze, and marble fountains, and trophies of fabulous wars, and broad streets given over wholly to the Beautiful. Right through the centre of the city there went an avenue fifty strides in width, and along each side of it stood likenesses in bronze of the Kings of all the countries that the people of Merimna had ever known. At the end of that avenue was a colossal chariot with three bronze horses driven by the winged figure of Fame, and behind her in the chariot the huge form of Welleran, Merimna’s ancient hero, standing with extended sword. So urgent was the mien and attitude of Fame, and so swift the pose of the horses, that you had sworn that the chariot was instantly upon you, and that its dust already veiled the faces of the Kings. And in the city was a mighty hall wherein were stored the trophies of Merimna’s heroes. Sculptured it was and domed, the glory of the art of masons a long while dead, and on the summit of the dome the image of Rollory sat gazing across the Cyresian mountains towards the wide lands beyond, the lands that knew his sword. And beside Rollory, like an old nurse, the figure of Victory sat, hammering into a golden wreath of laurels for his head the crowns of fallen Kings.

Such was Merimna, a city of sculptured Victories and warriors of bronze. Yet in the time of which I write the art of war had been forgotten in Merimna, and the people almost slept.