IN the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our
minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities;
people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce.
Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.
When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your
favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share
it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle
all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on
unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all
our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb
multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering
through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers
wrote across unexplored regions, ‘Here are lions.’ Across the villages
of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us,
we can write but one line that is certain, ‘Here are ghosts.’
My ghosts inhabit the village of H——, in Leinster. History has in no
manner been burdened by this ancient village, with its crooked lanes,
its old abbey churchyard full of long grass, its green background of
small fir-trees, and its quay, where lie a few tarry fishing-luggers.
In the annals of entomology it is well known. For a small bay lies
westward a little, where he who watches night after night may see a
certain rare moth fluttering along the edge of the tide, just at the
end of evening or the beginning of dawn. A hundred years ago it was
carried here from Italy by smugglers in a cargo of silks and laces.
If the moth-hunter would throw down his net, and go hunting for ghost
tales or tales of the faeries and such-like children of Lilith, he
would have need for far less patience.
To approach the village at night a timid man requires great strategy. A
man was once heard complaining, ‘By the cross of Jesus! how shall I go?
If I pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain Burney may look out on me.
If I go round by the water, and up by the steps, there is the headless
one and another on the quays, and a new one under the old churchyard
wall. If I go right round the other way, Mrs. Stewart is appearing at
Hillside Gate, and the devil himself is in the Hospital Lane.’
I never heard which spirit he braved, but feel sure it was not the one
in the Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed had been there set up
to receive patients. When the need had gone by, it was pulled down,
but ever since the ground where it stood has broken out in ghosts and
demons and faeries. There is a farmer at H——, Paddy B—— by name—a man
of great strength, and a teetotaller. His wife and sister-in-law,
musing on his great strength, often wonder what he would do if he
drank. One night when passing through the Hospital Lane, he saw what he
supposed at first to be a tame rabbit; after a little he found that it
was a white cat. When he came near, the creature slowly began to swell
larger and larger, and as it grew he felt his own strength ebbing away,
as though it were sucked out of him. He turned and ran.
By the Hospital Lane goes the ‘Faeries’ Path.’ Every evening they
travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea
end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived
there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband
was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After
he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, ‘In the name of
God, who are you?’ He got up and went out, saying, ‘Never leave the
door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.’ She woke her husband
and told him. ‘One of the good people has been with us,’ said he.
Probably the man braved Mrs. Stewart at Hillside Gate. When she lived
she was the wife of the Protestant clergyman. ‘Her ghost was never
known to harm any one,’ say the village people; ‘it is only doing a
penance upon the earth.’ Not far from Hillside Gate, where she haunted,
appeared for a short time a much more remarkable spirit. Its haunt was
the bogeen, a green lane leading from the western end of the village.
I quote its history at length: a typical village tragedy. In a cottage
at the village end of the bogeen lived a house-painter, Jim Montgomery,
and his wife. They had several children. He was a little dandy, and
came of a higher class than his neighbours. His wife was a very big
woman. Her husband, who had been expelled from the village choir for
drink, gave her a beating one day. Her sister heard of it, and came
and took down one of the window shutters—Montgomery was neat about
everything, and had shutters on the outside of every window—and beat
him with it, being big and strong like her sister. He threatened to
prosecute her; she answered that she would break every bone in his body
if he did. She never spoke to her sister again, because she had allowed
herself to be beaten by so small a man. Jim Montgomery grew worse and
worse: his wife soon began to have not enough to eat. She told no one,
for she was very proud. Often, too, she would have no fire on a cold
night. If any neighbours came in she would say she had let the fire out
because she was just going to bed. The people about often heard her
husband beating her, but she never told any one. She got very thin.
At last one Saturday there was no food in the house for herself and
the children. She could bear it no longer, and went to the priest and
asked him for some money. He gave her thirty shillings. Her husband
met her, and took the money, and beat her. On the following Monday
she got very ill, and sent for a Mrs. Kelly. Mrs. Kelly, as soon as
she saw her, said, ‘My woman, you are dying,’ and sent for the priest
and the doctor. She died in an hour. After her death, as Montgomery
neglected the children, the landlord had them taken to the workhouse.
A few nights after they had gone, Mrs. Kelly was going home through
the bogeen when the ghost of Mrs. Montgomery appeared and followed
her. It did not leave her until she reached her own house. She told
the priest, Father S——, a noted antiquarian, and could not get him to
believe her. A few nights afterwards Mrs. Kelly again met the spirit in
the same place. She was in too great terror to go the whole way, but
stopped at a neighbour’s cottage midway, and asked them to let her in.
They answered they were going to bed. She cried out, ‘In the name of
God let me in, or I will break open the door.’ They opened, and so she
escaped from the ghost. Next day she told the priest again. This time
he believed, and said it would follow her until she spoke to it.
She met the spirit a third time in the bogeen. She asked what kept it
from its rest. The spirit said that its children must be taken from
the workhouse, for none of its relations were ever there before, and
that three masses were to be said for the repose of its soul. ‘If my
husband does not believe you,’ she said, ‘show him that,’ and touched
Mrs. Kelly’s wrist with three fingers. The places where they touched
swelled up and blackened. She then vanished. For a time Montgomery
would not believe that his wife had appeared: ‘she would not show
herself to Mrs. Kelly,’ he said—‘she with respectable people to appear
to.’ He was convinced by the three marks, and the children were taken
from the workhouse. The priest said the masses, and the shade must have
been at rest, for it has not since appeared. Some time afterwards Jim
Montgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great poverty through
drink.
I know some who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon the
quay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night, sees
a woman with white borders to her cap[B] creep out and follow him. The
apparition only leaves him at his own door. The villagers imagine that
she follows him to avenge some wrong. ‘I will haunt you when I die’ is
a favourite threat. His wife was once half-scared to death by what she
considers a demon in the shape of a dog.
These are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their
tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in Fluddy’s
Lane. Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door. She
did not open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked. The
knocking ceased. After a little the front-door and then the back-door
were burst open, and closed again. Her husband went to see what was
wrong. He found both doors bolted. The child died. The doors were
again opened and closed as before. Then Mrs. Nolan remembered that
she had forgotten to leave window or door open, as the custom is, for
the departure of the soul. These strange openings and closings and
knockings were warnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the
dying.
The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It
is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who
live with it. I remember two children who slept with their mother and
sisters and brothers in one small room. In the room was also a ghost.
They sold herrings in the Dublin streets, and did not mind the ghost
much, because they knew they would always sell their fish easily while
they slept in the ‘ha’nted’ room.
I have some acquaintance among the ghost-seers of western villages.
The Connaught tales are very different from those of Leinster. These
H—— spirits have a gloomy, matter-of-fact way with them. They come
to announce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong,
to pay their bills even—as did a fisherman’s daughter the other
day—and then hasten to their rest. All things they do decently and in
order. It is demons, and not ghosts, that transform themselves into
white cats or black dogs. The people who tell the tales are poor,
serious-minded fishing people, who find in the doings of the ghosts
the fascination of fear. In the western tales is a whimsical grace,
a curious extravagance. The people who recount them live in the most
wild and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with
flying clouds. They are farmers and labourers, who do a little fishing
now and then. They do not fear the spirits too much to feel an artistic
and humorous pleasure in their doings. The ghosts themselves share in
their quaint hilarity. In one western town, on whose deserted wharf the
grass grows, these spirits have so much vigour that, when a misbeliever
ventured to sleep in a haunted house, I have been told they flung him
through the window, and his bed after him. In the surrounding villages
the creatures use the most strange disguises. A dead old gentleman
robs the cabbages of his own garden in the shape of a large rabbit.
A wicked sea-captain stayed for years inside the plaster of a cottage
wall, in the shape of a snipe, making the most horrible noises. He was
only dislodged when the wall was broken down; then out of the solid
plaster the snipe rushed away whistling.