I AM PURSUED BY PHANTOM FOOTSTEPS
Before I left the west of Ireland, I set out one day to investigate a
case of haunting by fairies, which was alleged to take place nightly at
the junction of four cross roads on the southern slope of the Wicklow
mountains.
I found a spot that seemed to correspond with the description of the
scene of the haunting given me by my informant, and kept a vigil
there for two consecutive nights without experiencing any of the
anticipated results. However, I intended giving the place another
trial, and accordingly set out; but when within half a mile or so of
my destination, I began to feel very tired, and having a bad cold on
me besides, I decided to put up at a cottage I espied a short distance
off, instead of pursuing my way further.
The cottage stood a little back from the main road, perhaps a hundred
yards or so, and was connected with it by a narrow lane. The situation
was one of intense loneliness; the nearest village was a good two miles
away, and few people, other than occasional cyclists, ever passed
along the high road after nightfall. At the time I am speaking of, the
cottage was tenanted by a couple named Mullins. The man was a drover,
and his wife one of the tallest women I have ever seen; she possessed,
moreover, a pair of green-grey eyes, and these were remarkable, not
only for their curious colouring, but for the impression they gave one
that they were perpetually trying not to see too much. Apart from these
peculiarities, she seemed ordinary enough, and I felt I was in the
house of very worthy and hard-working people.
I went to bed early and was given the only spare room in the cottage.
It faced the front and was immediately over the tiny parlour. As the
linen was spotless and felt thoroughly dry, I had no scruples about
getting in between the sheets, and, stretching myself out, I was soon
fast asleep.
I awoke with violent palpitations of the heart to find the room bathed
with moonlight; and, as all was absolutely silent, I concluded it must
be far on into the night. Suddenly I heard footsteps—footsteps in the
distance, running at a well-regulated pace. They rang out sharp and
clear in the still air, and gradually became more and more distinct.
I was wondering who the person could be, out at such an hour, when a
dog, apparently in the yard at the back of the house, set up the most
unearthly howling. The next moment I heard Mrs. Mullins speak, and,
inadvertently, I listened.
“John,” she said, “do you hear the dog?”
“I should be deaf and dumb if I didn’t,” Mullins replied sleepily.
“What is it?”
“What is it, indeed! Why the dog never barks like that unless there
is a spirit about. Do you remember those knocks on the door the night
Uncle Mike died, and how the dog howled then? There’s something of the
same sort about to-night. Listen!”
The steps very were near now. I listened intently. The runner, I
thought, must be wearing very extraordinary boots, for every step, so
it seemed to me, was accompanied by a peculiar and almost metallic
click.
“John,” Mrs. Mullins suddenly resumed, “do you hear those steps? What
are they? It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard anyone running
along the high road like that at this time of night. Hark! They’ve got
to the turning—they’re in the lane—they’re coming here! Get up at
once; go and bolt the front door. The thing’s evil—evil, I’m sure, and
it’s someone of us here it’s after.”
The steps grew rapidly nearer, and Mullins, stumbling hastily down the
stairs, bolted both the doors and swung to the little wooden shutters.
A moment later, and I heard the steps come right up to the door. There
was a momentary pause, then a series of terrific knocks.
“Cross yourself, John; for God’s sake cross yourself!” Mrs. Mullins
cried. “And may the Holy Virgin protect us.” She then started praying
loudly and vehemently, and, whether it was the effect of her prayers
or not, the knocking gradually diminished in violence, and then ceased
altogether.
“Come on up, John,” Mrs. Mullins called out; “the thing, whatever it
is, has ceased troubling us, and we may go to sleep in peace.”
Mullins, needing no second bidding, joined his wife, and once again the
whole place was wrapped in silence.
I must confess that, whilst the knocking continued, I had no desire
whatever to look out of the window, but the moment it was over I got up
and peered out. I could see right down the lane and for some distance
along the high road.
There was no sign of anyone or anything that could in any way account
for the disturbance—the landscape was brilliantly illuminated with
moonlight, every stick and stone being plainly visible, and all nature
seemed to be sleeping undisturbedly, as if no interruption in its
ordinary routine had occurred. I got back into bed, and, falling into
a gentle doze, slept soundly till the morning. After breakfast, Mrs.
Mullins said, “You’re not thinking of spending another night here, sir,
are you?”
“Why, no,” I replied. “I must be back in Dublin at my work by this
afternoon.”
“I’m glad of that, sir,” she went on; “because I couldn’t let you stay.
I suppose you heard the rapping, sir?”
“I did,” I replied; “and the footsteps—how do you account for them?”
“Only in one way,” she said; “they came after you. At least, that was
my impression, and my impressions are seldom wrong. I seemed to see
some terrible form—half animal and half human—something indescribably
grotesque and unnatural—something, my instinct tells me, was wanting
to get at you.”
Her description of the figure reminded me so strongly of the queer
thing that tried to strangle me in the house near the Waterloo Road,
that I narrated my experience to her.
“You may depend upon it, sir,” she said when I had finished, “that the
ghost you have just told me about and the one that came to the cottage
last night are the same. I have heard that spirits will sometimes
attach themselves to persons who have been staying in the house they
haunt, and that they will leave the house with them and follow them
wherever they go. I only hope and trust that this one will never do you
any harm, and that you will succeed in ridding yourself of it, but my
husband and I feel, asking your pardon, that we should not like to have
you sleep here again.”
I did not tell her that even had she been willing, nothing on earth
would have induced me to stay, for whether she was right in her theory
about the steps or not, the neighbourhood had lost all its charms for
me. Indeed, when next I had a ghostly visitation, I hoped I should be
quartered in a less isolated spot.
My aunt, Mrs. Meta O’Donnell, tells me that a relative of hers once had
a remarkable encounter with fairies on the road between Ballinanty and
the village of Hospital in County Limerick.
He was driving home one evening in his jaunting car, unaccompanied save
by his servant, Dunkley, who was sitting with his back to him, when a
number of little people—fairies—sprang on the car, and clambering up,
tried to pull him off.
Finding that, owing to the vigour with which they pulled, he was
actually slipping from his seat, he appealed to his servant for
assistance; and the latter, doing as he was told, held on to him with
all his strength, and thus prevented the little people from dragging
him to the ground. Mrs. Meta O’Donnell is absolutely sure that her
relative never took stimulants of any sort, and that he was in a
perfectly normal state of mind when this event happened.
Nor is this road haunted only by fairies, for Mrs. Meta O’Donnell again
tells me that this same relative of hers, when driving home on another
occasion—this time with several friends—saw a man on horseback, in
a hunting coat, suddenly leap the hedge, and, after riding for some
distance by the side of the car, abruptly vanish. Two of the men who
were with him, she believes, also witnessed this phenomenon.
It is a long step, seemingly, from the fairy to the banshee, but
these two types of spirit have at least one trait in common, namely,
exclusiveness; and the banshee, even more emphatically than the fairy,
will have nought to do with the alien. It will attach itself only to
the family of bona-fide Irish origin, only to the clan that has been
associated with Irish soil for many generations.
With the kind permission of Mr. Ralph Shirley, I will here introduce,
making only slight alterations, a few extracts from an article of mine
on the banshee, which appeared in the “Occult Review” for September,
1913:
“Contemporary with fairies and the Feni, phantoms typical of the great
lone hills of Wicklow and Connemara, and of the bare and wind-bitten
cliffs of Galway, may well have been the banshees, which, attaching
themselves for divers reasons to various chieftains and sons of
chieftains, eventually became recognised as family ghosts or familiars.
“Many people have fallen in the error of imagining all banshees are
moulded after one pattern. Nothing could be more fallacious. The
banshee of the O’Rourkes, for example, does not resemble that of the
O’Donnells; there are many forms of the banshee, each clan having a
distinct one—or more than one—of its own. Some of the banshees are
fair to look at, and some old, and foul, and terrifying; but their
mission is invariably the same, i.e., to announce a death or some great
family catastrophe.
“The banshee is never joyous; it is always either sad or malevolent.
Sometimes it wails once, sometimes three times—the wail in some
degree, but not altogether, resembling that of a woman in great trouble
or agony; sometimes, again, it groans; and sometimes it sighs, or
sings. In some clans the demonstrations are both visual and auditory,
in others only visual; and in others, again, only auditory. There is no
really old clan but has its banshee, and few members of that clan who
are not, at some time or other of their lives, made aware of it.
“How well I recollect as a child being told by those who had experienced
it, that a dreadful groaning and wailing had been heard the night prior
to the death of a very near relative of mine in Africa. I enquired what
made the wailing, and was informed ‘the banshee,’ or the ghost woman,
who never fails to announce the death of an O’Donnell.
“Years later, when in the extreme West of England, my wife and I were
awakened one night by a terrible wail, which sounded just outside our
door. Beginning in a low key, it rose and rose, until it ended in a
shrill scream, that in time died away in a horrible groan. The idea of
the banshee at once flashed through my mind, for I felt none other but
a banshee could have made such a sound.
“Still, to satisfy my wife, I jumped out of bed and went on to the
landing; all was dark and silent, and outside their bedrooms were
assembled the rest of the household, terrified, and eager to have
an explanation of what had happened. We searched the whole house
and the waste land outside, but there was nothing which could in
any way account for the noise, and in the morning I received news
of the death of someone very closely related to me.... Whilst some
writers are inclined to treat the subject jocularly, and attribute
the banshee either to obviously absurd physical causes, or to the
abnormally imaginative powers they insist are the birthright of all
Irishmen, others dive into the pseudo-profound compilations of modern
Theosophy, and reappear with the pronouncement that banshees are not
spirits at all—not entities hailing from the superphysical world—but
mere thought germs, created by some remote ancestor of a clan, and
wafted down from one generation to another of his descendants, an
idea as nonsensical as it is extravagant, and which will not for an
instant hold water when looked into by those who have had a bona-fide
experience of the banshee or any other ghostly phenomenon. Indeed,
it is only the latter who are capable of making observations of any
value on such a subject, and all effort to describe or account for the
superphysical by those who have never experienced it, no matter whether
those efforts are made by theosophical savants, professional mediums
or scientific experts, are, in my opinion, weightless, colourless and
futile.
“A geologist may describe the hydrosphere, and an astronomer the moon,
and their descriptions may be swallowed with tolerable composure and
assurance, because we know that the laws of similarity and analogy,
when applied to the physical, generally hold good; but no scientist
can teach us anything about spiritual phenomena, because such things
are actually without the realm of science, just as the game of marbles
is entirely without the province of theology. It is our sensations,
and our sensations _only_, that can guide and instruct us when dealing
with the superphysical. I have heard the dying screams of a woman
murdered beneath my window; I have heard on hill and plain the cries of
coyottes, panthers, jackals and hyenas; and I have many times listened
to the dismal hooting of night birds, when riding alone through the
seclusion of giant forests; but there is something in the banshee’s
cry that differs from all these, that fills one with a fear and awe,
far—immeasurably far—beyond that produced by a sound which is merely
physical. Imagine then what it is to be haunted all one’s life by such
a grim harbinger of woe, to have it ever trailing in one’s wake, always
ready and, maybe, eager to make itself heard the moment it detects, by
its extraordinary and unhuman powers, the advent of death. One curious
idiosyncrasy of the banshee is that it never manifests itself to the
person whose death it is prognosticating. Other people may see or hear
it, but the doomed one never, so that when every one present is aware
of it but one, the fate of that one may be regarded as pretty well
certain.
“And now once again, whence comes the banshee? From heaven or from
hell? What is it? It is impossible to say; at the most one can
only speculate. Some banshees appear to be mournful only; others
unquestionably malevolent; and whereas some very closely resemble a
woman, even though of a type long passed away, others, again, differ so
much from our conception of any human being, that we can only imagine
them to be spirits that never have been human, that belong to a genus
wholly separate and distinct from the human genus, and that have only
been brought into contact with this material plane through the medium
of certain magical or spiritual rites practised by the Milesians, but
for some unknown reason discontinued by their descendants. This appears
to me quite a possible explanation of the origin of the banshee.
“One realizes, when dabbling in spiritualism to-day, one of the
greatest dangers incurred is that of attracting to one certain
undesirable, mischievous, and malignant spirits—call them elementals
if you will—which, when so attracted, stick to one like the proverbial
leech. And what happens to-day may very well have happened thousands
of years ago; in all probability, the Unknown never changes; its ways
and habits may be as constant as those of Nature, guided by laws and
principles which may at times vary, but which, nevertheless, undergo no
material alteration. The superphysical, attracted to the ancients as it
is attracted to us to-day, would adhere to them as it now adheres to
us. I cannot surmise more.
“Supposing then that this theory accounts for the one class of banshee,
what accounts for the other—the other that so nearly tallies with the
physical? Are the latter actual phantoms of the dead; of those that
died some unnatural death, and have been earth-bound and clan-bound
ever since? Maybe they are. Maybe they are the spirits of women,
prehistoric or otherwise, who were either suicides or were murdered,
or who themselves committed some very heinous offence; and they haunt
the clan to which they owed their unhappy ending; or, in the event of
themselves being the malefactors, the clan to which they belonged. From
all this we can conclude that, whilst the origin and constitution of
banshees vary, their mission is always the same—they are solely the
prognosticators of misfortune. A sorry possession for anyone; and yet,
how truly in accord with the nature of the country—with its general
air of discontent and barrenness, with its rain-sodden soil and gloomy
atmosphere—as an unkind critic might say, could anyone imagine the
presence of cheerful spirits under such conditions?
“But the banshee has the one admirable trait which the average
Englishman obstinately refuses to recognize in the material Irish—the
trait of loyalty and constancy. It never forsakes the object of its
attachment, but clings to it in all its vicissitudes and peregrinations
with a loyalty and persistency that is unmatchable. It is thoroughly
Irish, essentially Irish; the one thing, apart from disposition and
character, that has remained exclusively Irish through long centuries
of robbery and oppression; and which, in spite of assertions to the
contrary, never has been, nor ever will be shared by other than the
genuine clansman.
“The banshee is most fastidious in its tastes—it will have none of
the pseudo-celt; none of the individual who, possessing an absolutely
English name, and coming entirely of English forefathers, terms himself
Irish merely because his ancestors happen to have settled in Ireland.
That is nothing like exact enough for the banshee. Others may talk
of it and write of it, but they can never honestly claim it; for
the banshee belongs wholly and exclusively to the bona-fide O’s and
Macs—and them, and them only, will it never cease to haunt so long as
there is one of them left.”
My last experience with a ghost in Dublin took place just after I had
been medically examined for the R.I.C., and to my intense grief had
been rejected, owing to varicose veins, which the examining doctor told
me were of a far too complicated nature to permit of an operation;
consequently, although I had been “cramming” for two years, and my
prospects of getting through the literary examination were deemed
extremely fair, it was futile to go up for it, as all chance of my ever
being in the R.I.C. was now at an end.
On the night of my failure to pass the medical I had gone to bed early,
as I had a splitting headache, and, after vain efforts, had at length
succeeded in falling asleep. I awoke just in time to hear a clock from
somewhere in the downstairs premises of the house—I was then lodging
in Lower Merrion Street—strike two, and almost immediately afterwards
there came a loud laugh, just over my face, and so near to me that I
seemed to feel the breath of the laughter fan my nostrils. Nothing I
have ever heard before, or have ever heard since, was so repulsive as
that laugh—it was the very incarnation of jeering, jibing mockery;
of undying, inveterate hate. I felt that nothing but a spirit of
unadulterated evil could have made such a noise, and that it had come
to gloat over my misfortunes—to let me know how greatly it rejoiced
at the cruel blow I had suffered. I naturally associated it with the
ghost that had tried to strangle me, and my heart turned sick within
me at the thought that such a horrible species of phantasm was still
hovering near me. Should I ever be free from it? I was not quite so
frightened, however, as I had been on the occasion of its visit to me
in the house near the Waterloo Road, and determining to prevent myself
from falling into that kind of paralytic condition again, in which all
my muscles and faculties had remained alike spell-bound and useless, I
sat up. The room was in pitch darkness, and everything was breathlessly
still. I waited in this posture for some seconds, my heart beating
like a sledge-hammer, and then, deriving assurance from the fact that
nothing happened, I got out of bed and struck a light. The door was
locked on the inside, and there was nothing in hiding that could in
any way account for the noise. I went to the window, and, lifting it
gently, peered out into the street. There was no moon, but many stars
and lamp-lights enabled me to see that the street was absolutely
empty—not even a policeman was in sight. I leaned far out, and from
immediately beneath me, although no one was visible, there suddenly
commenced the sound of running footsteps. Ringing out loud and clear,
and accompanied by a queer familiar clicking, they seemed to follow
the direction of the street towards Ely Place. I wanted to get back to
bed, for I was lightly clad, and the air was cool and penetrating, but
something compelled me to keep on listening, and so I remained with my
neck craned over the window-sill, till the steps gradually grew fainter
and fainter, and suddenly ceased altogether. And with their termination
this early period of my ghostly experiences in Dublin terminated, too.