Ireland's Haunted Women
Contents
Introduction
1. Róisín and the Ghost that Drew Blood
2. The Little Shop of Hauntings
3. Edel Delahant and the Family Poltergeis
4. Aoife and the Mischievous Ghost
5. The Haunting of Aisling, aged Eight
6. The Night the Veil was Rent
7. The Uniquiet Spirit of Hazel Quinn
8. The Dead Girl who Sought Revenge
9. Áine Synnott and the Haunted Chapel
10. Strange Goings-on in the Attic
Notes
Also by Christina McKenna
My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (memoir)
The Dark Sacrament (with David M Kiely)
The Misremembered Man (novel)
All proper names cited in the text are fictitious and their resemblance to actual persons, either living or dead, is coincidental. Likewise, names of dwellings, street names and localities have been invented for purposes of narrative and do not refer to actual places.
Ebook Published 2015
by Poolbeg Books Ltd.
123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle,
Dublin 13, Ireland
Email: poolbeg@poolbeg.com
© Christina McKenna 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Copyright for typesetting, layout, design, ebook
© Poolbeg Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781781991862
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Note on the author
Christina McKenna grew up in County Derry, Northern Ireland. She gained an honours degree in Fine Art and a further postgraduate qualification in English from the University of Ulster in 1986. After graduating, she taught
abroad for several years. Her paintings have been exhibited in Ireland and on the Continent. She now lives in Warrenpoint, County Down.
Acknowledgements
My grateful and heartfelt thanks go to all those women (and men) who trusted me with their stories. You know who you are. To everyone at Poolbeg Press, especially Brian Langan and Paula Campbell, who saw the potential in my initial proposal and took the plunge. To my editor, Gaye Shortland, for her constructive criticism, astute observations, and generosity of spirit. And last but not least, to my husband David for his unfailing love and support.
To Mr Kiely as ever
Introduction
For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible. Stewart Chase
This is not just another ghost book. This is no reheating of oft-told tales handed down from generation to generation, or stories borrowed from other collections. It is, rather, a personal exploration of the ghost in modern Ireland. The cases that follow are told here for the first time. I have collected them from women up and down the country, from all corners of the island.
Does the ghost of contemporary Ireland differ much from its predecessor? Well, yes and no. It would appear that the “traditional” Irish ghost has become more elusive, having failed to keep pace with the march of our post-industrial society. Who has seen or heard the banshee in recent years, or caught sight of the “Little People” making merry mischief in the moonlight under a hawthorn tree? Likewise the ladies in white and phantom carriages seem to have made themselves scarce. On the other hand, poltergeist activity has remained virtually unchanged down the centuries; scenes of past wickedness continue to haunt the living; the spirits of the deceased stubbornly insist on returning when least expected.
Few subjects divide opinion as ghosts do. Do they exist? The sceptic will scoff; the believer will defend an encounter with a zeal verging on the religious. For at the end of the day – traditionally the time when ghosts begin to appear – belief in ghosts can be considered as an extension of religious belief. Their existence would seem to confirm the reality of an afterlife. It is no coincidence therefore that, generally speaking, the believer and non-believer are to be found in those opposing camps: the religious and the atheist.
But the ghost is more complex than an “apparition”, a “phantom”, a “revenant” and other such words that attempt to describe it. It is more than a semi-visible or translucent entity. Contrary to popular belief and folklore, it’s unlikely to be found in a cemetery. The ghost tends to haunt places it has known in life. Which is why we’re infinitely more likely to spot a ghost in a house or other building, on a battlefield, or at a murder scene, all of which are places where the ghost’s mortal counterpart lived for a long period or died a violent death.
We have come a long way from headless horsemen, pookas, haunted graveyards, fairies and the like. The modern ghost is a little more sophisticated than that. He or she – no, let us from here on in refer to the ghost as a sexually neuter entity – it has to be sophisticated. Put simply, we live in an age where even young children are savvy enough not to be fooled by fairy tale and superstition. If the ghost is to be taken seriously it must work very hard indeed to convince us of its authenticity.
Ghost-hunters know this more than most. They are, in the main, gifted amateurs who devote their spare time to unravelling the mysteries of the ghost and haunted site. They have little time for the sensational, and the trivialization of what is for them a very serious subject. “I have always maintained,” says Troy Taylor, founder and president of the American Ghost Society, “that researching ghosts and hauntings is much more like detective work than it is like the antics that you see in movies and on television from so-called ghostbusters and dubious psychic investigators.”
I wish to make it clear that I am neither a ghost-hunter nor a psychic. Rather I consider myself to be a neutral observer, albeit a very inquisitive neutral observer. I have come up against the paranormal on two occasions in my life, once as a child and later as an adult. And although the poltergeist that plagued the parental home in childhood and the ghost I saw many years later were very real to me, I still wonder about the objective reality of both encounters and what they signified.
Of the two, it is the poltergeist experience which, even now, all of four decades later, remains the more memorable and credible of the two. This is not only due to the fact that it was such a terrifying ordeal, but because the typical range of poltergeist activity – the thumpings, rappings and scratchings – were so myriad and prolonged as to be indisputable not only for those immediately involved but for other independent witnesses as well.
By comparison, the ghost I saw in later years did not scare me half as much. I woke up one night feeling sure that someone had put their hand in mine. It had not felt life-threatening or even unfriendly. Rather the touch had felt comforting and I was not in the least bit afraid.
I was awakened a second time the following night. Close by my bed a man attired in old-fashioned clothing stood gazing down at me. I knew instinctively that he was the owner of the hand. When I switched on the bedside light he disappeared.
Was he my guardian angel, my spirit guide – or had he been part of a dream? All are possibilities. Yet I would still vouch that he was “real” and that I observed him whilst awake.
When I look dispassionately at both those episodes and the wider context in which they occurred, I see that they share something of significance. The phenomena manifested during periods of disruption and change in my life.
I was reminded of this while investigating the cases contained in this book, and particularly those involving children. “Edel Delahant and the Family Poltergeist” is a classic example, bearing as it does many of the hallmarks of my childhood experience. There are pubertal children, an elderly relative coming to stay for a period under the same roof, and the affair culminating in the death of that relative. Similarly, in “The Dead Girl Who Sought Revenge” Kelly was undergoing a period of great change: moving away from home, going to university, having to make new friends. Did she have a vivid waking dream or see an actual ghost, a spectre similar to that which I witnessed? Who is to say?
As is the case with that which “lies outside the physical” we look for clues and try to rationalize what is, in the end, irrational, unfathomable and impenetrable. Many people suffer major crises in their lives and never experience the paranormal, while those leading what would appear to be ordinary, uneventful lives can suddenly come under attack. “The Little Shop of Hauntings” is one such case. “The Haunting of Aisling, age Eight” is another.
I present the cases that follow as accounts told to me in good faith and I’ve endeavoured to remain non-judgemental in each instance. You, the reader, must decide for yourself what to accept as truth and what to reject as delusion, false memory – or possibly even deception.
A Whole History of Ghosts
As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror.
lucretius, “On the Nature of Things,” ca. 60 BC
Belief in ghosts goes back a long way, and it would appear that the ghost has been with us since the Bronze Age. The scribes of Mesopotamia (in what is now Iraq) were etching tales of mysterious spirits onto their clay tablets thousands of years before the birth of Christ.
The ancient Greeks were likewise familiar with the paranormal. Old writings tell of both good and evil spirits – even vampires – that returned from beyond the grave to haunt the living. It is striking that so many of those ancient ghosts seem to conform to what we know of our modern visitants. There is humour too: Pausanius, writing in the second century, recalls a famous bout between a celebrated boxer, Euthymus of Locris, and a ghost. The human won, thereby rescuing a princess, whom he later married.
At about this time Pliny the Younger, that celebrated Roman man of letters, when writing to the senator Lucius Sura, told him he wished to know his sentiments “concerning spectres, whether you believe they actually exist and have their own proper shapes and a measure of divinity, or are only the false impressions of a terrified imagination?” He went on to describe various hauntings. One in particular caught his imagination. It concerned a rented house in Athens, which was “large and spacious, but ill-reputed and pestilential”.
In the dead of the night a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of fetters. At first it seemed at a distance, but approached nearer by degrees. Immediately afterwards a phantom appeared in the form of an old man, extremely meagre and squalid, with a long beard and bristling hair, rattling the gyves [shackles] on his feet and hands.
Since the “old man” had the tendency to show up every time a new tenant moved in – so causing them to flee – the landlord found himself frequently out of pocket. Lowering the rent made little difference. Things changed, however, when a seemingly fearless philosopher named Athenodorus appeared. The story of the ghost intrigued him and he took up the tenancy.
The philosopher was visited, true to form, by the ghost, which led him out to the courtyard. It pointed to a spot on the ground, before vanishing. The following day Athenodorus had the particular place dug up. “There they found bones commingled and intertwined with chains; for the body had mouldered away by long lying in the ground, leaving them bare, and corroded by the fetters. The bones were collected, and buried at the public expense; and after the ghost was thus duly laid the house was haunted no more.”
Clanking chains were a common feature in old tales of the supernatural. Prisoners were usually shackled in bygone days and it was important that even in death wrongdoers could not be seen to escape. In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Marley’s ghost appears to his old skinflint partner, Scrooge, rattling his fetters. In The Canterville Ghost, Oscar Wilde has fun with his readers by drawing on the whole gamut of paranormal clichés: ghastly apparitions, shrouds, bony fingers, creaking floorboards, demonic laughter and rattling chains. When Reverend Hiram Otis, the new incumbent at Canterville Chase, hears the clanking ghost of Sir Simon, he jumps out of bed and offers the spectre a jar of Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator to oil his chains.
The clanking ghost of old may have long disappeared, together with our very own banshee (bean sidhe: “fairy woman”), our “Lady of Death”, yet our fascination with the afterlife in these more enlightened times is still as strong as ever. This fascination reached its apogee in the mid-nineteenth century when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, claimed they could communicate with the spirit world by interpreting the rapping sounds made by a noisy ghost. The spirit was said to be that of a peddler who’d been murdered in the house and buried in the cellar. Although the girls, Margaret and Katherine, had their detractors and were often accused of trickery, human remains were later unearthed in the cellar, thus lending a degree of credence to their claims.
The Fox sisters were pivotal in the rise of the modern movement of spiritualism. They ushered in the era of the séance, together with its interlocutors or mediums, who purported to communicate with the spirits of the dead. For the first time in history there was “evidence” that we could survive death.
Such grandiose claims by the Fox sisters and the mediums who followed in their wake could not go unchallenged. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was formed in London in 1882 by an eminent group of scholars and scientists. Their aim was to subject the claims made for paranormal phenomena to the same rigorous probing and scrutiny as those applied to scientific research.
Today we have groups such as the Irish Paranormal Alliance (IPA) and the Northern Ireland Paranormal Research Association (NIPRA), which continue this valuable work, applying similar high standards of investigation. The NIPRA’s founder member Warren Coates and his team have been kept busy for the best part of two decades. The group works alongside a priest and minister and find that their services are in greater demand during the winter months. “It’s not that the spirits take summer holidays,” Warren quips. “It’s simply because people spend more time indoors and so are more aware of noises and changes in atmosphere. And of course the spirits need darkness to communicate better and make their presence felt.”
It remains only to be seen if our modern ghost stories contain borrowings from those that have gone before, down through the centuries. The other explanation is, of course, that ghosts and hauntings possess – and have always possessed – common elements. It could be argued that, because such matters are non-physical and therefore outside time, it follows that the ghost will remain unchanged even though our societies and cultures are in a constant state of flux and renewal.
Ghosts in Other Cultures
Belief in an afterlife is common to all cultures. Even Neanderthals seem to have believed in survival after death. Archaeologists have uncovered multiple graves at single burial sites, together with evidence of flowers and animal antlers buried alongside human remains. This suggests that those early primates believed that some sort of future existence awaited their resurrected dead.
In many cultures, the spirit world is accepted as fact, and ghosts come in many guises. The North American windigo, feared by the Algonquin nation, is reputed to be part animal and part human, and sai
d to make pacts with evil spirits to kill people. It dwells in forests and is especially fond of feeding on the flesh of children.
Yet other Native Americans, the tribes of the Great Plains for example, consider it a normal part of life on earth that humans should interact with ghosts and spirits. Oddly enough, the Cheyenne do not accept that a ghost is the spirit of an individual but nevertheless believe in individual souls. They hold that the soul, or tasoom, is the essence of the human being, and continues to live on after death.
In some parts of Africa the ghost is seen in a very different light. The Kikuyu people of Kenya believe that we all have a spirit, or ngoma, that becomes a ghost upon a person’s death. If somebody is murdered then that person’s ngoma will haunt the murderer for the rest of his life – or until he turns himself in to the authorities. Ghosts are everywhere for the Kikuyu; even certain trees have their own spirits, entities that demand food offerings lest the local people suffer calamities.
The Japanese have a whole phantasmagoria of grotesque spirits to contend with. There’s the demonic toyol, which appears in the form of a mischievous green baby with red eyes, and will do the bidding of whoever summons it. It is said to suck on the big toes of people while they sleep and steal if commanded. It is not all bad, however: it will lay claim to only half of the victim’s property or wealth.
Along with the toyol there’s the shojo and umi bozu, popular Japanese sea-ghosts. The shojo is a licentious spirit with red hair, which can be coaxed away from its wild partying by offering it rice wine: sake. The uglier umi bozu, bald with huge, hideous eyes, is said to haunt sailors.