Irish Folk Tales (40 page)

The man paid no attention.

He says, “I just riz,” he says, “and I just leapt on top of him. And after that, there wasn’t a sight of him to be seen,” he says.

“I came on home.”

It was alarming tales like that, do you know, that you would hear.

Well then, there was a tale told about a ghost at Arney.

Well, it’s very hard to know as far as that’s concerned because the man that told that, he wasn’t a teller of ghost tales, do you know.

Well, I’ll tell you:

There was a mansion convenient to Arney in days gone by.

It was known as Nixon Hall.

The owners of it owned all the townlands around the chapel and around the parochial house. In fact, they owned the whole townland of Mulli-namesker.

And they were wealthy people. The most of them all had high-up army positions at the time.

But anyway, there was a whole lot of laborers about this place. There
was a lot of horses and there was a lot of cattle. In them days, there was no water mains, nor there wasn’t many places for animals to drink, especially in the summer when
ponds
would dry up.

So there was some fellow working at Nixon Hall, and he wasn’t—as the men used to say—he wasn’t a good article. And it was him used to bring the horses to that little brook beside Tommy Gilleece’s public house for them to drink.

So there was another man in the locality, and they were deadly enemies.

So this night he had brought the horses to Arney for to drink them, and he was coming
back
.

And the way that he used to come: he used to come
out
there through a
gate
at the graveyard, next to Arney, below the chapel, between the chapel and Arney. There was a road in them days that led to this
mansion
over in the fields.

So anyway, this man and him had it
hot
some time before it. And didn’t they meet on the road this night.

And of course, the feud was there and the row started again between them.

So anyway, this man he had a blade of a scythe, or some edged weapon, and didn’t he take him on the neck.

And I think he partly cut the head off him anyway.

Oh, he died. Whether he got home or not, or whether he got as far as the mansion or not before he died—but he died anyway: be the hacks of it.

So that’s supposed to be his ghost that be’s seen.

Well, it’s very seldom that it has been seen, but it has been seen a couple of times: a man without a head, between Peter McKevitt’s and the chapel.

Well, Hugh Pat Owens’ father seen it. And the way he told the story was: that he started for home and that this headless man started along with him, and that he put out his hand to get him by the arm as he thought.

But there was nothing to be found.

So then he invoked the Blessed Trinity and the man disappeared.

Well then, there was another man coming on the same road. And he had some experience like that.

And whether he seen this man or whether he didn’t, I couldn’t say. But they weren’t the type of this man, Maguire, that I’m telling you about, you know; they wouldn’t tell ghost stories for amusement.

And that thing, it’s common about Arney, all the time.

And then, do you see, a person that’s not in the habit of telling these ghost stories, do you see, there’d be something to what you hear from them
in the line of seeing things from the other world, but them men like this man that I’m telling you about that could compose, do you see, that’s where the value was: to make others afraid.

Well then, there’s a lot of people and they imagine that they see ghosts. And if it was investigated it’s just something ordinary that takes their eye, and that they be under the impression there’s a ghost.

You could see a thing that looks like a ghost, and then if it was investigated, it’s no ghost atall.

Now I was coming from a house away over there on the Back Road.

And I was coming through Drumbargy.

And I was walking along the pad road.

And I looked to me right.

And I seen

   what I took to be

      a very stout little man

            
standing

      a distance away.

So I come on for a wee piece and says I, to meself:

“It’s a pity to go home without finding out is it really a man or who would it be.”

So I turned back.

And I went on down to where this figure was.

And I found out what it was.

There had been a sally runt—that’s one of these plants in this country that there grows big long wattles out of, do you know. There used to be in days gone by, the old men used to be very anxious for to come across some of them; they were great for making creels, do you know—big, strong wattles.

Well, there had been some of them growing on this.

And that day they had been cut, do you know.

And the wattles was cut off this,

      at the distance,

      and in the darkness,

      it was terrible like the shape of a wee stout man.

So.

That’s what I found out when I investigated.

T
HE GRAVE OF HIS FATHERS

I have not seen a ghost, but I have known people who have, and there are many tales of them, and of strange things that happen upside down with the things of this world.

There was a lad in Ventry parish once and he could not make a living in the place where he was, so he said to himself that he would travel to the North of Ireland, and that maybe he would find something to do there that would bring a bite of food to his mouth.

And he set out with a friend from the same parish, and they walked Ireland till they came to the North and there they took service with a farmer, and were doing well for a time. But after a time this lad fell sick, and he called his friend to him, and said, “I know that I am going to die.”

“Don’t say that,” said his friend.

“I do say that, for, young or old, when the day comes, we must go. But I always thought, when I came to die, to be buried in my own churchyard among my kindred, and now I am dying a long way from home. But promise me this much, that when I am dead you will cut the head off me, and take that and bury it in my own churchyard.” His friend was unwilling at first, but at the last he gave the promise, and the lad died happy, for he knew that some part of him would rest in his own churchyard.

So, when he died, his friend was true to his word, and he cut the head from him and started throughout Ireland with the head wrapped in a cloth.

And at last he came to Ventry parish, weary with walking, and he turned into the house of his friend, and put the cloth with the head in it on the table, and told them that it was their son’s head, that he had died in the North, and that he had wished that his head should be buried in his own churchyard, since his body could not rest there.

And they got in a coffin, and a barrel of porter and some tobacco pipes, and had a wake on the head.

And the next day they started for Ventry churchyard with the head in the coffin. You know that Ventry churchyard is in a place where two roads meet.

Now, as they came down their road they saw another funeral coming down the other road.

Now it is the custom, when two funerals are coming to the same churchyard at the same time, for them to race together so that the one that wins will be the first to bury its dead.

So they made all speed down their road, and the other funeral hastened down the other road. And they came together in the same moment to the wall of the churchyard, and as they touched the wall, the other funeral, the coffin and the bearers and all, vanished as though the earth had swallowed it. They wondered at this, but they said that they had come to bury the head, and that they would bury the head.

So they lifted the coffin over the wall, and came to the place where the grave was open, and there they buried the head as the young lad had asked when he was dying.

So it was for a time. But after some months another man of the family died, and they opened the grave again, and what should they find there but two coffins, and in one coffin was the head and in the other the body, so that in the end the lad had his wish, and rested, head and body and all, in the grave of his fathers.

T
HE COFFIN

A long time ago, when I was a young lad, I was in a farmer’s house below near Monagea one evening and I saw a very strange thing there. It was what looked like a coffin without any cover on it, standing up against the wall, and it had shelves across it like a small cupboard, and there were tins and things in it, the same as you would find on the shelves of a dresser. Well, the old man of the house noticed how curious I was, and he told me about it.

It seems that one night, when he was a young married man, they were sitting around the fire in the kitchen, himself and the wife, and the old people and a few of the neighboring boys, when the door opened and four men came in with a coffin between them, and they laid it down in the middle of the floor without saying a single word, and then they turned and walked out again. They were strangers to the people in the house.