The places mentioned are round about Sligo. Further Rosses is a very
noted fairy locality. There is here a little point of rocks where, if
anyone falls asleep, there is danger of their waking silly, the
fairies having carried off their souls.
SOLITARY FAIRIES.--Page 80.
The trooping fairies wear green jackets, the solitary ones red. On the
red jacket of the Lepracaun, according to McAnally, are seven rows of
buttons--seven buttons in each row. On the western coast, he says, the
red jacket is covered by a frieze one, and in Ulster the creature
wears a cocked hat, and when he is up to anything unusually
mischievous, leaps on to a wall and spins, balancing himself on the
point of the hat with his heels in the air. McAnally tells how once a
peasant saw a battle between the green jacket fairies and the red.
When the green jackets began to win, so delighted was he to see the
green above the red, he gave a great shout. In a moment all vanished
and he was flung into the ditch.
BANSHEE'S CRY.--Page 108.
Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall give the following notation of the cry:--
[Music]
OMENS.--Page 108.
We have other omens beside the Banshee and the Dullahan and the
Coach-a-Bower. I know one family where death is announced by the
cracking of a whip. Some families are attended by phantoms of ravens
or other birds. When McManus, of '48 celebrity, was sitting by his
dying brother, a bird of vulture-like appearance came through the
window and lighted on the breast of the dying man. The two watched in
terror, not daring to drive it off. It crouched there, bright-eyed,
till the soul left the body. It was considered a most evil omen.
Lefanu worked this into a tale. I have good authority for tracing its
origin to McManus and his brother.
A WITCH TRIAL.--Page 146.
The last trial for witchcraft in Ireland--there were never very
many--is thus given in MacSkimin's _History of Carrickfergus_:--"1711,
March 31st, Janet Mean, of Braid-island; Janet Latimer, Irish-quarter,
Carrickfergus; Janet Millar, Scotch-quarter, Carrickfergus; Margaret
Mitchel, Kilroot; Catharine M'Calmond, Janet Liston, alias Seller,
Elizabeth Seller, and Janet Carson, the four last from Island Magee,
were tried here, in the County of Antrim Court, for witchcraft."
Their alleged crime was tormenting a young woman, called Mary Dunbar,
about eighteen years of age, at the house of James Hattridge, Island
Magee, and at other places to which she was removed. The circumstances
sworn on the trial were as follows:--
"The afflicted person being, in the month of February, 1711, in the
house of James Hattridge, Island Magee (which had been for some time
believed to be haunted by evil spirits), found an apron on the parlour
floor, that had been missing some time, tied with _five strange
knots_, which she loosened.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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