Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series
History
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series
Atlantic Coast (Ireland) -- Social life and customs; Folklore -- Ireland; Ireland -- Social life and customs
We don't talk much to her now, we don't care to meddle much with
those that have been brought back, so we keep out of her way. She'll
most likely go to America.
* * * * *
To bring any one back from being in the faeries you should get the
leaves of the _lus-mor_ and give them to him to drink. And if he only
got a little touch from them and had some complaint in him at the
same time, that makes him sick-like, that will bring him back. But if
he is altogether in the faeries, then it won't bring him back, for
he'll know what it is and he'll refuse to drink it.
In a trance the soul goes from the body, but to be among the Sheogue
the body is taken and something left in its place.
(_Later._)
That girl I was telling you about in my own village, Sibby Dempsey,
I had a letter about her the other day when I was in Cashel, and she
that had been in her bed seventeen years is walking out and going
to Mass, a nice respectable woman. They told me no more than that
in the letter, but Tom Carden the policeman that had been there for
his holiday told that there had come a wandering woman--one of her
own sort, it's likely--to the house one night, and asked a lodging
in the name of God. Sibby called out, and asked Maggie, the girl,
who was that? And the woman stopped the night, and whatever they did
was between themselves, and in the morning the wandering woman went
away, and Sibby got up out of the bed, that she never had left for
seventeen years. Now she never was there all that time in my belief,
for if it was an oak stick was lying there through all those years
wouldn't it be rotten? It is in the faeries she was, and it not
herself used to be in it in the night-time. (_Note_ 43.)
(_Later._) Sibby Dempsey is getting ready now for her wedding. She is
all right now; she has gone through her years.
But what do you say to what happened her father shortly after she
being brought back? His horse fell with him coming home one evening
and both his legs were broke, and the horse was killed. That is the
revenge they took for the girl being taken away from them.
_One Lanigan:_
My own mother was away for twenty-one years, and at the end of every
seven years she thought it would be off her, but she never could
leave the bed. She could not sit up and make a little shirt or such a
thing for us. It was of the fever she died at last.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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