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
They are said to have all things the same as ourselves under the
sea, and one day a cow was seen swimming as if for the headland, but
before she got to it she turned another way and went down. And one
time I got a small muc-warra (porpoise) and I went to cut it up to
get what was good of it, for it had about two inches of fat, and when
I cut it open the heart and the liver and every bit of it were for
all the world like a pig you would cut up on land.
There's a house in the village close by this that's haunted. My
sister was sitting near it one day, and it empty and locked, and some
other little girls, and they heard a noise in it, and at the same
time the flags they were sitting on grew red-hot, that they had to
leave them. And another time the woman of the house was sick, and a
little girl that was sitting by the fire in the kitchen saw standing
in the door the sister of the woman that was sick, and she a good
while dead, and she put up her arm, as if to tell her not to notice
her. And the poor woman of that house, she had no luck, nothing but
miscarriages or dead babies. And one child lived to be nine months
old, and there was less flesh on it at the end of the nine months
than there was the day it was born. She has a little girl now that's
near a year old, but her arm isn't the size of that, and she's
crabbed and not like a child as she should be. Many a one that's long
married without having a child goes to the fortune-teller in Galway,
and those that think anything of themselves go to Roundstone.
_A Man near Loughmore:_
I know a woman was washed and laid out, and it went so far that two
half-penny candles were burned over her. And then she sat up, came
back again, and spoke to her husband, and told him how to divide his
property, and to manage the children well. And her step-son began to
question her, and he might have got a lot out of her but her own son
stopped him and said to let her alone. And then she turned over on
her side and died. She was not to say an old woman. It's not often
the old are taken. What use would there be for them? But a woman to
be taken young, you know there's demand for her. It's the people in
the middle island know about these things. There were three boys from
there lost in a curragh at the point near the lighthouse, and for
long after their friends were tormented when they came there fishing,
and they would see ships there when the people of this island that
were out at the same time couldn't see them. There were three or four
out in a curragh near the lighthouse, and a conger-eel came and upset
it, and they were all saved but one, but he was brought down and for
the whole day they could hear him crying and screeching under the
sea. And they were not the only ones, but a fisherman that was there
from Galway had to go away and leave it, because of the screeching.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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