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
There was a woman in Ballinamore died after the baby being born.
And the husband took another wife and she very young, that everyone
wondered she'd like to go into the house. And every night the first
wife came to the loft, and looked down at her baby, and they couldn't
see her; but they'd know she was there by the child looking up and
smiling at her.
So at last some one said that if they'd go up in the loft after the
cock crowing three times they'd see her. And so they did, and there
she was, with her own dress on, a plaid shawl she had brought from
America, and a cotton skirt with some edging at the bottom.
So they went to the priest, and he said Mass in the house, and they
didn't see so much of her after that. But after a year, the new wife
had a baby. And one day she bid the first child to rock the cradle.
But when she sat down to it, a sort of a sickness came over her, and
she could do nothing, and the same thing always happened, for her
mother didn't like to see her caring the second wife's baby.
And one day the wife herself fell in the fire and got a great many
burns, and they said that it was _she_ did it.
So they went to the blessed well Tubbermacduagh near Kinvara, and
they were told to go there every Friday for twelve weeks, and they
said seven prayers and gathered seven stones every time. And since
then she doesn't come to the house, but the little girl goes out
and meets her mother at a faery bush. And sometimes she speaks to
her there, and sometimes in her dreams. But no one else but her own
little girl has seen her of late.
* * * * *
There was one time a tailor, and he was a wild card, always going to
sprees. And one night he was passing by a house, and he heard a voice
saying, "Who'll take the child?" And he saw a little baby held out,
and the hands that were holding it, but he could see no more than
that. So he took it, and he brought it to the next house, and asked
the woman there to take it in for the night.
Well, in the morning the woman in the first house found a dead child
in the bed beside her. And she was crying and wailing and called all
the people. And when the woman from the neighbouring house came,
there in her arms was the child she thought was dead. But if it
wasn't for the tailor that chanced to be passing by and to take it,
we know very well what would have happened it.
* * * * *
That's a thing happens to many, to have faery children put upon them.
_A Man at Corcomroe:_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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