Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Second Series
General
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Second Series
Atlantic Coast (Ireland) -- Social life and customs; Folklore -- Ireland; Ireland -- Social life and customs
One night I and another lad were coming along the road, and the dog
began to fight, as if he was fighting another dog, but we could see
nothing and we called him off but he wouldn't come. And when we got
home he answered us, and he seemed as if tired out.
* * * * *
There was a strange woman came to this island one day and told some
of the women down below what would happen to them. And they didn't
believe her, she being a stranger, but since that time, it's all been
coming true.
_Mrs. Casey:_
I knew a woman that every night after she went to bed used to see
some sort of a shadow that used to appear to her. So she went to some
old woman, and she told her to sprinkle holy water about and to put a
blackthorn stick beside her bed. So she got the stick and put it there
and sprinkled the holy water, and it never appeared since then. Three
sorts of holy water she got, from the priest and from the friars and
from some blessed well. And she has them in three pint bottles in the
window, and she'd kill you if you so much as looked at them.
_A Fisherman:_
I never saw anything myself, but one day I was going over the fields
near Killeen, and it the quietest day of summer you ever saw. And
all of a sudden I heard a great noise like thunder, and a blast of
wind passed by me that laid the thistles low, and then all was quiet
again. It might be that they were changing, for they change from
place to place.
I would not give in to faeries myself but for one thing. There was a
little boy of my own, and there was a wedding going to be here, and
there was no bread in the house, and none to be had in Kilcolgan, and
I bade him to go to Kinvara for bread. I pulled out the ass-car for
him and he set out.
And from that time he was never the same, and now he is in the asylum
at Ballinasloe.
Did he tell what happened? He never told me anything, but he told a
neighbour that he met awful looking people on the road to Kinvara
just about midnight, and that whatever they did to him, he could
never recover it.
_A Carter:_
Often and often I heard things. A great shouting I heard one night
inside Coole demesne,--a hurling it must have been. Another time I
was passing at night-time, near Reed the weaver's, and there were
rocks thrown at me all along the road, but they did not touch me, and
I could not see any one thing there. But I never went that road again
at night-time.
It's said those that die are left in the place where they lived to
do their penance. Often and often when I came to that house below, I
felt knocks under the bed, and like some one walking over it.
Two men I know were going from Gort one night, and there near the
wall of the demesne they saw two men ploughing, and they asked one
another what could they be to be ploughing by night. And then they
saw that as they ploughed, the land was going away from them, and
they were gone themselves, and they saw them no more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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