Do the Irish believe in ghosts? Collective trauma feeds the supernatural

In October 1913, the Tipperary clergyman St John D. Seymour placed an unusual advert in Ireland’s major newspapers. The message was a simple one: he invited people to send him ghost stories. Seymour’s research for his first book on the occult, Irish Witchcraft and Demonology, had whet his appetite for the weird. It had also alerted him to a gap on the shelf. Though countless books had been published on Ireland’s myths, fairy-lore and folk beliefs, no volume dealt exclusively with Irish ghosts. Seymour’s request for first-hand tales of hauntings aimed to change that.

At first, Seymour wondered whether anyone would reply to his invitation. He needn’t have worried. “Within a fortnight I had sufficient material to make a book,” he recalled later; “within a month I had so much material that I could pick and choose.” Seymour’s True Irish Ghost Stories was published the following year. Reading the book on the last train home, my face doubling in the window during the black interludes between stations, I wondered what a more modest appeal for Irish ghost stories would produce today. So I began to ask around.

Claire, one of the people I heard from, used to work in the Old Library at Queen’s University Belfast. One evening, not long before closing time, a man strolled in through the door. Normally Claire would approach latecomers to remind them that the library would soon shut. But on this occasion, she decided to leave well alone. “I made a snap judgement”, she says, “that there was something a bit off about him, and actually I didn’t want to speak with him unless I had to”. He was dressed in an antiquated fawn raincoat, and there was something strange about the way he moved through the old building, first built in 1868 and subject to many changes since. “His path through the library,” Claire says, “just seemed somehow out of line with the entrances and archways.”

He walked deeper into the library, towards an area dedicated to reference works, and disappeared from view. When the time came to close up, Claire realised that she hadn’t seen the man leave. Not wanting to lock him in for the night, she went looking for him in the reference section. He was nowhere to be found. She thought little of it at the time, despite his unsettling demeanour. He must have left without her noticing. It was only years later that she discovered two things. First, that a student once claimed to have seen a man walk through the wall of the reference section. Second, “there used to be an exit in that area, that had later been blocked off. It was behind the wall.”

A ghost in the workplace is unnerving enough. But while haunted libraries can be avoided if need be, there is no avoiding your own home — a place where, as Seymour noted, the “poor human being is placed at such a disadvantage”. Orla, another contributor, was three years old when she saw a ghost at her house in Portstewart. She doesn’t remember the experience herself, but the story has entered family legend. “My grandfather had died the week before,” she tells me. “Apparently I was looking out through the door into the hallway and saying ‘Poppa, Poppa, I want to see Poppa’.” Orla’s mother said that there was no one there. Orla insisted that there was. “My mother was genuinely spooked, I think because I was so earnest about it,” Orla recalls. “Things like that are scary enough to experience yourself, but it’s worse to see it through the eyes of your child.”

Seymour didn’t believe that Ireland was any more haunted than other parts of the world. Nor did he think that the Irish were any more given to superstition than the average Englishman. He did, however, suspect that religion had a role to play. As an Anglican cleric, he wondered whether Irish Catholicism had incorporated “certain elements which may be traced back to pre-Christian times” — resulting in a more richly supernatural cultural lexicon. This is rather amusing coming from a man who had written a book about witches and subsequently spent a year eagerly collecting ghost stories for publication, especially since a great many of his respondents were Protestants themselves.

Nevertheless, it’s certainly true that Ireland can draw on a wealth of ancient ghostly lore. One of the earliest Irish ghost stories appears in the Ulster Cycle, a series of linked epic tales preserved in medieval manuscripts, but certainly much older. The Adventures of Nera takes place on Samhain night, at the court of Queen Medb at Raíth Cruachan. When Nera is challenged to tie a supple twig around the ankle of a hanged man, the swinging corpse offers him helpful advice on how best to secure the binding. He then demands a drink, and Nera carries him from house to house until something is found to quench the cadaver’s thirst. Things go downhill from there, as Nera is subjected to horrifying visions of destruction and eventually finds himself in the Otherworld. This is a truly Irish tale, born of the island’s ancient literature. The complex of archaeological sites associated with Cruachan still lie in County Roscommon today, as does the so-called “Cave of Cats”  — a granite opening said to be one of the entrances to the Otherworld.

Other phantasmagorical traditions have emerged over the years. There’s an entire scholarly industry devoted to what you might call the “Irish Protestant weird”, exemplified in the fiction of Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu and Charlotte Riddell. And, of course, each townland will have its own stories, its own reservations about certain lanes or bridges after night has fallen.

If I have a misgiving about Seymour’s book, it’s that his tales don’t reflect the depth and complexity of Ireland’s ghostly cultures, whose antiquity and energetic cross-pollination resist summary. For the most part, they are ghost stories that happen in Ireland, not Irish ghost stories. You could transpose them to Caithness or Norfolk without losing much. This may have something to do with his method of collection. Ask the readers of The Irish Times for paranormal experiences and you are going to receive answers from a very particular stratum of society.

Yet there are certain threads that feel quite specific to Ireland, chiefly the matter-of-fact way in which the supernatural is discussed. So, when a visiting Major is shoved awake in the middle of the night and grasps a human hand, “warm, plump, and soft”, the servants inform him that this is merely old Aunt Betty, 50 years in the grave. And when a squireen is driven from his new country pile by phantom knocks at the front door, a local herdsman says not to worry — it’s just the spectre of a former resident. Yes, it’s a bit of a nuisance, but the knocking will stop in time. If Seymour’s tales seem a bit dated, then consider the 2015 case of Jack McKee. A councillor in Larne, McKee objected to the installation of a plaque in memory of eight women and one man who were pilloried and jailed as witches in 1711. His grounds for complaint were simple: he “could not tell whether or not the women were rightly or wrongly convicted”.

Orla agrees there’s a frankness about ghostly matters in Ireland. Recently, sitting with her boyfriend’s family, she realised that everyone had a tale to tell, including one alarming experience of a headless rider on the Donegal backroads. When I ask whether she thinks that Ireland is a more haunted place than England, a country with its own proud ghostly traditions, she doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely. 100%. Perhaps because a lot of bad things happened here. Or whether we’re just more likely to take this stuff seriously… But it’s not a reach to say this is a much ghostlier country [than England]. There’s definitely truth in that.”

Naturally, Ireland has always had its sceptics too. A flick through the August 1812 edition of the Belfast Monthly Magazine uncovers a pseudonymous piece entitled “On Ghosts”. The author wonders why, given the marvellous advances of the age, so “many remnants of superstition still linger amongst us”. He concludes that stories learned in childhood are chiefly to blame, and admits that “in spite of scepticism, I am rather afraid to remain in a room without light, which I ascribe to the numerous hobgoblin stories I heard in infancy”. Even William Carleton, the great 19th-century collector of Irish folk tales, warned against “the popular nonsense of ghosts”. This would be a more forceful statement if it did not come at the end of “The Fate of Frank M’Kenna”, in which Carleton breathlessly relates the tale of a ghost who insists on the charitable donation of his best breeches.

Still, even those who are unconvinced by ghostly phenomena can have uncanny things happen to them. At the age of seven, Stephen attended a family wedding at Glenavna House Hotel in Whiteabbey, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, where he and his cousin spent the day playing in the grounds. “We were just running about, and the two of us saw…” He pauses for a slightly embarrassed laugh and continues: “When we saw what we immediately went and told people was a ghost of a young woman wearing blue.” She was moving through the trees. And then she wasn’t. Gone. “We both saw this independently. And it wasn’t as if either of us were prone to making shit up, basically. But whatever we saw, we saw something.”

Stephen doesn’t believe he saw a ghost that day, merely describing the experience, and what followed, as “a deeply weird coincidence.” Weird enough to remember — and weird enough to bear repeating long after that afternoon in Whiteabbey. Because, as with Claire, the conclusion came some time afterwards: “It must have been 15 years later that I found out about a particularly grisly murder that happened there, almost in the exact spot that we supposedly saw whatever we saw.”

Like Orla, Stephen thinks there’s something about Ireland. A small tremble where there should be stillness. In part, he attributes this to both geography and history, an island at the end of Europe that has seen centuries of turmoil. “The wound of the famine is surely in a collective residual memory in one way or another,” he says. “I can’t imagine that there isn’t something that’s left after that. So I think that there’s not a lot of…” He pauses, hunts for words. “English rationality kind of doesn’t exist in the same way.” He finishes with another laugh.

I’m not sure I believe in English rationality — the oeuvre of M.R. James is dedicated to the slow sanding away of that particular veneer — but I take Stephen’s point. It seems to me that ghost stories are a good way of metabolising time, change and pain. They may not be believed by the listener, or even by the teller. When Claire, Orla and Stephen speak to me, they all give caveats of one sort or another. None are convinced that they saw a ghost. And yet the unsettling moment is remembered. The story is told.

“On November eve,” wrote W. B. Yeats, “the dead are abroad, and dance with the fairies.” Halloween or Samhain, whichever you prefer, is a time for uncanny tales. Most of all, a time for tales that encourage us to pay attention. Stephen likens ghost stories to old customs around fairy thorns. “You don’t cut down hawthorn trees,” he says. “They serve a purpose in the places that they are. I’d wonder if seemingly irrational explanations for things are actually the result of however many hundreds of generations of received wisdom.” Perhaps strange stories and traditions, whether Irish or English, have this in common: they invite us to take care. To pay close attention to the world around us. They remind us of doors, long bricked-up, waiting patiently behind the wall.

---