The Irish emigrant calendar has a few fixed points in the year and one of them is Halloween. What in Ireland is a festival of spooks and monkey nuts is, for many of us abroad, an annual opportunity to bore everyone by insisting Halloween doesn’t originate in the US but Ireland.
Seeking fresh evidence this year for my claims, I stumbled upon True Irish Ghost Stories by someone with the luxurious name of St John Drelincourt Seymour.
Born in Limerick in 1880 and educated at Trinity College Dublin, Seymour was ordained a Church of Ireland pastor in 1904. After starting in Cashel and Emly, of which he became archdeacon, he served as archdeacon of Cashel until just before his death in 1950.
Alongside his church work he left histories of Anglo-Norman settlers, the puritans in Ireland and tales of King Solomon. But his interest in the supernatural is apparent in his intriguing study of Irish witchcraft and demonology, another of “Irish visions of the otherworld” and his aforementioned collection of ghost stories, available free online.
Prince of the church – Brian Maye on Cardinal Michael Logue
Conflict of many colours – Frank McNally on a finely illustrated atlas of the Civil War
Lunar quest – Frank McNally on moon missions, misinformed quiz questions, and mountweazels
The Dromcollogher cinema fire disaster – Frank McNally on a fateful day in 1926
This book began life with a letter to The Irish Times and other newspapers on October 29th, 1913, “requesting the readers of it either to forward me ghost stories, or else to put me in the way of getting them”.
“Within a fortnight I had sufficient material to make a book; within a month I had so much material that I could pick and choose,” he writes in his introduction to a collection of stories that are a fascinating psychogram of century-old Irish middle class anxieties. For many Irish Times readers in 1913 it seems there was no terror greater than hearing the fire-irons rattling on their servant’s night off.
There are many such stories in the collection, with unexplained knockings at night either from uneasy previous occupants or as precursors of bad news to come. Not helping matters is how they are retold by Seymour in a cold, dead prose that kills any thrill the stories may once have had.
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Many other stories are harmless enough: a woman visiting friends in Portarlington was woken at 2am by the sound of someone snoring under her bed. Her friend was unflustered: “Oh, never mind, it is only grandfather! He died in this room, and a snoring is heard every night at two o’clock, the hour at which he passed away.”
When the Portarlington hostess asked a previous visitor to the house, a German gentleman, how he slept, he noted some snoring in the room, but “supposed it was the cat”.
A remarkable number of Seymour’s stories come from fellow clergymen. Rev Thomas Westropp moved into a previously derelict house near Limerick and, in his letter, wrote of a woman in an old-fashioned dress passing him one evening on the stairs to enter a locked room.
One evening the letter-writer’s daughter ‘saw a tall man, with one arm, carrying a lamp, who walked out of the pantry into the kitchen, and then through the kitchen wall’
The next morning Rev Westropp and a local carpenter broke into the dusty room, found a white bird flying around the ceiling and, under the floorboards, a child’s skeleton. When his children reported nightly visits of “a great black dog with fiery eyes resting its paws on her bed”, the man and his family left the house.
Many stories involve sights and sounds of people at the moment of their death. The then Archdeacon of Limerick, John Haydn, wrote to Seymour of how he heard someone in the hallway of his house and trying to enter his study – twice – one evening at about 11pm. Days later he heard from a friend in Adare that the man’s wife – a regular visitor to Haydn’s house – had died at that precise hour. In her last, delirious moments the man said his wife spoke of happy visits to the archdeacon’s home and even appeared to be having a conversation with the clergyman.
Seymour retells the tale of a Donegal rectory where the inhabitants reported periodic spells of night-time disturbances: moving furniture, tin buckets knocked about, herds of cattle “galloping up the drive before the windows”.
One evening the letter-writer’s daughter “saw a tall man, with one arm, carrying a lamp, who walked out of the pantry into the kitchen, and then through the kitchen wall”. Later his wife opened the door to a knock and saw “the selfsame man. He simply looked at her, and walked through the wall into the house. She got such a shock that she could not speak for several hours, and was ill for some days”.
Despite all these ghostly goings-on in Church of Ireland rectories, Seymour notes how many supposed hauntings only came to end when sheepish Anglican ministers called in the local Catholic priest.
The firm view of one such parish priest near Cashel is reported in the book, speaking “very forcibly from the altar on the subject of spirits, saying that the only spirits he believed ever did any harm to anyone were ... a well-known brand of wine”.