Irish Ghost Stories

Dr Stephen Carver introduces the latest addition to our Mystery & Supernatural series, Irish Ghost Stories From the Haunted 19th Century

As the nights chill and draw in, and we move relentlessly towards Halloween, the mind turns naturally towards the ghost story. And as pumpkins are carved and displayed as an invitation to trick-or-treaters, we perhaps forget that their original purpose was to ward off the evil spirits that walk on All Saint’s Eve, the same night as the ancient Gaelic festival of Samhain, marking the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter; the dark half of the year, the dead half. Celebrations traditionally began at twilight on October 31, since the Celtic day began and ended at sunset. Samhain was marked by great tribal gatherings, feasting around huge bonfires, and animal and human sacrifices. Ancient burial mounds were opened as portals to what the Celts called the Otherworld, letting supernatural beings and the souls of the dead into the world of men.

Ireland seems made for ghosts, or as they are called in Irish, Thevshi or Tash. The Emerald Isle; much of it primordial forest until the middle ages, with its Atlantic mists, slate-grey sky, windswept bogs, and winding lanes leading to half-forgotten places: the ruins left by the dying castes of the Protestant Anglo-Irish and the fading Catholic aristocracy. A land of passionate belief, religious unease and rural superstition that takes death very seriously indeed. And then there are the bones. The victims of colonialism and land loss, of Cromwell, the famine, grinding rural poverty, mass emigration, rebellion, political betrayal and violence. It’s a country where the past is never quite past. There’s a feeling here, difficult to define but easy to sense, that something lingers. Something unseen, unquiet, and very, very old.

It all comes down to ghosts in the end. Irish Ghost Stories

This, then, is the guiding principle of our new collection of Irish Ghost Stories. Though Ireland’s folklore is rich and vivid, you will find few references to banshees in these pages, no selkies or giants, no leprechauns hoarding gold, no witches souring milk, no pookas, changelings or fairy folk. I’ve limited myself strictly to tales of the dead, of the haunter, the haunted, and the things they leave behind. As W.B. Yeats wrote of them, ‘They are held there by some earthly longing or affection, or some duty unfulfilled, or anger against the living…’

Sheridan Le Fanu

And though possessed of the chill essential to any successful ghost story, the Irish tales were never written simply to scare. There is always a subtle yet implicit political edge; a sense of social class, faith, and national identity. They were thus often about memory, justice, guilt, trauma, and the uneasy persistence of the past. As such, the unquiet spirit becomes a messenger, a reminder, a question left unanswered. Irish ghosts don’t haunt so much as occupy. Irish Ghost Stories

The tales in Irish Ghost Stories range from the early 19th century to the early 20th, from Romantic to Modernist and the Celtic Revival, a period when Ireland – and Irish literature – was undergoing great transformation. It was a time of political upheaval, cultural retrieval, and seismic social change. But through it all, the ghost story endured. In fact, it flourished on both sides of the water, a golden age of supernatural fiction in Britain, Ireland, and America, from Regency tales of terror through the uncanny urban gothic of writers like Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Irishman J.S. Le Fanu, to the occultism and gallows humour of Englishmen Algernon Blackwood and M.R. James, Welshman Arthur Machen, and Irishman Lord Dunsany, men H.P. Lovecraft called modern masters of horror.

I have arranged the stories chronologically, with the original source of publication given for context, from what dusty corner of antique print culture each one first emerged. You’ll see Irish, English and American periodicals, Victorian Christmas annuals, long-forgotten collections of short stories by authors who were bestsellers in their own day but are now unjustly neglected, and lofty anthologies of Irish folklore, some with traditional tales reproduced in peasant dialects that would give readers of James Joyce a run for their money.

The Dragon of Shandon Parade, Cork

Each story is prefaced by a brief biographical overview of its author, which I hope will feel like another story in itself. There are canonical Irish writers like Yeats and Oscar Wilde, and masters of the gothic and the sensational like the creator of Dracula, Bram Stoker, the doomed clergyman Charles Robert Maturin – a ghost himself before his story in this collection first saw print – and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, perhaps the finest Victorian writer of ghost stories that ever lived, who advised Dickens and hugely influenced M.R. James. Others, like Lord Dunsany and Fitz-James O’Brien, are best known as pioneers of fantasy and science fiction, but they were nonetheless still drawn to the supernatural. Then there are the ladies. Household names in their own time writing across a variety of genres like Rosa Mulholland and Charlotte Riddell, and downright weird women like Letitia McClintock, who never set foot outside Donegal, and colourful Irish-American Herminie Templeton Kavanagh, who wrote in a madly phonetic brogue and once had a book filmed by Walt Disney. Amateur and professional folklorists, meanwhile, like Thomas Crofton Croker, Patrick Kennedy, William Carleton, Douglas Ross Hyde (the first president of Ireland), Jeremiah Curtin, and the elusive American academic David Russell McAnally laboured tirelessly to bottle the last gasps of an oral tradition rapidly slipping away under the yoke of the British Empire and the rise of the modern state. A common theme is that many of these authors commanded huge audiences in their own day, but with the exception of literary giants like Yeats, Wilde, and Stoker, have now largely been relegated to footnotes in literary histories. This book is their revenge. They’re back, and they’ve brought their ghosts with them.

With two exceptions, all the authors in this collection are either Irish, Anglo-Irish, or first generation Irish-American. David Russell McAnally, the author of Irish Wonders (1888) – a collection of folklore still cited to this day – was an American academic about whom little is known, though I would venture that with that surname his ancestry was almost certainly Irish. Francis Marion Crawford, on the other hand, was an Italian-born American writer who could not resist an Irish ruin in his eerie tale ‘The Dead Smile’ (1899), which is set in County Tyrone, and for which I bent the rules because it’s a wonderful story. Irish Ghost Stories

                                            Lord Dunsany

For me, and I hope soon for you, too, the joy of this collection lies in the sheer scope of these stories. There are the traditionally gothic, such as Maturin’s ‘Leixlip Castle’ and Crawford’s ‘The Dead Smile’. There are haunted houses in Riddell’s ‘Walnut Tree House’ and Mulholland’s ‘The Ghost at the Rath’, and paranormal investigation in O’Brien’s ‘The Pot of Tulips’. You can meanwhile observe the high watermark of the Victorian ghost story in Le Fanu’s ‘Squire Toby’s Will’ and ‘The Judge’s House’ by Stoker. There is folk horror in tales like Croker’s ‘The Headless Horseman’, Douglas Hyde’s ‘Teig O’Kane and the Corpse’, and Letitia Maclintock’s ‘Far Darrig in Donegal’; and fairytale in William Maginn’s ‘A Vision of Purgatory’ and Patrick Kennedy’s ‘The Ghosts and the Game of Football’. Some stories, such as Le Fanu’s ‘The Ghost and the Bone Setter’ and Jeremiah Curtin’s ‘Daniel Crowley and the Ghosts’, are played for laughs, while Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ is an elegant satire of gothic stereotypes and American materialism. George Moore brings Zola-inspired Naturalism, Yeats symbolist historicism, and Dunsany and Reid a haunting sense of magic realism.

Of the 28 stories in this collection, no two are alike, yet each delivers its own particular thrill, twist, scare, or smile. Together they represent a map of Ireland’s haunted imagination. They show how the ghost persisted through famine, rebellion, the twilight of the landlords, and the rise of Irish Nationalism. They show us how Irish writers negotiated their own place in a landscape already crowded with the dead.

Ghosts are not just remnants of belief. They’re reflections of how a society understands itself, its history, its traditions, its crimes. In Ireland, that understanding has always been complex and layered. The land remembers. The graves remember. And so, too, must we.

Main Picture: Celtic crosses in a cemetery at sunset, Enniscrone, County Sligo, Ireland. Credit: Gareth McCormack / Alamy Images

Picture 1 above: Credit: Photojope / Alamy Images

Picture 2 above: Sheridan Le Fanu Credit: FLHC A2020 / Alamy Images

Picture 3 above: Annual Dragon of Shandon Parade as it makes it way through the streets of Cork which marks the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. Credit:  David Creedon / Alamy Live News

Picture 4 above: Lord Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett Dunsany Credit: Alphastock / Alamy images