Irish Ghost Tales (15 page)

Changelings have been known to eat the cupboard bare and still not be satisfied. Yet no matter how much it devours, the changeling remains as scrawny as ever.

Changelings do not live long in the mortal world. They usually shrivel up and die within the first two or three years of their human existence. The changeling is mourned and buried, but if its grave is ever disturbed all that will be found is a blackened twig or a piece of bog oak where the body of the infant should be. Some live longer but they rarely reach their teen years.

There can also be adult changelings. These fairy doubles will exactly resemble the person taken but will have a sour disposition. The double will be cold and aloof and take no interest in friends or family. It will also be argumentative. As with an infant, a marked personality change is a strong indication of an adult changeling.

Changelings may be driven from a house. When this is achieved, the human child or adult will invariably be returned unharmed. The least severe method of expulsion is to trick the fairy into revealing its true age. Another method is to force tea made from Lismore (foxglove) down the throat of a suspected changeling. This burns out its human entrails and forces it to flee back to the fairy realm. Heat and fire are anathema to the changeling, so it will fly away from these.

In July 1826, at a sitting of Tralee assizes, Ann Roche, a woman of very advanced age, was tried for the murder of Michael Leahy, a young child, by drowning in the River Flesk. In nineteenth- and even as late as mid- to late-twentieth-century Ireland, the belief in the fairy folk and the supernatural was quite common, particularly in rural communities.

This case turned out to be a murder committed because of the woman's superstitious delusion. The child was 4 years old, but he could not stand, walk or speak, so he was thought to be fairy-struck. The grandmother ordered Ann Roche and another woman, Mary Clifford, to bathe the child every morning in that pool of the River Flesk where the boundaries of three farms met. On the last morning, Roche kept the child under the water longer than usual and he drowned. When her companion Mary Clifford, who would later serve as a witness, said to her, ‘How can you ever hope to see God after this?' she replied that, ‘The sin was on the grandmother and not on her.' Upon cross-examination, the witness said that it was not done with the intent to kill the child but to cure it – to put the fairy out of it. The policeman who apprehended Roche stated that, on charging her with drowning the child, she had said that it was no matter as really it had died four years ago.

Baron Pennefeather (the magistrate) said he believed it was a case of superstition and that although it should be thoroughly investigated he ordered the jury to find the prisoner not guilty. The court's ‘not guilty' verdict (at the direction of the judge) is indicative of the depth of belief in changelings and ‘fairy-struck' people in the community – and the countryside around Glenflesk was not the only region in which such superstitions manifested themselves.

On 30 January 1888, a woman named Johanna Doyle appeared at assizes near Killarney, again on a charge of child murder. At the time she was roughly 45 years of age, could neither read nor write and was barely able to speak English. She was charged with butchering her own mentally retarded son, Patsy, with a hatchet. In this terrible act, she had been aided by her husband and three of her other children. During her trial she insisted in Irish that 13-year-old Patsy had been both ‘a fairy and a devil', having been ‘changed' by the fairies for some malign purpose. The family had been dogged by strange events in recent years and this had been put down to Patsy's evil and magical influence.

Another son, 12-year-old Denis, described as ‘an imbecile', was also considered to be under threat for a similar reason. Johanna Doyle was placed in the Killarney asylum, where she had to be restrained from hurting herself and tearing her clothes. Her 18-year-old daughter Mary went on record as saying that she was not surprised to hear that her mother had killed Patsy: ‘I heard people say that he was a fairy and I believed them.'

A series of changeling-related incidents occurred in County Tipperary in the mid- to late 1800s. There are, for example, mentions of several such incidents in Roscrea in the north of the county. These took place in the 1860s but no definite information on them was recorded.

It was in the south of the county that the most serious changeling-related events occurred. The
Daily Telegraph
of 19 May 1884 notes the arrest of two women in Clonmel. They were arrested on the suspicion that they had harmed a 3-year-old child named Philip Dillon. Before a local magistrate, Anastasia Bourke and Ellen Cushion stated that they believed the child, who didn't have the use of his limbs, to be one of the fairy kind, left in exchange for the original infant. While the mother was absent, they entered the house and, seizing the unfortunate child, placed him on an iron shovel, naked, and held him over a hot fire (a common way of driving out malign creatures and spirits in rural areas). In this way they hoped to ‘break the charm' and destroy the changeling's powers. The boy was badly burnt and at the time of the newspaper report was in a very serious condition. The prisoners were remanded in custody to stand trial (no further account exists) and during the hearing they were hooted and sneered at by locals.

The most notorious case, however, also comes from the Clonmel area and concerns Bridget Cleary, who has been ignominiously dubbed ‘Ireland's last witch'. The horrific events that surround her death have been recorded as the ‘last witch-burning in the British Isles' and have often been cited by English writers as evidence of profound ancient superstition still existing in the Irish countryside during the late nineteenth century.

O
nce upon a time, Ireland, in common with many other countries, had a number of hard-working scarecrows that performed a very useful function: they guarded the crops of the rural landscape.

As well as protecting the growing crops from hungry birds, they served as landmarks and even acted as collection points. It has been said that many a love letter or bottle of poteen was hidden in the pockets of scarecrows, awaiting collection by some secretive lover or thirsty traveller.

However, drive from Westport to Dublin, Cork to Belfast nowadays and you will be lucky if you see a single solitary figure silhouetted against the horizon.

I don't know where scarecrows originated from as they are a worldwide phenomenon, but one suggestion harks back to Europe in the Middle Ages, when small children worked as crow-scarers. Their job entailed them running around the fields clapping blocks of wood together in order to frighten away the birds. However, the huge decrease in population caused by the plague resulted in a shortage of children, so farmers began to create lifelike figures by stuffing old clothes with straw, sticking an old turnip on top to represent a head and placing these figures in the fields. They worked so well that the scarecrow was born and of course they didn't need feeding or paying.

It has been said that scarecrows differed from county to county. Those born on the west coast were far better dressed that those born elsewhere and stood prouder than their stunted cousins from other areas. They might have been found wearing waistcoats, scarves, hats and even overcoats. They had legs covered with decent trousers and even shoes or boots. They looked so realistic that they would scare any passing stranger during the night, never mind some unsuspecting crow.

There have been numerous stories told about scarecrows. Long ago in Longford it was said that a man of very low morals got a neighbour's daughter pregnant then skedaddled over to England and left her high and dry. However, he didn't escape completely because the girl in question erected a scarecrow that was the spitting image of him. She carried on this tradition over the following years and the blackguard became the laughing stock of the area and perhaps he still is.

Another story concerns two old women who lived in a remote part of County Mayo. Over the years, lack of local employment and opportunity resulted in most of their neighbours moving away. The women began to feel more and more isolated and afraid. Luckily their local Garda station hadn't been closed and the sergeant and Garda that were stationed there kindly donated some old pieces of uniform, including an old cap, in order to make a scarecrow. The plan was to place it in their garden to watch over their little vegetable patch but it looked so realistic that it seemed like it was a man dressed for duty. The funny thing was the scarecrow gave the impression that this was the home of a member of the Gardaí. The result was that the old women felt safe and were never troubled by the break-ins so common in rural Ireland today.

The
Larne Weekly Reporter
of 31 March 1866 in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, carried a front page article entitled ‘Bogles in Ballygowan'. ‘Bogle' is another word for a scarecrow. The article concerned a house in a quiet rural area that was being attacked night after night. Stones were thrown through the windows and rocks were dropped onto the roof. Local people were terrified. The attacks went on for months and the locals believed they were the result of interference with the little people. Apparently there was a house that was being refurbished using material from an abandoned house in the locality. This abandoned house was believed to be the preserve of the fairies, who gave life to an old scarecrow every night with the sole purpose of punishing those responsible. Eventually the attacks stopped. I don't know why. Could it be that some sort of agreement was reached?

D
uring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a steady flow of Scots Presbyterians to the north of Ireland. Many of those who came were weavers and spinners and it was they who created the foundations of the linen industry upon which Ulster was later to depend for its development. With them, they brought their religious beliefs and their ministers. This has a bearing on one of the most famous of the Ulster witches, who came from the nearby village of Galgorm: Dr Alexander Colville.

The Revd Alexander Colville was High Anglican (Church of England). To the Presbyterians this was as good as being a Catholic. He was hated and detested in the surrounding countryside. Little is known about his actual history but his name has become legendary in the district and is still a byword for evil and witchcraft. He was considered to be an extremely cruel and tyrannical landlord.

The most famous tale, one that is still repeated today, is that he sold his soul to the devil. Despite being a clergyman, Dr Colville loved to gamble, drink and eat. Whatever money he had was quickly frittered away. Consequently he was soon bankrupt and, having nothing to barter with, he decided to use dark powers to replenish his finances. This involved selling his soul to the devil for gold. The doctor knew after years of hedonistic living that his soul would not be worth much but he also knew that the soul of a minister or godly man was worth more to the devil than some others and maybe his would be of interest to the dark lord.

Dr Colville owned a large number of books on the ‘black arts'. He used one of these to perform the appropriate ritual to summon the devil and within a moment there was a reek of sulphurous smoke and up popped the prince of darkness.

‘Well? Why have you disturbed me?'

The doctor told him of his proposal. The devil looked up Colville in his ledger and informed him that all souls had some worth but his was worth very little. Colville accepted this and agreed to a low sum in two instalments. All the devil had to do was to fill an old riding boot and an old soft hat with gold. Dr Colville would be satisfied with that and the devil could have his soul. The actual date for the surrender of the soul, the doctor suggested, should take place twenty years hence, on 25 December.