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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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Village Ghosts
IN the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift
into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities;
people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every
man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the
inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for
you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read
books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village
multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different
for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb
multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through
the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across
unexplored regions, "Here are lions." Across the villages of fishermen
and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one
line that is certain, "Here are ghosts."
My ghosts inhabit the village of H-----, in Leinster. History
has in no manner been burdened by this ancient village, with its crooked lanes,
its old abbey churchyard full of long grass, its green background of small
fir-trees, and its quay, where lie a few tarry fishing-luggers. In the annals of
entomology it is well known. For a small bay lies westward a little, where he
who watches night after night may see a certain rare moth fluttering along the
edge of the tide, just at the end of evening or the beginning of dawn. A hundred
years ago it was carried here from Italy by smugglers in a cargo of silks and
laces. If the moth-hunter would throw down his net, and go hunting for ghost
tales or tales of the faeries and such-like children of Lillith, he would have
need for far less patience.
To approach the village at night a timid man requires great
strategy. A man was once heard complaining, "By the cross of Jesus! how
shall I go? If I pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain Burney may look out on
me. If I go round by the water, and up by the steps, there is the headless one
and another on the quays, and a new one under the old churchyard wall. If I go
right round the other way, Mrs. Stewart is appearing at Hillside Gate, and the
devil himself is in the Hospital Lane."
I never heard which spirit he braved, but feel sure it was not
the one in the Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed had been there set up to
receive patients. When the need had gone by, it was pulled down, but ever since
the ground where it stood has broken out in ghosts and demons and faeries. There
is a farmer at H-----, Paddy B----- by name-a man of great strength, and a
teetotaller. His wife and sister-in-law, musing on his great strength, often
wonder what he would do if he drank. One night when passing through the Hospital
Lane, he saw what he supposed at first to be a tame rabbit; after a little he
found that it was a white cat. When he came near, the creature slowly began to
swell larger and larger, and as it grew he felt his own strength ebbing away, as
though it were sucked out of him. He turned and ran.
By the Hospital Lane goes the "Faeries Path." Every
evening they travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the
sea end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived
there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband was asleep
by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After he had been sitting
there for a while, the woman said, "In the name of God, who are you?"
He got up and went out, saying, "Never leave the door open at this hour, or
evil may come to you." She woke her husband and told him. "One of the
good people has been with us," said he.
Probably the man braved Mrs. Stewart at Hillside Gate. When
she lived she was the wife of the Protestant clergyman. "Her ghost was
never known to harm any one," say the village people; "it is only
doing a penance upon the earth." Not far from Hillside Gate, where she
haunted, appeared for a short time a much more remarkable spirit. Its haunt was
the bogeen, a green lane leading from the western end of the village. I quote
its history at length: a typical village tragedy. In a cottage at the village
end of the bogeen lived a house-painter, Jim Montgomery, and his wife. They had
several children. He was a little dandy, and came of a higher class than his
neighbours. His wife was a very big woman. Her husband, who had been expelled
from the village choir for drink, gave her a beating one day. Her sister heard
of it, and came and took down one of the window shutters--Montgomery was neat
about everything, and had shutters on the outside of every window--and beat him
with it, being big and strong like her sister. He threatened to prosecute her;
she answered that she would break every bone in his body if he did. She never
spoke to her sister again, because she had allowed herself to be beaten by so
small a man. Jim Montgomery grew worse and worse: his wife soon began to have
not enough to eat. She told no one, for she was very proud. Often, too, she
would have no fire on a cold night. If any neighbours came in she would say she
had let the fire out because she was just going to bed. The people about often
heard her husband beating her, but she never told any one. She got very thin. At
last one Saturday there was no food in the house for herself and the children.
She could bear it no longer, and went to the priest and asked him for some
money. He gave her thirty shillings. Her husband met her, and took the money,
and beat her. On the following Monday she got very W, and sent for a Mrs. Kelly.
Mrs. Kelly, as soon as she saw her, said, "My woman, you are dying,"
and sent for the priest and the doctor. She died in an hour. After her death, as
Montgomery neglected the children, the landlord had them taken to the workhouse.
A few nights after they had gone, Mrs. Kelly was going home through the bogeen
when the ghost of Mrs. Montgomery appeared and followed her. It did not leave
her until she reached her own house. She told the priest, Father R, a noted
antiquarian, and could not get him to believe her. A few nights afterwards Mrs.
Kelly again met the spirit in the same place. She was in too great terror to go
the whole way, but stopped at a neighbour's cottage midway, and asked them to
let her in. They answered they were going to bed. She cried out, "In the
name of God let me in, or I will break open the door." They opened, and so
she escaped from the ghost. Next day she told the priest again. This time he
believed, and said it would follow her until she spoke to it.
She met the spirit a third time in the bogeen. She asked what
kept it from its rest. The spirit said that its children must be taken from the
workhouse, for none of its relations were ever there before, and that three
masses were to be said for the repose of its soul. "If my husband does not
believe you," she said, "show him that," and touched Mrs. Kelly's
wrist with three fingers. The places where they touched swelled up and
blackened. She then vanished. For a time Montgomery would not believe that his
wife had appeared: "she would not show herself to Mrs. Kelly," he
said--"she with respectable people to appear to." He was convinced by
the three marks, and the children were taken from the workhouse. The priest said
the masses, and the shade must have been at rest, for it has not since appeared.
Some time afterwards Jim Montgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great
poverty through drink.
I know some who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon
the quay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night, sees a
woman with white borders to her cap' creep out and follow him. The apparition
only leaves him at his own door. The villagers imagine that she follows him to
avenge some wrong. "I will haunt you when I die" is a favourite
threat. His wife was once half-scared to death by what she considers a demon in
the shape of a dog.
These are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of
their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in
Fluddy's Lane. Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door. She did
not open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked. The knocking ceased.
After a little the front-door and then the back-door were burst open, and closed
again. Her husband went to see what was wrong. He found both doors bolted. The
child died. The doors were again opened and closed as before. Then Mrs. Nolan
remembered that she had forgotten to leave window or door open, as the custom
is, for the departure of the soul. These strange openings and closings and
knockings were warnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the dying.
[1. I wonder why she had white borders to her cap. The old
Mayo woman, who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law
saw "a woman with white borders to her cap going around the stacks in a
field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months."]
The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning
creature. it is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those
who live with it. I remember two children who slept with their mother and
sisters and brothers in one small room. In the room was also a ghost. They sold
herrings in the Dublin streets, and did not mind the ghost much, because they
knew they would always sell their fish easily while they slept in the "ha'nted"
room.
I have some acquaintance among the ghost-seers of western
villages. The Connaught tales are very different from those of Leinster. These
H----- spirits have a gloomy, matter-of-fact way with them. They come to
announce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong, to pay their
bills even--as did a fisherman's daughter the other day--and then hasten to
their rest. All things they do decently and in order. It is demons, and not
ghosts, that transform themselves into white cats or black dogs. The people who
tell the tales are poor, serious-minded fishing people, who find in the doings
of the ghosts the fascination of fear. In the western tales is a whimsical
grace, a curious extravagance. The people who recount them live in the most wild
and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with flying clouds.
They are farmers and labourers, who do a little fishing now and then. They do
not fear the spirits too much to feel an artistic and humorous pleasure in their
doings. The ghosts themselves share in their quaint hilarity. In one western
town, on whose deserted wharf the grass grows, these spirits have so much vigour
that, when a misbeliever ventured to sleep in a haunted house, I have been told
they flung him through the window, and his bed after him. In the surrounding
villages the creatures use the most strange disguises. A dead old gentleman robs
the cabbages of his own garden in the shape of a large rabbit. A wicked
sea-captain stayed for years inside the plaster of a cottage wall, in the shape
of a snipe, making the most horrible noises. He was only dislodged when the wall
was broken down; then out of the solid plaster the snipe rushed away whistling.
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