When I was a child, my father climbed down a well beneath a pump shed on the farm searching perhaps for dead rats or some broken equipment. Quite how he got stuck there, I don’t know. Maybe the rope broke or a torch fell. He was down there for ages until the farm worker realised what had happened and went for help. A phone call came almost the moment Dad returned to the house. It was Dad’s sister, a nun in a convent back in Ireland. She had been at prayer in the middle of the night and then he was on her mind and she couldn’t stop worrying about him.
Coincidences, intuition, superstitions and weird happenings – they go hand in hand with an Irish heritage and when it came to writing my novel, Secrets of the Land, there were many stories of such instances to call on. When I wrote about my aunt’s sixth sense in a recent email to John, one of my scholarly contacts on all things Irish in Ireland, he said that a friend had recounted a similar happening between Ireland and Australia. Moments after a brother died, their sister (THAT NEVER BEFORE RANG, he notes in capital letters) was on the phone. Something had prompted her to phone.
As a man who grew up with tales of haunted houses and banshees and a host of other folklore stories, my Irish contact is more inclined to say, “Trillions of happenings are taking place every minute on the planet, simple maths tell us that coincidences will occur.”
A 2021 survey for LottoLand in Ireland found that those most sceptical of supernatural events were the over 65 year olds, with three out of every four respondents being dismissive of the idea (my Irish friend is in this age group). The explanation for this rational approach could be a matter of having heard one too many uncanny tales or that such events are against the rational and logical world we now favour.
It was the millennials, the 25-34 age group, who were the most superstitious with nearly three in five (59 percent) saying they believed in ghosts and ghouls.
At my boarding school there were always ghost stories. The older girls told each new incoming third form class about the scary Green Nun, a ghost who would float through the wooden doors that separated the students’ dormitories from the nuns’ quarters. What I remember more though is the occasions a deceased sister would lay in an open coffin in the chapel. We girls would traipse past them on our way to daily Communion. I never gave this odd custom a thought.
On a visit to Ireland nearly 30 years ago, I was keen to find where my mother’s father had been born. I knew the area was just a small settlement of cottages somewhere out in the Co Kerry countryside. My father’s brother suggested we call in on a man who was sure to know. We arrived at a house in the country where a small nuggetty man climbed down from a tractor in a nearby paddock and made his way over to us.
“Sure enough,” he said nodding his head solemnly after I explained who I was. “And would you know it, but I was just sitting here looking at those sheep there. I was thinking to myself about your father, out there in New Zealand.” As he spoke his voice got higher and faster, like my Kerry uncle’s did.
The little man went on to explain that when my father left to go to New Zealand all those years ago, he sold his flock of seven sheep to him. “I was only a young lad at the time.” We both stood there marvelling at the thought. Well, I was thinking what were the chances of this little man thinking about my deceased father on that very day? What could I do but take him at his word? I also took note of his directions to where I could find my maternal relatives. “Go easterly to a house with a yellow roof and another with a white wall. Ask for directions from there.”
When I was researching my O’Mahony family history, an elderly cousin in Ireland sent me a two-page account of ghostly happenings in and around the ancestral home. One of his siblings was helping his father tie down hay with ropes before a storm. “He saw a man going past, at least 12 inches or so off the ground. The lad put out his hand and the man shook it – in a strange way.” When the boy described the man to his father, the older man said the description fitted one of their ancestors. Where the son had seen the stranger was the site of a no longer visible old path from a village.
Other instances included music being played in the parlour when despite a full house no one was in that room, signalling a death of a family member. Three knocks on a front door might happen at the same time a family member had died in another place.
Stories of such happenings – people sending messages back from the afterlife, via flowers or scents or birds (“Robins appear when loved ones are near” it is said, and often on window sills) – were so common two Irish authors sent letters to newspapers seeking such experiences. They brought a flood of responses. Many of the accounts in Contacted, published by Mercier Press, Ireland, 2005, shared similar descriptions. Journalist Audrey Healey and investigative author Don Mullan stated they “made no judgments”. They “respectfully allowed eye witnesses to tell their stories and leave readers with the final choice of believing them or not.”
People with Irish backgrounds have told me they are very familiar with stories of family members with intuition or sixth sense. A New Zealand friend of Irish heritage responded immediately to my question. “Our sister is the one in our family. She lives in an old house and has said she has experienced a presence there at times.”
Secrets of the Land by Kate Mahony (Cloud Ink Press, $29.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
