True Irish Ghost Stories – Resurrected
A hundred years ago, when the rest of the island was caught up in the horrors of the First World War and preparing to launch a revolution, one man was working on an enterprise of an altogether more other-worldly nature.
St. John Drelincourt Seymour was ordained to the Anglican priesthood in 1904. While an interest in the supernatural might seem a prerequisite for someone in that job, the areas he chose to write about may raise some eyebrows among his modern equivalents in the Church of Ireland. By 1913, he was making his way through the ranks of the Church via curacies around Ireland in Durrow, Thurles, Tuem and Borris. He had also published several books, one of which was a comprehensive study of Irish Witchcraft and Demonology. Having covered witches and with Ireland already being awash at the times with books on fairy lore (it was at the height of the Celtic Twilight after all), St john Seymour decided next to tackle the woeful lack of books on Irish ghost stories.
Whether the time of year was an accident or not is not known, but as Halloween approached in 1914 and the guns were already roaring on the Western Front, Seymour set out to gather the stories that would fill his next work. His approach was surprisingly modern. Today it would be called “crowd sourcing”, but back in 1914 Seymour had no Internet-based Social Media, so he turned to the equivalent of the time: The National Newspaper. On the 27th of October and over the subsequent days Seymour sent letters to “the principal Irish newspapers ” requesting readers to forward him their ghost stories.
The Reverend Seymour was unsure what to expect in terms of response. In his own words “I confess I was a little doubtful as to the result of my experiment, and wondered what response the people of Ireland would make”. He need not have worried. By October 30th replies were already starting to arrive at his home at Donohil Rectory in South Tipparary.
“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—and more was promised.”
Pretty soon he was so inundated with replies that he had to employ an assistant to help with the administration of it all. It is worth remembering at this point, yet again, that this was all happening after the start of the First World War and in the run up to the Easter Rising of 1916. It is probably an indication of what really preoccupies people’s minds, even at times of great upheaval.
The result of all this was a book, titled “True Irish Ghost Stories”. When I was growing up we had a copy of this book on a bookshelf in a room we liked to call “The Study”. As a child, the book terrified me to the extent that anytime I had to get something from that room I dashed in and out as fast as I could, looking neither right or left in case I even caught a glimpse of it.
In reality “The Study” was a spare bedroom with a lot of bookshelves but sitting on one of them just at head height for an eight year old was “True Irish Ghost Stories”. It was a reprint of the book, complete with a lurid 1970s style cover which featured a human skull but for some reason it still had eyes and hair. The eyes were bright green and the hair was jet black and swept over in a side shade that Hitler would have been proud of. However it was not the cover that had such a horrifying effect on me. It was the title: Not only were these ghost stories Irish, and therefore set on the very island I lived on, but they were true.
I was probably a teenager before I had enough courage to actually read it. For a modern reader, some of the stories are particularly dated, though they offer an invaluable portrait of an Ireland now vanished long into the past. Others still are eerie enough to send an involuntary shiver down the spine.
This work is an attempt to revisit and update St John Seymour’s work. Do the ghosts in his book still haunt the places mentioned in the book?
Seymour divided the stories into sections. Haunted houses, haunted places, poltergeists, Banshees and death warnings, ancestral hauntings, apparitions at or near death and “Miscellaneous Supernormal Experiences” and we have preserved those categories.
So why did he do it? Thankfully Seymour tells us in his own words in the concluding chapter of the book.
“This book was written with a twofold purpose: first, that of entertaining our readers, in which we trust we have been successful; secondly, to stimulate thought.”
He then goes on to outline his thoughts in a paragraph that is worth repeating in full:
“For it is obvious that we have now arrived at one of those interesting periods in the history of human thought which might be described as the return of the pendulum. We are in the process of emerging from a very materialistic age, when men either refused to believe anything that was contrary to their normal experience, or else leavened their spiritual doctrines and beliefs with the leaven of materialism. The pendulum has swung to its highest point in this respect, and is now commencing to return, so perhaps the intellectual danger of the future will be that men, instead of believing too little, will believe too much.”
In this “post truth” age of “Fake News” and internet propaganda that can influence even the outcome of elections, we have to ask if St john’s “pendulum” has in fact swung too far the other way.
He continues, acknowledging that the fields of Psychical research and spiritualism are clogged with “absurdity, error, and fraud” but concludes that amid that, he has found authenticated “ghost stories” which have their own value. “Taking them at their lowest they suggest inquiry into the strange workings of the human mind: at their highest how many strange lines of inquiry do they not suggest?”
Seymour urges that “the earnest thinker must be prepared to suspend judgment on many points”. In that respect he concurs with Charles Hoy Fort, the pioneer investigator of anomalous phenomena. In sentiment, he is also quite close to his contemporary Irish compatriot, William Butler Yeats, when he wrote that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.