A ghostly memory and a flying witch

Times Past by Jonathan Smyth

On Easter Sunday evening, last March, as the quiet of the evening set in and darkness fell, long-forgotten memories returned of a deserted building close to part of the family farm. The abandoned house had an unsettling ghostly feel about it. I remember the wind whistling through a crack in the glass, and a ragged curtain fluttering in the breeze.

The memories felt real again, as I thought about that stretch of wallpaper, I once saw half unwound from the wall while plaster fell from the ceiling. But it was not always an eerie spectacle like I now recall. There was a time, four decades ago, when the three elderly McMahon brothers lived together in that very same house.

One day, in the early 1980s, when I was maybe nine or 10 years old, my father, with my brother and myself, visited the house. There was a big open fireplace, painted red and a bar with a hook for holding the potato pot. One of the men said they were putting potatoes on for the dinner and needed to go for water. My brother and I followed him down the field to the well. With fascination we watched him lower the bucket into the clear cool water. Autumns came and went, and the brothers then moved out. From that day, the house lay empty.

Time slowly crept on, and the house edged into decline and the window frames silently rotted and fell out. Even the front door loosened in its frame and partially fell from its hinges. One day, somebody with a sense of mischief had scrawled the word ‘beware’ in white paint across the door. While checking the cattle one afternoon, curiosity got the better of us about the changes that had come over the house since the owners moved away.

I remember it was a dry breezy day and the old door could be edged to one side with a push. The sound of something tapping in the wind caught my attention and I figured a door was the culprit but could not see from where the sound was coming. Looking in, we noticed how much of the ceiling had fallen, leaving the rafters exposed. Rooms once bustling with life, now lay silent, empty and eerie. A sudden clang from a loose chunk of corrugated iron meant we did not stay around too long.

Moggy

The whole ghost theme then got me thinking about witches whizzing around on broomsticks and I remembered the tale of Moggy, the flying witch who could transform into a horse. Have you heard of her? Well, we will now leave the old house in Monaghan, and take a short trip to Knockbride, Co Cavan, where a rich revelation of antiquity can be found amongst the Sliabh Trí nDeé aka the Hill of the Three Gods.

This Moggy was known as a cailleach, that is a witch, or hag-like creature, who could alter her appearance by shapeshifting. Stories of Moggy have circulated in Knockbride for generations and from here, I will let Cavan historian Tom Barron provide his pitch on Moggy.

Barron studied the history of a Celtic sanctuary at Drumeague, the historic Corleck idols, the legend of Moggy and a site known as Moggy’s leap where apparently, she ‘jumped down a precipice’, only to leave an imprint of her foot on a large boulder as she entered a bottomless pit that offered a gateway to the otherworld.

Ever an enquirer, Barron wondered if Moggy was the mare spoken of in the Robbie Burns poem Tom O Shanter. But it happens, that Burns’s horse was in fact called Maggy. Then he asked if Macha of Ulster might be Moggy, which could make her the sun-goddess, or Epona, of Ireland’s North. In another odd twist, the boulder with the strange paw imprint was said to fully rotate whenever a cock crowed within earshot of the stone. A similar story about a revolving rock in Cornwall came to Tom’s attention when he heard about it on the BBC.

All this ghostly reminiscing reminded me of a poem by the writer Walter de la Mare called ‘The Listeners’. It is a magnificent poem that also features a haunted house and a horse. If you should go trick or treating this Halloween, beware, there just may exist an unseen otherworld, lurking in the shadows. Happy Halloween.

Fógraí

I have a particular interest in Walter de la Mare because he was friends with our grandmother. In 1935, de la Mare encouraged her to publish a volume of poetry. In 2008, the book, which was titled Faeries Hither! was republished with an illustrated biography by her daughter Patricia Smyth.