Spectres Across the Atlantic, c.1820-1940: Communicating with the Dead Over Space and Time

ABSTRACT

In Irish tradition it was believed that both the living and the dead might in certain circumstances appear at a distance from their bodies. This article considers occasions where such supernatural visitations happened close to the moment of the death. Deathbed apparitions or ‘crisis apparitions’ were reported widely in Europe and America, but have not been much explored by historians. In crisis apparition stories, the dying or just-dead person visited a neighbour, friend or close relative and a key feature was that the percipient would declare what they had seen, even before confirmation had arrived of the death. Accounts dating from between about the 1820s and 1940s provide the basis for an exploration of the crisis apparition both as reported in Ireland and among Irish people abroad. That many crisis apparitions communicated across the Atlantic reflects the anxieties of ‘exiles’ and their friends and families about death far from home, and this article also considers their role in bridging gaps in conventional communications. Accounts of supernatural leave-taking also travelled across time, offering insights about how storytelling assisted the processing of grief and the handing down of the dead over generations that are relevant to other contexts far beyond Ireland’s shores.

KEYWORDS:

• Omens
• apparitions
• emigration
• memory
• emotion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. National Folklore Collection [NFC], Main Manuscript Collection [MMC] Ms 485, pp. 191–2, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbe/9000657/7230752.

2. Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge, 1968), 160; William H. Harrison, Spirits Before our Eyes (2 volumes, London: W.H. Harrison, 1879). See “Apparitions and After-Death Communications,” https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/types-of-cases. ‘Deathbed apparitions’ is also the term applied to the visions sometimes experienced by the dying of their dead relatives, which is why crisis apparitions is preferred here. See Jens Schlieter, What is it Like to be Dead? Near-Death Experiences, Christianity and the Occult (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 145–6.

3. Peter Moore, Where are the Dead? Exploring the Idea of an Embodied Afterlife (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 33, p. 157.

4. Patricia Lysaght, The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death Messenger (Dublin: O’Brien, 1996); Patricia Lysaght, “Irish Banshee Traditions: A Preliminary Survey,” Béaloideas 42/44 (1974–1976): 94–119; Helen Frisby, ““Them owls know”: Portending Death in Later Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England,” Folklore 126, no. 2 (2015): 196–214. For some idea of the range of Irish beliefs around the forms taken by ‘signs of death’, see the collection by the students of Caherlustraun, Co. Galway, ‘Signs of death which have been shown to people’, NFC, Schools Folklore Collection [SFC] Ms 22, pp. 517–26, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4562128/4561968. On Irish prophecies, omens, divination, and apparitions at times of broader social crisis, see Benjamin Ragan, “The Supernatural in the Irish Revolution 1916–1923” (unpublished PhD thesis, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, 2023).

5. Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature: or Ghosts and Ghost Seers (London: Routledge, 1852), p. 110.

6. William Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (London: William Frederick Wakeman, 1852), 232; W. Sayers, “A Hiberno-Norse Etymology for English Fetch: 'Apparition of a Living Person',” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 3, no. 4 (2017): pp. 205–9.

7. NFC, SFC Ms 837, p. 111, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4770049/4769171/501497. See Paul Meehan, The Ghost of One’s Self: Doppelgangers in Mystery, Horror and Science (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2017).

8. NFC, SFC Ms 977, pp. 5–9, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5044834/5042622.

9. Augusta Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (London, 1920, repr: Colin Smythe, 1970), p. 175.

10. Ray Cashman, Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), pp. 144–8.

11. Henry Glassie, The Stars of Ballymenone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 325–6.

12. Though note that as they are retold they can become more closely related to legends ‘as they become more removed from direct experience’. Frank J. Korom, “Close Encounters of the Numinous Kind: Personal Experience Narratives and Memorates in Goalpara, West Bengal,” South Asia Research 20, no. 1 (2000): p. 25.

13. Glassie, The Stars of Ballymenone, p. 375.

14. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, “Part III Interpreting memories,” in The Oral History Reader, ed. Perks and Thomson, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 297.

15. Lynn Abrams, Oral history Theory (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 79.

16. Gillian Bennett, ‘Alas, Poor Ghost!’ Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999), p. 5.

17. For an overview, see Patricia Lysaght, “From 'collect the fragments…' to 'Memory of the World'. Collecting the Folklore of Ireland, pp. 1927–70: Aims, Achievement, Legacy,” Folklore p. 130, no. 1 (2019): pp. 1–30; Patricia Lysaght, “Collecting the Folklore of Ireland: The Schoolchildren’s Contribution,” Folklore 132, no. 1 (2021): pp. 1–33. See www.duchas.ie.

18. See Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); A. Sommer, “Psychical research in the history and philosophy of science. An Introduction and Review,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48 (2014): pp. 38–45; Peter Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs: A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

19. Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living (2 volumes, London: Trübner and Co., 1886); Charles Sidgwick, Alice Johnson, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, and Eleanor M. Sidgwick, “Report on the Census of Hallucinations,” Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research 10 (1894): pp. 25–411. See Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-seeing in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

20. St John D. Seymour and Harry L. Neligan, True Irish Ghost Stories (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1914), especially pp. pp. 259–71.

21. See Vito Carrassi, “Yeats as a Folklorist: The Celtic Twilight and Irish Folklore,” Studi Irlandesi 13 (2023): pp. 157–67, especially pp. 157–8.

22. On the complexity of ‘class’ in Ireland, see Maura Cronin, “Class and Status in Twentieth-century Ireland: The Evidence of Oral History,” Saothar 32 (2007): pp. 33–43, at 34.

23. Glassie, The Stars of Ballymenone, 84.

24. Clodagh Tait, “Worry Work: The Supernatural Labours of Living and Dead Mothers in Irish Folklore,” in Mothering’s Many Labours: Past and Present Supplement 15, eds. Sarah Knott and Emma Griffin (2020): pp. 217–38.

25. Micaela di Leonardo, “The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship,” Signs 12 (1987): pp. 440–53.

26. Andrea R. Roberts, “Count the Outside Children! Kinkeeping as Preservation Practice among Descendants of Texas’ Freedom Colonies,” Forum Journal 32, no. 4 (2020): pp. 64–74.

27. Patricia de Santana Pinho, Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 164. See Carolyn J. Rosenthal, “Kinkeeping in the Family Division of Labor,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 47 (1985): pp. 965–74.

28. Daniel Cohen, The Encyclopedia of Ghosts (Waltham Abbey: Fraser Stuart Books, 1984), 173–7, 196–8. See Owen Davies, A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith During the First World War (Oxford, 2018), especially pp. 73–4

29. NFC, SFC Ms 743, pp. 65–6, 129, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009110/4987638; www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009110/4987639; www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009110/4987702. The source claims Russell ‘was shot for disobedience to Army orders’, but this does not seem to have been the case.

30. Sheila St. Clair, Unexplained Encounters: Exploring the Paranormal in Ulster (Belfast: White Row Press, 2001), 29–30. St Clair may have expanded on the story, and the words spoken by her interviewee may not be exactly represented. The Battle of the Somme, in which thousands of Ulstermen were killed and injured, is implied by the July dating.

31. Peter Berta, “Two Faces of the Culture of Death: Relationship between Grief work and Hungarian Peasant Soul Beliefs,” Journal of Loss and Trauma 6 (2001): pp. 83–113. Note that Irish ideas about activities of the dead were also informed by beliefs that some of the dead were not dead, but had been taken away by the fairies.

32. For one of very many examples, see NFC, SFC Ms 269, p. 152, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4921567/4880370. Shane McCorristine, ‘Introduction: When is Death?’, in Shane McCorristine (ed.), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings: When is Death? (London: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 1–10; Tait, “Worry Work.”

33. There is a large literature on Irish emigration: for introductions, see chapters by Brian Gurrin, Liam Chambers, Patrick Griffin, Barrie Crosbie and Kevin Kenny in The Cambridge History of Ireland 3, 1730–1880, ed. James Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Mary E. Daly, “Migration since 1914,” in The Cambridge history of Ireland 4, 1880 to the Present, ed. Thomas Bartlett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and the articles in “Part III Emigration, Immigration and the Wider Irish World,” in The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland, eds. Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

34. Eileen Metress, “The American wake of Ireland: symbolic death ritual,” Omega – Journal of Death and Dying 21, no. 2 (1990): pp. 147–53.

35. Re-Imagining migration, https://reimaginingmigration.org/mary-garvey-writing-from-hightstown-new-jersey-to-her-mother-in-ireland-october-24–1850.

36. Paul Burns, “A letter from Bridget Burns Benson to her parents Thomas and Mary Burns in America,” The Corran Herald 52 (2019/2020): pp. 23–4, https://issuu.com/ballymoteheritagegroup/docs/the-corran-herald-issue-52–2019–2020.

37. Niamh Nic Ghabhann, “Gothic Ruins and Remains: Disorderly Burials and Respectable Bodies in Irish Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings, 1824–1900,” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 16 (2017): pp. 41–66. See also Nicholas Evans and Angela McCarthy (eds), Death in the Diaspora: British and Irish Gravestones (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

38. Fanny D. Bergin, “Burial and Holiday Customs and Beliefs of the Irish Peasantry,” Journal of American Folklore 8, no. 28 (1895): pp. 19–20.

39. NFC, SFC Ms 32, p.316, www.duchas.ie/en/cbe/9000030/7024084/9098760.

40. Sean Ó Dhuibhir, Killadoon, Co Sligo, collected by Bríd Ní Ghamhnáin, 1938, NFC, MMC Ms 485, p. 106, www.duchas.ie/en/cbe/9000657/7230667. On deathbed scenes and burial in Irish-American fiction, see Christopher Cusack and Lindsay Janssen, “'Tis yourself is a skeleton': Deathbed Scenes and Ethnic Identity in Irish-American Short Fiction, 1895–1910,” Irish Studies Review 30, no. 1 (2022): 1–15; Christopher Cusack, “'Here at least and at last is reality!’: Catholic Graveyards and Diasporic Identity in Irish North American Fiction, 1859–92,” in The Graveyard in Literature: Liminality and Social Critique, ed. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2022),pp. 159–173.

41. “Report of the Committee on Phantasms and Presentments,” Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1 (1885–89): pp. 417–22.

42. “Report of the Committee on Phantasms and Presentments,” pp. 417–22.

43. Seymour and Neligan, True Irish Ghost Stories, 96.

44. Peter Berta, “Omens,” in Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, ed. Robert Kastenbaum (New York, 2003), via www.deathreference.com/Nu-Pu/Omens.html. For more on the psychology of the construction of meaning in grief, see for example, Robert A. Neimeyer, Dennis Klass and Michael R. Dennis, “A Social Constructionist Account of Grief: Loss and the Narration of Meaning,” Death Studies 38 (2014): pp. 485–98.

45. Ellen Badone, “Death Omens in a Breton Memorate,” Folklore 98, no. 1 (1987): pp. 99–104.

46. NFC, SFC Ms 101, p. 448, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4427863/4351686.

47. NFC, SFC Ms 1073, p. 108, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4493627/4405050/4514443.

48. NFC SFC Ms 643, p. 175, www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4428120/4379974/4546531.

49. McCorristine, Spectres of the Self, 3.

50. NFC, MMC Ms 415, p. 81, https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbe/9000901/7263000.

51. Seeing a sheet/shroud hanging where it should not be was a sign of death in some places: one story told of women who sent her servants to collect a sheet she had seen hanging in the garden, but it couldn’t be found: the family later discovered the woman’s brother had died in Malta at the time she had spotted it. C. J. Hamilton, ‘Tales of the supernatural’, Weekly Irish News, October 28, 1905, 7.

52. Gregory, Visions and Beliefs, 177.

53. “Report on the Census of Hallucinations,” 234–5. Miss R. says she was ‘at home’ at the time of her sister’s death, but the collection doesn’t reveal where ‘home’ was.

54. Jeremy Sandford, ed., Mary Carbery’s West Cork Journal 1898–1901 (Dublin: Lilliput, 1998), 123–5; Mary Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur (London, 1937; new edition, Cork: Mercier Press, 1973).

55. Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, vol. 2, pp. 480–1.

56. Alice Miles, Every Girl’s Duty: The Diary of a Victorian Debutante, ed. Maggy Parsons (London: Andre Deutsch, 1992).

57. Dorothy Harrison Thurman, Stories from Tory Island (Dublin: Country House, 1989), pp. 141–2.

58. Kathleen Chaplin, “The Death Knock,” New England Review 34, no. 1 (2013): 153. See Cashman, Packy Jim, p. 145.

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Clodagh Tait

Clodagh Tait is a lecturer in history in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. She has written extensively on early modern Irish social and cultural history, including the history of death, violence, martyrdom and protest; pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing; religious devotion; ideas about the supernatural; and the history of emotion. Her recent research also uses the Irish nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklore collections to consider motherhood, family, the household, work, and ghosts. She is working on an anthology of women’s folklore, and a book on cursing and blessing in Ireland over 400 years. She is joint editor of Irish Historical Studies.